What? You don't like lackey? Hmm. Or how about, uh, toady? Or lickspittle? Lickspittle's nice. Oh, wait, I got it. Flunky. That's it.

I'm becoming quite the fan of Andy Burnham. This Home Office lickspittle is clearly intent on riding the scruffy, unshaven coattails of Charles Clarke all the way to the top, so earnest and full-throated is he in his support for ID Cards.

The intent expressed therein should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the methodology of this increasingly bankrupt and oppressive government. But I can't help wondering if he's been a little over-eager in the actual expression. For a government usually so secretive, it's a startlingly frank admission of intention: not just to force this totalitarian initiative on an unwilling nation, not just to invert the relationship between state and individual, making the latter answerable to the former rather than being accountable itself, not just to implement the political oppression, so redolent of unspeakable crimes, of numbering people; but openly to admit to the intention to make it as near as dammit unrepealable. Perhaps such unwonted transparency may in the end prove his downfall: maybe even ID Cards'. Or we could always rely on the incompetence of the state to implement such an enormous and complicated scheme inside three years. With a bit of luck it will become such a farrago that no-one in his right mind could possibly continue to support it (which will not, of course, mean that it goes without support...).

In the meantime ... and in case you (silent, invisible reader) didn't make it down to the comments section of the first link, check this out.