Now is the winter of our disbelief

turned into slushy puddles of failed promises underfoot. The only thing that surprises me is that nobody is really that surprised. A prime minister being questioned by police, aides arrested, a lord arrested (twice), but it's all business as usual for both the police and the government. Perhaps new labour have flirted so close and so often with controversy that we are all happy to accept that things have always gone on this way, and it's only the rabid curiousity of the press that has resulted in these items getting on to the front pages. After all, what's a reward for a donation compared to war on false premises? Quite right, nothing. We've had dodgy lords for centuries, it always was a way of rewarding someone who new when to put the purse in and keep his mouth shut. Dodgy prime ministers? Well, Disraeli used to 'rescue' fallen women. Allegedly.

I suspect also that someone around number 10 might have been breathing a sigh of relief that so much other news has been making it to the top of the list to bump this item steadily down to the bottom of the cess-pool. The continuing release of home office catastrophes, for example. Marvellous, and much more relevant to the fears of everyday people, worried about foreign rapists and absconding criminals. Rich knights just don't figure in the ranks of bogeymen. Or the recent Celebrity Big Brother storm in a far-eastern teacup, it's on the streets and in the factories every day and every night, and much more meaningful to us than those strange P's and K's referred to in the scribbled notes and rattled e-mails.

And what is so sinister about P's and K's anyway? I can hear Tony Blair exclaiming. It's not what you think. It's just swearing. We swear in number 10, honest. Everybody swears. It's just part of life. It's just that, well, educated people tend to be a bit more euphemistic than the inmates of the Celebrity Big Brother house. When you read P or K in our emails it's completely wrong to think of Peerages and Knighthoods. No indeed, what we're referring to are 'phucks' and 'kunts', to put it in terms that Jade Goody would understand. We just spell some words slightly differently.

Like integrity?