It's one of the basic tools of any magician — control of the audience's attention. It's said that a good magician knows at all times where the audience is looking, and controls it. Misdirect the audience into looking at your right hand, while your left hand palms the coin. Or, if that fails, use the Glamourous Assistant as the focal point.

Today's lesson in stage magicianship comes from our old friends, the Labour Party. While you're all looking at the left hand waving goodbye (or the Glamourous Assistant), the right hand is busy palming £400m of my money and yours.

That 8% cost slippage (that's £2.4bn so far, or 76% of the original budget for those keeping count) came out in the Gateway Review, a month past the required deadline, and just happened to be published within a few minutes of the Dear Leader's Resignation Speech. Mind you, the only reason it came out at all was because the courts ordered to be published.

Yes, it seems that even in its death throes, the Blair Project cannot resist spinning for all its worth. It's another Good Day to Bury Bad News — an open goal so wide that we should have seen it coming a mile off.

Oh, we did.

So here's the theory — a couple of senior labour bods, panic about the idea of El-Gordo as Dear Leader. In a desparate attempt to derail the expected coronation (and the gentlemen's likely permanent sinecure on the back benches), they launch a debate on the future of the Labour Party (my emphasis).

Now while this is as obvious a piece of astroturf as the gamut will allow, you'd think that if they had a modicum of sense, Haystack and Hairdo would ensure that the related website would do mad, off-the wall, distracting things like... ooh, debate ideas for the future of the Labour party.

Visiting it for the first (and likely only) time today, I discover this as the front page:

(Again, my highlighting)

Yes, it's Clarke, continuing to punt ID cards. And the forward looking bit (so far forward looking that even Tone hasn't suggested yet) is that the National Register should include a DNA database, presumably to support the Dear Leader's fondness for fishing expeditions.

Leaving aside that even this cowed Parliament balked at the idea of DNA inclusion, I'm just failing to see the 'future of the Labour Party' element here.

Anyone? Buehler? Anyone?

Dave Cullen has put his finger on what's up with the Home Office: It's stuffed with mediocre blue-sky thinkers, but they've not got anyone who's got a Scooby about admin.

Hence the never ending series of Whizzo Schemes, and a basic inability to fulfil the tasks they already had. Great news if you're a large system integrator. Not so much if you're a citizen.

So, The Dear Leader and Shaven-headed Sidekick have given up on the burden of proof of the criminal law...

The Al Capone Bill (yes, it's been at least a week since a Serious Crime Bill was in the works) is positing that the necessity of proof is just a fiddly little thing that plain gets in the way when you're trying to get those Nasty Mr Bigs.

Oh yes, we're reducing the burden of proof in Criminal matters to that of Civil cases because it's easier that way.

Insert your own A-levels joke here...

So I'm sure you remember the big kerfuffle about foreign ex-prisoners not being deported from a month or three ago. And how Big Hard Dr John was going to personally track them down and sling them out of the country. All (approx) 1,000 of them, but 43 of the most serious ones in particular.

This was so high a priority task that a special taskforce was set up to set up networks of informers, knock on doors in the middle of the night, bundle people off on unregistered flights to unacknowledged prisons in regimes with a laissez-faire attitude to death squads and so on.

You might therefore think that — given this was such a high priority of public safety — we could rest assured that a newly vitalised Home Office would complete the job. Ah but no. No, no no. It turns out that the Snatch Squad has been disbanded already, having failed to deport perhaps half of the 1,000 total, and to find 1 in 6 of the most serious offenders.

Which raises an interesting question — now that the Eye of Sauron (aka the editorials of Murdoch owned newspapers) has moved on, can we infer that the taskforce was never more than political window-dressing?

(Hat-tip: lebwog)

Reading Blair's extended answer to ChickYog's question (my emphasis):

I am quite sure, based on the experience I have had in government, you cannot solve some of these law and order problems unless you are prepared, quite profoundly, to change and rebalance the system of criminal justice so that you have more summary justice, more summary powers, more ability for quick and effective action to be taken, even if it will cross the line that most people normally think of as there in terms of civil liberties. And my view is that you can decide that you are not going to do it for civil liberty reasons, decide it, but then don’t say to the politicians and all the rest of it, you have got to deal with this problem, because you cannot deal with it in my view by the normal processes of the law, you just can’t do it. The way the world has changed means that the only, and this is why we only started to get any action on antisocial behaviour when we introduced the power to get Antisocial Behaviour Orders, summary powers for the police, and the ability to take swift action.

rang a few bells with me. It took me a while to work out what they were. I thought about examples of societies changing from ones where decisions were made with thought and care, taking multiple views into account, to ones where frustration with the time this takes leads to demands for summary action without the nicities of getting the edge cases right, and an example popped into mind:

ANAKIN: We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree what's in the best interests of all the people, and then do it.

PADMÉ: That is exactly what we do. The trouble is that people don't always agree. In fact, they hardly ever do.

ANAKIN: Then they should be made to.

PADMÉ: By whom? Who's going to make them?

ANAKIN: I don't know. Someone.

PADMÉ: You?

ANAKIN: Of course not me.

PADMÉ: But someone.

ANAKIN: Someone wise.

PADMÉ: That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.

ANAKIN: Well, if it works...

This is exactly what Blair is proposing. The I'm right; I know what needs to be done, and will do it no matter the casualties along the way school of thought. I'm guessing that Il Duce's commitments to targets in train punctuality is all part of this.

I realise incidentally that I'm running the risk of invoking Godwin's Law here, but consider The 14 defining Characteristics of Fascism — I'm counting 10 out of 14 at present.