The Sketch: With fingers like Cornish pasties, how can Moonie be a safe pair of hands?

After Question Time, Melanie Johnson introduced government amendments to the Enterprise Bill. I can feel the surge of adrenaline in the readership, but those with horses should hold them, momentarily.

The Sketch has been waiting for a suitable moment to apologise to Ms Johnson for, oh years now. So long that the offence has been forgotten. Unfairness was involved, surely? Cruelty perhaps? Almost certainly. She'd said something or other to the Treasury Select Committee. The Sketch observed: "If Gordon Brown had said this" whatever it was, "instead of his useless apparatchik Mel J, it would have made headlines all over Britain". Gordon Brown went on to repeat her remark word for word and nobody thought anything of it. There it is. I think we all feel better now.

Before we come to Ms Johnson's Enterprise we should drop in on Defence questions. This department is is so dull that people assume the ministers are "safe pairs of hands". Lewis Moonie has fingers like Cornish pasties; Adam Ingram hasn't any hands at all. Bernard Jenkin accused him of reducing by stealth the army's target strength of (so the Adjutant General told a select committee, repeating the figure from 1997's Strategic Defence Review) 108,500. Last month's figures, Mr Jenkin noted, stood a fraction over 100,000. Why had the Government abandoned its targets without telling anyone?

Mr Ingram denied the figure of 108,500 was significant. "It was a notional figure and not the working assumption," he told the House. And people wonder why soldiers hate politicians. Well, perhaps they don't. Lewis Moonie was asked about rumours he was selling an aircraft carrier to India to pay some bills. "There has been no discussion with anybody on the sale of our carriers," he said. What did that mean? Perhaps there hadn't been discussions but negotiations. Perhaps not with any body but with a department. Perhaps the deal isn't for a sale but a lease with a negligible end payment. "I am not used to having my word questioned in the House," he said quite grandly for someone in his position.

Ms Johnson's Enterprise Bill has attracted cross-party support. It is framed to protect people from liars, twisters, fraudsters, rogues, and high-pressure sales people. Those slippery fish who find loopholes in the law and swim through them. The more they described these villains, the more I thought they were talking about themselves. Not con artists but Con artists, Lab artists and Lib Dem artists.

They come to the door, offer to do a job you didn't really want doing, do it shoddily and then charge you more than you agreed to pay. They were referring to asphalt salesmen but it was impossible not to think of the Dome. One of them pointed out that discredited timeshare operations now advertise their product under the banner headline "This Is Not A Timeshare". Same abuses, same scams, same people, he said. The same semantic denial of reality, he might have added: This Is A Bill to Encourage Enterprise.

The Government was legislating to outlaw abuse of a bargaining position, to prohibit restrictions on returns, and to insist that all information be revealed before the sale was secured. No one would ever get elected under these conditions.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com