www.tanstaafl.co.uk

One of the most odd things about the recent days of the inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal has been the apparent ignorance of the senior staff involved. We’re frequently told that such people have to be paid frankly obscene amounts of money to obtain the most talented individuals for their jobs. It very much appears that one of their necessary talents is not asking questions about important aspects of the business, and in fact almost dismissing them as “beneath their consideration”. I’d have thought that taking so many sub-postmasters to court for having their hands in the till really ought to have rung alarm bells very high up. It’s an awful lot of staff to believe are up to something seriously illegal in one business.

Or is the real talent actually the ability to create plausible deniability and develop a sudden case of amnesia so that they can claim when challenged that it was nothing to do with them?

Presumably Liz Truss must have turned off her irony meter when addressing parliament today to oppose Richy Sunak’s bill that imposes a cut-off for the age at which people are allowed to buy cigarettes. It would limit personal freedom, she claimed. Well, yes, it would, though I’d suggest that’s a very poor argument when personal freedoms are limited in many other ways just to make society work.

The real irony however is that when she was Prime Monster (Remember that? Perhaps not. Blink and you missed it, though perhaps not the resulting financial fall-out) her government refused to allow Bermuda (a British colony) to implement cannabis reform. Quite how that jibes with her opposition to limiting personal freedom I’m really not sure.

To pour more petrol on the fire, she allegedly supported the idea of cannabis reform when she was a Lib Dem, presumably before she realised that total nutcases were more welcome in the Conservatives.

I’m reminded of the quote often attributed to Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others”.