Blair lacks courage of his convictions in wrangle over crime

What diabolical plan has Number 10 been following? What news could have been so bad that it merited burying beneath a royal funeral fracas? It must have been big, because the Queen Mother is now threatening to do to President Blair what Monica Lewinsky did to President Clinton. I'll rephrase that. For President Blair, what Monica did for President Clinton. She blew his credibility, if you remember. I think that's the right way of putting it.

So what else happened last week that the Government was keen to obscure? Crime appears to have gone up despite the Prime Minister's weekly rehearsal of the claim that it is going down. Had crime gone down, as he claimed? Or had people simply stopped reporting it? There doesn't seem much point in reporting crime now we know that just 6 per cent of all crimes will result in a conviction.

But then, has crime gone up? The police suggested recently a brilliantly funny tactic in their war against the Home Secretary. If David Blunkett continued to bully them into abandoning their Hispanic practices they would find a new way of reporting the statistics. A street-fight between five people used to be logged as a single crime; now, in a drive for more ethical reporting, they were going to register it as five crimes. One stroke of the pen creates a crime wave, and another stroke does the opposite. Meanwhile, the citizens increasingly see the state as self-serving, untrustworthy and disabled, and they subtly withdraw from it.

But then, another event surfaced last week which may bring us all closer together. The state is voting itself powers to allow anyone's most intimate records to be accessed by the pettiest of state servants and without the need for a court order. Everyone down to your local council officials will be able to check out what internet sites you've been visiting and what mobile numbers you've been calling. If you're a parish pump councillor, and obliged to declare gifts down to the level of a dinner party, you should probably quit while you're ahead.

Charles Clarke accused the media last week of persistently demeaning politics. In my case he's right on the button. If you believe in this column's First Law of Politics (Everything A Politician Touches Turns to Sewage), one's view of the political class is bound to be tinged with melancholy.

The obsession with spinning sewage into something more attractive springs from the fundamental problem with our representative democracy. Perfectly ordinary people – some very much more ordinary than others – are elected to Parliament to represent their constituency. They end up administering the biggest budget in Europe. Four hundred billion pounds of public money. They simply try to do too much. They're not equipped for it. They fail. They have to present their failure as a success because otherwise people won't admire them so much. As they toil, so they have to spin.

Is the Chancellor's aide really a superhero?

The new Spider-Man probably isn't worth seeing, not if you've seen Batman and Superman. Except for the remarkable physical resemblance between the actor playing Spider-Man and the Chancellor's right-hand man – the mild-mannered Ed Balls.

Is Ed Balls really a superhero? Is Spider-Man the secret identity? Or is Ed Balls the secret identity? Have they ever been seen in the same room together? Spider-Man says: "With great power comes great responsibility." And so, I bet, does Mr Balls.

Why they're out to get Gwyneth Dunwoody

Gwyneth Dunwoody is not hopeful of her chances. The Government is out to get her. They want her position as chairwoman of the Transport Committee. She's awkward. She tells the truth as she sees it. She won't be twisted out of shape. They hate that.

She was saved last year by the intervention of the House of Commons: it voted to retain her as the committee's chairwoman. The House only gets its act together once, she believes.

Her crime, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, was to stick the final knife into Stephen Byers, thus precipitating his resignation. The committee had produced a report characterising the 10-year plan for transport as a bag of wind. Mr Prescott was enraged because it was his bag of wind.

He'd produced the preposterous rubbish when he was the minister.

Mr Prescott's attack diverted attention from the real reason for Mr Byers' resignation: the man's last lie came to light (that it was after all his own decision, not the Office of Fair Trading's, to declare Richard Desmond to be a fit and proper person to own a national newspaper). That's why he quit. One lie too many. Caught out. A reef knot tied in his forked tongue.

It is also worth saying that Mrs Dunwoody generally defended Mr Byers. In committee she stood by him loyally – a little too loyally for the likes of us bloodthirsty commentators – and outside committee she refused to say anything to his discredit.

Mrs Dunwoody's criticism of the 10-year plan makes entirely reasonable reading. The plan is everything you'd expect from John Prescott: it's confused, ill-considered, incompetent, contradictory twaddle.

¿ The massive private-sector contribution to the £180bn spending programme is now uncertain. What happens to a capital spending plan when there is no capital?

¿ The multi-modal studies are confused and disparate. They'll never relate to each other. Ten years will disappear into them with no useful outcome.

¿ "There is currently no way of meaningfully assessing the progress between now and 2010, and no criteria against which to decide on whether the Plan is on track to meet the 2010 targets."

¿ Cycling levels haven't grown, let alone doubled. "The failure to meet the 2002 target shows the importance of interim targets against which progress can be assessed."

I like Gwyneth Dunwoody; she was the source of the only good joke the Sketch has made in the past two years. It called her the secret love child of Ena Sharples and Leonid Brezhnev. She didn't seem to mind. It was a good joke because it saw the inside from the outside. The idea that Ena Sharples and Leonid Brezhnev would have allowed the Tories to hijack a committee's report against their wishes is so stupid that only John Prescott would have come up with it.

Sony. The PCG. Where's my power supply?

A consumer product warning. Sony. Remember the name Sony. Their sexy little laptops, the ones with the camera in the screenbox? They're called PCG series, and they will tempt you in the shop, sometimes past resistance. But if you're thinking of buying one, this column's advice is: don't. On no account buy a Sony PCG.

The power supply is, by the looks of things, generally defective. Mine packed up after six months. Sony offered to supply a new one, according to their guarantee. But they had none in stock. Other suppliers had none in stock.

There seems to be a run on them. Perhaps there's a systematic fault. A batch problem. Maybe PCG power supplies are packing up all over the country.

Sony promise to deliver, they promise to phone back, the supervisor is said to be on to it. But nothing happens.

After six weeks of waiting, hogging the boys' computer, unable to use my Sony PCG, I found relief from Computer Assistance in Oxford, an engaging cyber wigwam up the Cowley Road (01865 451177).

They were able to do what the great multinational power of Sony couldn't. They found the last Sony PCG supply unit in England (at a cost, I might say, of £100) and got it to me in 24 hours.

Sony (I just can't stop using their name) are still offering to send me another unit, and it will be interesting to see if it ever arrives.

¿ Investment must be matched by reform, that's the cry. How's that going, by the way? How about, say, the cost of operations?

Euro-surgeons can do a private heart bypass operation for £700; our surgeons charge £2,500 for the same thing. Brit-surgeons charge £1,300 to do a hip operation; you can get a whole euro-surgery team for the same amount.

Indigenous consultants are keen to see their incomes from private work preserved. They want to keep foreign teams out. So how's that reform process going?