I think we should be told

Tom Watson has written a piece in the Mirror today about Jeremy Hunt being the boil that the NHS needs to lance. For me that would represent little more than a good start, but anyway I’ve emailed Tom (who I think is a nice bloke but I’m still not entirely sure) to say the piece is disgracefully boilist. If you can’t, as an MP, tell a Hunt from a boil by now, then there is no hope for you.

Save the Boil, Lance Hunt! should be the watchword of any Nurse who finds the Health Secretary rushed into A&E with a boil anywhere upon his person. Your country needs boils. Lance Boil is innocent, OK.

‘Syria peace talks open amid disagreement’ headlined the FT this afternoon, a set of words that set me off into guilty laughter alongside thoughts about where this trend might go from here. ‘Greek bond yields spike as Athens announces debt repaid’. ‘Lionel Messi gets winner after being sent off’. The possibilities are endless – especially with Messi. But perhaps the most appropriate extension would be, ‘Con Coughlin proven MI5 agent before opening mouth’.

The Daily Mail’s website had a headline today claiming ‘NPower chief Massara blames green taxes for high bills’. He could be right of course (although I suspect oilcos might also be implicated) but the combination of names and odd correlations put me in mind of a quack purveyor of daft African medicine ideas. So in darkest deepest somewhere or other is this elegant and exotic tribe the Npower, and its Chief Massara is convinced that neutrally coloured tax demands are the cure for high bills – a disease unique to his tribe, the main symptom of which is a beak growing out of the top of one’s head. He probably also thinks that Tim Yeo’s black taxis have very low CO2 emissions, a bizarre belief he shares with Chief BoJo of Mendacium.

Britain’s shiny new Police & Crime Commissioners, says the National Audit Office, are failing to publish key information about salaries and contracts. By which the NAO means – literally – none of them. It went on quite reasonably to observe that this was going to ‘make it impossible for them to be held to account by the public’. I think the NAO might be onto something here, but given we have 620 other equally elected politicians who are also entirely unaccountable, one might have thought the trend would’ve been spotted by now. Especially as the NAO Inspector concerned’s name is, um, Morse.

In the best tradition of Lord Mandelson’s illustriously cloudy career, the lady who lied to get Chris Huhne off a speeding fine, Vicky Pryce, has returned to her role as a Government economics adviser after being released from jail. A DBIS spokesman said her crime “in no way brought into question her ability or judgment as an economist”, an odd but fairly apt thing to say given the complete dishonesty of many who work as economists in Government from Rome to Washington. Pryce was born in Greece, where I suspect her skills would be particularly applicable.

Mr Huhne himself, who resigned from the Cabinet when he was charged with perverting the course of justice over the incident, also went to jail, but is now chairman of Zilkha Biomass Energy on a salary of £100,000 a year. Biomass produces solar energy by incinerating fast-recycling plant material. During his interview for the job, the former Energy Secretary asked for seven offences of burning coal in a smokeless zone and 476 cases of burning public money via wind propellers to be taken into account.

Earlier at The Slog: Greek submarines and Italian defaulters