Why is it so difficult to find MPs who aren’t useless?  

It’s a sign, possibly, of my increasing age and bad temper that I find myself harking back to an imaginary past in which tradesmen could be relied upon to know what they were about. A time when people took pride in their work. You know the sort of thing: back in the good old days a plumber or electrician  would diagnose and fix the problem on the first call-out; you didn’t have to spend six months trying to get your builder to come back and reopen all the windows he painted shut; and if you got a brutal warlord marching on the capital with 25,000 hairy-bottomed ex-cons, he wouldn’t leave his coup half-finished and bugger off to Belarus. A great disappointment, I call it.  

And forget about the police starting to look younger: they’re starting to look less police-like.