The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) has reminded me of the extraordinary genius that produced “Peppa Pig”. In the past fortnight I have seen Père Cochon and Maman Cochon, watching on Gallic television, as I do frequently—and there is a Dada Moch and a Mama Moch—in versions of “Peppa Pig”. Why should young children including my many grandchildren be fascinated by a mutant pig with both eyes on one side of her face? That, I presume, is explained by the nature of errant genius.

I speak with a special interest in the matter, because the Intellectual Property Office has the great good luck to be located in the wide open spaces of Newport West. When it was the Patent Office, its relocation was cited in the Lyons report as the exemplar of a splendid, profitable and intellectually successful relocation. I remind the House …

The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) has reminded me of the extraordinary genius that produced “Peppa Pig”. In the past fortnight I have seen Père Cochon and Maman Cochon, watching on Gallic television, as I do frequently—and there is a Dada Moch and a Mama Moch—in versions of “Peppa Pig”. Why should young children including my many grandchildren be fascinated by a mutant pig with both eyes on one side of her face? That, I presume, is explained by the nature of errant genius.

I speak with a special interest in the matter, because the Intellectual Property Office has the great good luck to be located in the wide open spaces of Newport West. When it was the Patent Office, its relocation was cited in the Lyons report as the exemplar of a splendid, profitable and intellectually successful relocation. I remind the House …

Writing in the Guardian this week, sketch writer Simon Hoggart claimed that Labour MP Paul Flynn had invented a new word. He wrote: “11.55:Paul Flynn coins new word for what the coalition has created: “An ineptocracy of greed.” Won’t catch on.”

Unfortunately for Mr Hoggart, he was wrong on two counts. Firstly, Mr Flynn didn’t coin the word. And secondly, it already has.

Ineptocracy has been around very …

In the past there was exaggerated optimism about the beneficial effects of city status and the location of the Ryder Cup. Now there is exaggerated pessimism about current problems. 

The city centre is going through a very rough patch. A debate in parliament recently proved that almost every city in the UK is suffering the same flight of shops from centres to out-of-town sites. One malicious TV programme on a minority channel has caused upset. It took eight weeks of filming to collect revolting scenes of drunken low life. A similar picture of Cardiff was broadcast two years ago.  By deliberately accentuating the negative, the same awful scenes could be found in every city in the UK. 

Come on, Newport. It's time to stop beating ourselves up. This was a tiny slice of the worst of local life. We still have a great city. There are hundreds of pubs and dozens of restaurants here that are comfortable, well-run, safe and first class. Today I had a great meal in …

There is no conceivable British interests threatened by Iran. But vast profits beckon for the international war profiteers. Ever thus.

179 British lives lost in Iraq after Commons was bribed, baffled and bamboozled with lies on on non-existent WMDs. New Iran lie is being spread

Afghan and Iraq war sacrificed the lives of 575 British soldiers and achieved nothing. Corrupt regimes still rule. Iran war would be worse.

Lying to war AGAIN? Clegg says Iranian WMD missiles threaten UK and USA. Another war planned with unimaginable costs in blood and treasure.

Simon Jenkins said today:

Unlike most European countries, sucked into the Afghan vortex by Nato blackmail, Britain and the US were willing warriors, with belligerence in their cultural genes. Discussing "what must be done" to order the rest of the world is second nature to their political class. Successive British governments bought into the lies and scaremongering of George Bush's war on terror. Gordon Brown and David Cameron alike claimed that the killing fields of …

The myths will crumble. The lies will be hidden in the hope that they will be forgotten. The war has been lost by the West. The Taliban will be the Government again in Afghanistan. The great majority of Afghans trust the Taliban more than the corrupt Karzai and his depraved thieving army.

 The Times described a report today as secret and "highly classified", saying it was put together last month by the US military at Bagram. "Many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban," the report was quoted as saying. "Once Isaf (Nato-led forces) is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable."

The document stated that Pakistan's security agency was helping the Taliban in directing attacks against foreign forces – a charge long denied by Islamabad. The findings were based on interrogations of more than 4,000 Taliban and al-Qaida detainees, the Times said, adding the document was scarce on identifying individual insurgents.

Despite the presence of more than 100,000 foreign troops, the UN has …

Regular readers may recall my spat with GOD before Christmas.

The probe into the Liam Fox - Adam Werritty scandal was rushed, defective and politically inspired.  David Cameron's former independent adviser on ministerial interests said today he should have been asked to look into claims that Liam Fox's friendship with his self-appointed adviser Adam Werritty broke the ministerial code.

Sir Philip Mawer, who has since stood down from the post, told the public administration select committee today: "I do believe the adviser ought to have been brought in to investigate the Fox/Werritty affair and ought to have been brought in quickly...

"I was frustrated at the failure to call me in on the Fox/Werritty affair, and I made clear to the Cabinet Office at the time I felt the credibility of the independent adviser had not been assisted by the decisions that were taken," he said.

It is straining credibility to believe that his resignation was not influenced by an investigation into the ministerial code that was itself a …

Very pleasing display of my new book in the Parliamentary Bookshop.

