C’mon Cherie: even Goering stuck up a bit for Hitler

I had hoped to bring you a little more fine detail about Cherie Blair’s menstrual cycle this week — I had provisional charts mapped out and so on. But at the last moment I came over a little queasy. Obviously all of us need to know precisely when she is ovulating, in case we should wish to impregnate her while her husband is away lecturing at Yale or bringing peace to the Middle East. But my nerve failed me. This is a personal failure and should not reflect badly on the lovely Cherie. She is believed to be the first inhabitant of 10 Downing Street to have shared with the electorate the delicate comings and goings of activity in her fallopian tubes and beyond, and the first to have called Princess Margaret a stuck-up old slapper; for this stuff alone we should thank her profusely. She has greatly added to the mirth and gaiety of the nation. She is one of many dispossessed former New Labour luminaries trying desperately to force shut the coffin lid on the regime they brought into life, the cadaver inside the coffin still palely bleating that he’s not actually dead. The various hideous autobiographies and diary excerpts published in the last year or so seem to take as a given that it’s all over and that Gordon Brown’s administration is akin to the discarded tail of a sand lizard, twitching for a few moments as if possessed of sentient life but in fact devoid of purpose and hope. Just the vestigial nerve endings doing their very temporary stuff, disconnected from the centre.

I know that in publishing these days time is of the essence, but has any departing administration in memory been quite so hasty and rapacious in piling on the ordure? Was there ever before a case of departed politicians and their sinecured hangers-on moving more speedily to pile the ordure on to the heads of their former colleagues, while insisting that they themselves were quite beyond reproof? Hell, even Goering felt the need to stick up for Hitler at Nuremberg — but then, I suppose, nobody offered him a million quid for his memoirs.