The Sketch: What's eating the Speaker? Could it be Mr Blunkett?

It was the Speaker's birthday yesterday. He looks as though he was born in the 18th century, but he's not much older than I am. Sketch-writing is a far tougher, dirtier, more treacherous vocation than Glaswegian politics, so his appearance is a mystery.

But I am not here to be rude to the old codger. Not on his birthday. With the words of his new spin doctor ringing in my ears ("You're just gratuitously insulting to him ... You're undermining the office of Speaker"), The Sketch offers an interim judgement pending a consultative process prior to a wide-ranging report on the Speaker's current standing.

Initial findings demonstrate he is noticeably less partial than when he started. That's good. He has developed a pleasantly avuncular approach to members and addresses them with what is almost certainly a sort of smile thing in the lower part of his face. That's better.

But best is that he has managed to stop the Prime Minister's long anti-opposition harangues during Prime Minister's Questions. That took courage. He rebuked Mr Blair publicly last year, telling him that opposition policy was nothing to do with him. So hats off for the Speaker's birthday. And a long retirement, too!

Mr Blair was busy yesterday, so he sent his android along, the Polbot who stands in for him these days. "We want to put the money in and the party opposite want to take it out," it repeated every time it was asked a question.

Then the dark tide of David Blunkett came flowing into the Commons for a statement on identity cards. Talk about "something of the night". What is it about the office of Home Secretary that turns relatively ordinary politicians into groaning, flesh-eating zombies?

Everyone thinks Mr Blunkett wants to introduce compulsory ID cards to keep closer tabs on the population. He wants, people think, to allow public servants and elected officials to find out our most intimate details without the necessity of a court order. The evidence is pretty conclusive. Not only does he keep proposing legislation to restrict historic liberties, he says he is doing the opposite. "I don't accept my department has undermined people's freedom," he declared. The Conservative leadership resisted the impulse to stand on the front bench and bare their backsides in his direction. Discipline can be too tight, sometimes, in my view.

He wasn't able to get ID cards through public opinion before, so he is trying again, calling them "entitlement cards".

He didn't want to make them compulsory, he lied, as we saw when he was tripped up by Simon Hughes and had to reveal that everyone who travelled abroad or drove a car would have to have one.

"Very disappointing," Mr Blunkett said. He had wanted a debate but found himself in an engagement with "intellectual pygmies". Intellectual pygmies! How rude he is. And with his formidable array of psychological defects (paranoia, class rage, humourlessness, grace-lessness, ghastly beard) in no position to criticise anyone at all.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com