The charming lady who runs the shop told me that sales are going well. I have to qualify my shameless promotion of the book by repeating that all royalties go to charities. There was a good reception from fellow parliamentarians today. A lady LibDem peer sent some flattering words - underlined twice. The brightest new LibDem MP liked the writing. A Labour MP complained that there was no index and he was forced to read the book to find his name. Exactly. One MP told me he had just started  reading his copy - which he has borrowed from the Common Library. He is a Tory of course. The only hostility is from those who cannot disentangle newspaper headlines from the contents of the book.

2,000 words from the book were printed in one national newspaper: 1,000 words in another. One was distorted, malicious and mendacious. The other was truthful, intelligent and a tad inspirational. The two papers were the …

Prize for media distortion goes to the Telegraph. My comments are in italics

Assisted suicide should be illegal throughout Europe, human rights body rules

Euthanasia and assisted suicide should be banned in every country in the Continent, the Council of Europe has ruled.

'Ruled' the COE has no power to impose its will. The rule is subsidiarity and every one of the 47 nations will make its own rules

In a declaration that will have legal implications in its 47 member states, the Strasbourg-based organisation announced that such practices “must always be prohibited”.

It has no legal obligations

The move will represent a significant setback to assisted dying campaigners who want Britain to follow Holland, Belgium and Switzerland in allowing doctors to help end the lives of their patients.

In your dreams. It wiil have no effect except derision

But members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe argued that living wills, which became legal in Britain under the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, were inextricably connected …

 Email

Speaker John Bercow has set his own high standards for his role free of the tyranny of the stultifying traditions that have blocked past reformers.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said that Bercow is "supporting the legislature against the executive." This is the job of the Speaker - to represent Parliament and to challenge government when necessary.

Bercow has more pioneering courage than all of his three predecessors. He has promoted the feeble rights of backbenchers against the overweening powers of the executive. Contriving to call a record number of urgent, oral and topical questions has liberated backbenchers and multiplied our chances of holding the executive to account. He has reduced the verbose garbage that clogs the parliamentary word machine.

Bercow has been the scourge of the self-regarding, boring time gluttons who spew endless verbal Polyfilla. He has been the friend of those whose contributions are brief, pithy and substantial.

One oafish MP said …

It not just the £million bonus. The bailed-out RBS bank has spent over £2.5m of British taxpayers' money to influence politicians reforming US financial law. They handed over this fortune to American lobbyists.

Both in-house and commercial lobbyists have been paid to influence American senators and congressmen reforming US finance law since the bank's collapse and government bail-out in October 2008.

The money has been handed over despite calls from ministers for RBS and other banks that have received taxpayers' handouts to refrain from hiring public affairs firms.

According to the documents, the bank spent $4.13m from October 2008 to December 2011 on lobbyists as it tried to influence three different areas of legislation.

The Guardian report that :

'RBS sought influence over consumer protection, with proposed legislation such as the Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act and the US Credit Card Act.

These proposed laws wanted to make it harder for young people to be given credit cards, …

Chance of debate on our discredited Honours system. Plans to use honours to push political schemes are about to be hatched. The Telegraph reports:

The Daily Telegraph disclosed yesterday for the first time the official list of everyone who rejected an honour between 1949 and 1999, and has since died.

Pressure is mounting on ministers to release the identities of other people who have rejected an honour in the past decade.

New figures from the Cabinet Office show that over the past three years 116 people have rejected honours, but they are not identified.

They show that 30 people turned down honours in last year’s Queen’s Birthday and New Year’s honours lists. That compared with 46 in 2010 and 40 in 2009.

Authors JB Priestley and Roald Dahl and the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and LS Lowry were among 277 people on the list, which was disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act after a 15 month battle with …

That quote was about his earlier book Commons Knowledge, which came out in 1997, but with publisher’s typical chutzpah that quote has found its way onto the jacket of the revised and updated book.  But no complaints: if the new book is half as good as the old book, then it’ll be a cracker.  For those of us …

It happened last time in 1994. It will not happen again until 2037. We hold the Presidency for six months in the Council of Europe. It started in May and will be over in November. It was a great opportunity to spread some of the UK best practises to the 46 members states with poor human rights records. We blew that. We concentrated on the issue of vote for prisoners - a matter of monumental insignificance compared with the summary arrests, torture and abuse that is traditional in many European prisons. Other countries have seen us talk about our national customs. they have national customs too. Cruel ones.

On Wednesday the Prime Minister will address the Council of Europe is Strasbourg. He will be seeking flattering headlines about the interference in UK laws by Europe - especially in the failure to expel Abu Qatada. There is universal outrage at this decision. He be wildly acclaimed …

In the Commons a Government Minister aired her ignorance about thalidomide. I had to remind her that it WAS tested on animals. It was tested on rabbits including pregnant rabbits. No birth abnormalities were found until it was used on human guinea pigs. Now news of another silent killer has been found. The Independent report.

Tens of thousands of British families are to be asked if they are victims of a drug given to pregnant women which can cause fatal illness in the second, and possibly even third, generations. Some women given the drug in this country have already obtained compensation in America.

