Corridors . . .
PUZZLE WOULD LIKE to enier a progress report on Jim Prior as Leader of the House of Commons. A fly mover, Jim. He made sympathetic noises about Willie Hamilton's failed Bill on the rights of women when it looked as if there would be votes in the subject — but had earlier written to various interested parties hinting broadly that no Government time would be available.
PUZZLE IS HAPPY to report that James Wellbeloved's fight against sludge is looking near to success. Wellbeloved is bothered because his constituency of Erith has been inundated with Londoners' sewage for the past month or so because of a sludge movers' strike. This, he thought, was produced by the general red tapiness of the GLC. Now it appears things will soon get moving again — to the detriment only of those little fishes far out to sea on 'whom London sewage is normally dumped.
PUZZLE IS A TRIFLE SHOCKED at how much parliamentary questions — which are such fun in the House — actually cost. In reply to a question from Labour MP William Price this week, it was revealed that in the 1971-2 session 28,594 questions were asked. More than four and a half thousand received oral answers. The cost of preparing an oral answer is £16 a shot; and for a written answer £10. The total cost of answering questions in the session was, therefore, £352,588. A little excessive, Puzzle thinks, for the amount of information you actually get.
THE AWFUL CYRIL SMITH emptied the chamber of the House of Commons very effectively the other day. The man is the least articulate of Jeremy Thorpe's faithful band of Liberal warriors and punctuates every word — let alone sentence — with an um and an ahm. " My God," said a colleague in despair, "let's send Cyril back to the sticks where he's good."
TORY CENTRAL OFFICE, Puzzle hears, is very impressed, nonetheless, by Cyril and mates' activities in the sticks, and notably by Graham Tope's brilliant first circular to the electors of Sutton. It was delivered just after Dick Sharples's appointment as Governor of Bermuda — an effective dirty word that, said one Smith Square mandarin — and merely pointed out to each elector that their member had departed to sunnier climes.
PUZZLE LEARNS THAT Granada TV, thwarted by the IBA in its attempt to screen a profile of John Poulson and his friends, has decided to tackle the issues raised in a different way. Instead of producing a revised version of the profile, the World in Action team now plans to screen at least two investigations into the abuse of public money by nationalised industries and local authorities — the Coal Board and the Post Office are particularly favoured candidates. Incidentally, the Corridors are buzzing loud with the name of the key London man referred to at the Poulson hearings. The name is that of a well-known Labour politician.
Tom Puzzle
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