Sex quiz

I am not making this up:

More than 500,000 people a year are to be questioned about their sex lives and salaries by Government inspectors, it has emerged.

Officials will ask for information about former sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before getting married.

I had intended to mention John Cowperthwaite's policy in Hong Kong of not collecting any statistical data at all, in case any of it motivated a bureaucrat to do something.

I had intended to make some sort of light crack about this. I had thought this might distract from the obvious gross invasion of privacy this represents. I thought it might make it easier to point out that the government is not entitled, under any circumstances, to involve itself in the private and sexual lives of consenting adults.

But it won't work. The rage is rising. How did we come to be governed by such people?

In fact, there's a simple answer. Labour is one of the least successful political parties ever, and this is why. This is what they do, this is what they are like. They had never even managed two full successive terms before Blair came along. And Tone had what seem to be the prerequisites for a vastly successful politician: immense vanity, imperviousness to criticism, religious mania and the ability to smile like the Joker from Batman while simultaneously lying to the public and knifing a colleague in the back.

Thank God he's finally gone, leaving the Labour Party to slither back into their trench.