Diethylstilboestrol (DES), a drug given to women for 30 years up to 1973, has been found to cause a rare form of vaginal and cervical cancer in some of the daughters of the women who took it, as well as fertility problems. Compensation of an estimated $1.5bn has been …

It will take many years to rebuild trust in politics. Many judge all MPs to be lying thieves. The details are forgotten but the mud still sticks. The sins of predecessors are visited onpresent MPs. The tentacles of corrupting corporate lobbyists are sunk deeply into the body politic. Removing them requires all- party microsurgery. David Cameron has correctly warned that ‘corporate lobbying goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people’s worst fears and suspi- cions about how our political system works.’ More MPs than ever are former lobbyists. Many hope to be future lobbyists. The Werritty scandal shocked the Government into refresh- ing their reform notions. Ominously, the first debate follow- ing the scandal was crowded with former lobbyists lobbying for lobbying.

In opposition David Cameron made this stunning declaration:

"It’s an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long...an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business …

Discord  and disruption is cetain.

After some lively disagreement  the Commons Public Administration Committee (PASC) have eeached a unanimous yew. We say the new arrangements implemented at the top of the Civil Service on the retirement of Sir Gus O’Donnell “could lead to weaker leadership and disperse power at a critical time of change in government” and that they will not succeed unless ministers, and particularly the Prime Minister, accords the two roles equal power and status.  They must both attend Cabinet on equal terms and both must have access to the Prime Minister and the authority “to speak truth unto power”.

 There have been some hilarious reports from Sue Cameron on disputes over office space and desks. Jealousies are rampant. The risk of unequal status and differential access to the Prime Minister under the new arrangements has prompted  the Committee to demand a full review of the new structure by July 2012.

TOur report states 

“The Civil Service is one of the United Kingdom’s great institutions.  It is not merely …

Perhaps the Leader of the House had not thought through his answer this afternoon. He is surely not defending the murder of civilians.

Earlier this week, I had a very disturbing reply about Wikileaks reports on incidents involving Afghan civilians and NATO soldiers. There are no records of some incidents and inadequate action on others. There is no chance of a full investigation until the fighting is over.

Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab): Will next week’s defence debate concentrate on the paramount need to reduce tension between the west and Iran in order to avoid this country stumbling into another avoidable war, and may we explain to those responsible that murdering Iranian scientists can have only one outcome: making war more likely?

Sir George Young: I am sure that if the hon. Gentleman couched his remarks in a suitable way they would be perfectly in order in next Thursday’s debate. I have noted his …

Also yesterday I was critical of the apprenticships in the Commons.

Paul Flynn(Newport West) (Lab): Although I greatly I admire the work of my close comrade, the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), is not there a danger that apprenticeships that are essentially relabelled job creation, job experience schemes or internships, without a job, skill or indentures at the end, are likely to increase the cynicism and disillusionment among young people?

The chief executives leading the government's multi-billion pound apprenticeship schemes have both announced they are to step down.

Geoff Russell will leave his position heading up the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) in the summer.

The SFA has faced accusations of misuse of public money by training providers and an inquiry is to start next month.

Mr Russell's departure coincides with the resignation of Simon Waugh, head of the National Apprenticeship Service.

Both men in charge of the government's multi-billion pound apprenticeship schemes announced their departures on the same …

Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab): Although I greatly I admire the work of my close comrade, the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), is not there a danger that apprenticeships that are essentially relabelled job creation and job experience schemes or internships, without a job, skill or indentures at the end, are likely to increase the cynicism and disillusionment among young people?

Mrs Gillan: I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that, for example, all the apprentices at the Welsh Government undertake business administration NVQs and are recruited through fair and open competition via their website, with support from Careers Wales and Jobcentre Plus. That shows that the apprentice programmes are equipping young people to take up jobs in the future.

 [Interruption.] Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab): When does the Prime Minister expect to be cross-examined by the Leveson inquiry? Does he not agree that the British people deserve an answer to the question of why he appointed one of Murdoch’s top lieutenants, Andy Coulson, …

I can tell you how to gate a gong. If you are rich it's simple. Give £millions to charities and don't be shy about  letting everyone know about it. The best value is giving to royal charities like The Prince's Trust. A £1 given to them is worth £50 given to a non-royal charity. Soon honours will be for sale for any association with Cameron's  dying Big Society wheeze. Get involved with some doomed Big Society scheme soon. The scheme will flop but the gong will arrived anyway.

If you are a billionaire, you can get any honours you want including knighthoods and a place in the Lords. It may cost anything from £10 million to £100,000. But the honour is guaranteed. Smaller amounts will guarantee an OBE or an MBE under the Government new sale of gongs for philanthropy. As the Government is starving public services out of cah they are …

The LibDem leader joins the Hallelujah chorus of derision at Gove's deluded suggestion.  This is probably the most perceptive thing that Nick Clegg has ever said.

He joked that it was a case of "the haves and the have yachts" - before apologising for the poor quality of his quip.…