It's Lammy Time

Further to my pieces on David Lammy's woeful appearance on Celebrity Mastermind I see today that he has been caught out making two more woeful mistakes. First Dizzy Thinks finds that the Labour Minister for Higher Education doesn't know the difference between the two homophones "here" and "hear", well he has only got a Masters in law from Harvard (can that be true?). Second Matthew Norman in The Independent reports on David lammy's interview with Sarah Montague on the Today programme: "But do you agree, asked Sarah, with the basic premise that they need more cash? "Look, I don't want to get into what will rightly be the scenarios when we begin the independent review. But I would say..." Yes but forget the review, she interrupted as exasperation finally began to flirt with her larynx, do you agree they need more money?

"Look," said Mr Lammy, understandably irritated himself now at being expected, as minister for higher education, to have an opinion about higher education,

"it's a bit like asking a farmer whether he needs more land." Answers on the traditional postcard, please, you cryptographers out there. In the absence of the Enigma machine, Mr Lammy's Agrarian Code remains uncrackable to me.

He then accused Ms Monatague of pursuing him on the point not on behalf of school pupils who might want a steer as to whether they'll be able to afford the higher of education for which, lest I forgot to mention this, he is minister; but rather in a cynical BBC hunt for "banner headlines". Even by the standards of Mrs Bottomley in the dog days of Major, even compared to the "I've already been very clear..." obfuscatory gibberish spewed by Hazel Blears herself, this was a display of psychosis-inducing obtuseness and complacency. I'd call it a calculated insult to the public's intelligence, of the sort disclaimed above, but it's hard to accuse someone who answered "Henry VII" to 3) of being able to calculate anything at all."

As Matthew Norman goes on to say:

"How did it come to this? How did this country come to be governed by people whose knowledge of everything from fourth-form history to popular culture, sport and even cheese (the blue variety served with port, he posited, is Red Leicester) verges on the non-existent?

So many questions, so few answers. If whether higher education needs more funding or not is yet another to stump David Lammy, so be it. It's in excellent company. But if our universities should shortly join every other once-revered British institution on the one-way journey past the U-bend, we should be able to make a fair old stab at answering why."

It appears to me that David Lammy like a very large number of his colleagues in this Labour Government are living proof of the Peter Principle - the Peter Principle says that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."