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For just £38,000, Eric Pickles can help his own staff avoid the sack. Talk about best value
• It's a time of smoke and mirrors but anyone with half a brain knows that. So when the Department for Communities and Local Government says it aims to become "smaller and stronger", everyone knows what that means. Time to brush up the CV. Seek a career change perhaps. Talk to the mortgage company. But it doesn't have to be that way for everyone because some jobs will be available post-cull. And who better than the secretary of state to advise on how to get them. So while Eric is doing the sacking, Eric is also spending £38,000 running workshops advising staff how to apply for the jobs he'll be handing out when the bloodletting is over. Around 550 staff have attended so far and more will do so between now and June. Think kindly of them. They don't ask much. They merely yearn to survive.
• They didn't choose this fate. This fate chose them. But then so few victims elect to become victims. It was certainly never the intention of the Audit Commission to achieve victim status. But Pickles got the organisation in his sights. The rest is history. And he's not the only one getting stuck in. The other day the commission got it in the neck again when Tory MP Eric Ollerenshaw flagged up yet another example of waste: a fat cat dinner in 2009 at the Cinnamon Club costing £230.29. Beneficiaries were the commission's chairman, Michael O'Higgins (who was, in fact, reappointed by the Tories last autumn), and the then chief executive Steve Bundred. But who was the guest? None other than the state shrinker-in-chief Oliver Letwin. Clearly, Big Dave's axeman took no pleasure in the occasion. An undercover assignment, we suspect.
• What a rollercoaster ride it has been throughout the week on Radio 4 with tales from the last days of George Best as related in the Book of the Week, Celia Walden's Babysitting George. But not as rambunctious as it could have been. For Radio 4 listeners have been served a rather sanitised version. The BBC tells us it had to carefully select the passages chosen for transmission because chunks of it are subject to accusations of libel. Still aggrieved and still intent on pursuing the author and publisher Bloomsbury is Best's former wife Alex, whose immediate reaction on reading about herself, as described by Walden, was to call in messrs Carter-Ruck. She has not been the only source of complaint. We understand that earlier challenges from another quarter led to changes in the manuscript, but more challenges might yet greet the finished product. Bloomsbury decline to comment when we ask. All a bit sad really. Like George's life towards the end.
• And staying with Radio 4, there was an altogether different quality to the Moral Maze this week, with Michael Buerk away and the writer, columnist and broadcaster David Aaronovitch as stand-in. "While I was chairing #moralmaze last night Peter Oborne accused me (and my ilk) of 'venality'. Position meant I couldn't tell him to go & fuck himself," tweeted Aaronovitch yesterday. A distinctly lowered tone, edgy with a hint of menace, think Romford on a Friday night. We like it.
• A wedding: quite a fancy one and those assembled around the table are chit-chatting. One of them is Stanley Johnson, politician, writer, bon vivant, father of Boris. Another attendee is less well to do, she's a film-maker. They're talking. And what have you been doing recently? asks Stanley. Well, I have been very busy, she replies. We have been making a film on an estate in Bradford. Oh really, says Stanley, an estate in Bradford? He turns to his wife. "Don't we know them?" Cue an awkward silence. There are estates, and then there are estates. There's life for the likes of Stanley. And then real life.
• Finally, a splendid introduction from Speaker John Bercow as he played the warm-up man to Barack Obama on Wednesday. Pithy, well judged. Perfect. Well, not quite perfect. For he well knew that the following day, as part of a Speaker's lecture, he planned to honour the legacy of Enoch "Rivers of Blood" Powell. He could have made a joke about that to the first black US president. But he quite forgot to mention it.
