Richard Ingrams' Week: A so-called big beast who would be lost in a jungle

The description in this newspaper of Charles Clarke as "a big beast" seems typical of the strange unreality of so much political coverage these days. I don't know when journalists first used the big beast label but it was presumably designed to distinguish the major political figures of our times. They were the lions and the elephants and the others were the meerkats and raccoons.

Apart from looking like a rather manky old chimpanzee with his unkempt beard and his air of surly aggression, Clarke cannot conceivably be put into the big beast category. He is just another failed politician with a grudge. I remember Clarke when Minister of Education giving out his view that "education for education's sake is a bit dodgy", and what did he ever achieve with this moronic mantra to guide him?

Then Blair foolishly made Clarke Home Secretary, but he was soon forced to resign over the immigration issue, blaming what he called "systemic failure" – in other words it was the system that was to blame. Nothing to do with him. Yet when Clarke launched an attack this week on Gordon Brown, his comments were given huge coverage and treated with enormous respect. Apparently the big beast had emerged from the jungle, causing panic among the meerkats.

Brown and Darling may not be up to much, but is there anyone better? Can one seriously imagine "the pillock on his gap year" David Miliband as prime minister? Would David Cameron make any difference? The short answer is no. But you wouldn't think it from the way some supposedly well-informed people go on.

In praise of Glenda Slagg

I am proud to have played some part in the creation and continuing career of Glenda Slagg, Private Eye's all-purpose female columnist.

Glenda's formula is a simple one. Take any prominent person in the news and write two consecutive items, one praising, the other damning.

Then donchalovehim? Then arentchasickof him?

It's all a bit crude. But I like that. The point being that Glenda has no firmly held views of her own. She can be for, or just as easily against.

Glenda's inspiration in the early days was the Daily Express columnist Jean Rook. Not to be outdone, the Daily Mail launched their own Glenda in the shape of Lynda Lee-Potter. Both are dead and today the Glendas proliferate and not only in the tabloids. As a Glenda connoisseur I was delighted by this week's column by Alice Miles in The Times which managed to incorporate the For and Against in the same article. On the subject of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin: "Call that a woman? A gun-toting anti-abortionist with the hide of a grizzly bear. She makes Barack Obama look like a girl." But then a few paragraphs later: "I just love her beehive hairdo and glasses, the sexy librarian look."

Not bad. Still I think Glenda herself had more of a punch on the same topic on the same day: "Fur hats off to Alaskan beauty Sarah Palin the huntin', shootin' fishin' femme fatale from the land of the Eskimos", followed by: "Gawd help us all! This gun-crazed, right-wing Inuit nutter could be one heartbeat away from being president!! With Eskimo Nell standing and Pappy McCain a-drooling and a-dribbling at her side Obama can start choosing the White House curtains right now." It has a bit more of a ring to it.

* Some time last month it was announced on Channel 4 News (my main source of information for what is going on in the world) that Gordon Brown was planning on providing free laptops to all the children of poor families in the country.

Subsequently I've heard no more about it. So it could be that the project has been shelved, along with a whole lot of other exciting government initiatives.

Perhaps it was the expense – presumably colossal. But I hope that there was at least one person involved sufficiently sane to point out that if you provide children with free laptops they will only use them to play computer games, often for long periods at a time.

That is one snag, but the attraction of laptops and the internet from the Government's point of view is that they provide an excuse to do away with expensive and untidy books.

If all the knowledge of the world is available on the internet then, they argue, we have no further need of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, atlases. Even story books could soon be obsolete and what a big saving could result.

Of course, it means overlooking the various dangerous elements of the internet – the porn, the paedophiles, etc, not forgetting the computer games. Apropos of this I had an interesting letter the other day from the head of British Home Tutors, Mr Thomas Mayer, who blames these games for the fact that in recent years girls have been outperforming boys in exams, not just in Britain but all over the world.

Boys, he states, are particularly prone "to find a mind-numbing distraction" (a fact that every parent can confirm) and the games are perfectly designed for this purpose. It would be sad but predictable if Gordon Brown is planning to make it even easier for those boys to fall further behind.

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