Minister’s blanc statement

EVERY year, the Foreign Office is required to reveal how many bottles have been glugged from the government’s well-stocked wine cellar.

But in a Parliamentary answer rushed out before the recess, the junior minister Henry Bellingham said: ‘Publication of the annual statement to Parliament on the Government Hospitality wine cellar has, regrettably, been delayed until the autumn.’

Could it be that over-indulgence during the summer drinks party season has left the auditors unable to count up the large number of missing crates of Chateau Margaux? HOME OFFICE ministers have come up with a novel way of trying to avoid angry confrontations with passengers arriving from abroad and facing huge queues at the country’s undermanned airport immigration desks. When customs officials give travellers back their passport, they are to tell them cheerily: ‘Welcome to Britain.’ Somehow, I suspect, it might make things worse. QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Labour MP Frank Field, responding to the census figures showing the population of England and Wales had soared by 7.1 per cent due to increased immigration, said: ‘This is not so much a wake-up call. It is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen.’ WITH impeccable timing, the security firm G4S, which has failed so abysmally over its Olympic Games contract, is advertising for a £40,000-a-year PR manager with ‘personal credibility’ and the ability to ‘work under pressure’. Start queueing now! YET another Lib Dem U-turn. In 2007, Nick Clegg described as ‘brutal’ the Labour government’s closure of some Remploy factories which employed disabled workers in his Sheffield constituency.

He said it meant those being made redundant would be subjected to life on the ‘ benefits merry-go-round’. Five years on, and now that Clegg is deputy PM, what’s his view of the Government’s decision to close the country’s remaining 36 Remploy factories? He’s fully behind the idea!