The Sketch: As I wasn't saying to the PM: 'Machine-gun the prisoners!'

Oh, what a disappointment. The question I had lined up went: "Prime Minister, it is claimed that your erstwhile Home Secretary whom you describe as" (Sketch ostentatiously refers to notes) " 'excellent' ordered one of his senior civil servants to 'machine-gun' rioting prisoners. Were you aware of this at the time? And are you aware of any other psychologically vulnerable characters round your current cabinet table?"

I really did want to hear the words "machine-gun prisoners" in the PM's briefing room. A cabinet minister yelping "I don't care about lives!" (as noted by the civil servant). He was "hysterical", apparently. That really needed to be explored. Had the PM been told about it all? Of course he had. "Home Secretary's stripped himself naked and is barking at women in the street again, Prime Minister."

"Now that's what I call a home secretary." A home secretary howling at the moon - it throws a whole new light on control orders and secret trials that he was supervising at the time. "Excellent!"

But the Prime Minister had cleverly exhausted us by engaging us in the NHS debate. We'd got a presentation as a punishment for some unrecorded misdemeanour. We were shown a picture of a man who had had a heart operation. I'm not sure any of us had come expecting that. The operation had all gone well. Hooray! And ambulance people are being trained to help injured people now. Yippee!

Then the current chief executive of the NHS told us it was just his sixth week "in post" He said that "polishing the status quo is not an option." He said some other equally dreadful things. Did he know who we were?

Like a large, suffering animal, Adam Boulton, Sky's Political Editor, lifted his head to look at the unfortunate bureaucrat. In his dullest voice he asked whether or not it was true that 20,000 jobs were to be lost in the NHS in the next financial year.

That unleashed a flurry of energy that can be rendered as: "Ah. Now. Yes, interesting point. Surveys! Decentralised information systems, 600 institutions, 1.3 million employees, 130,000 moving jobs every year. So in summary what we can say is we don't have a complete figure in answer to that."

"So you don't know?" Boulton almost didn't ask. This produced more flurries, including a prime ministerial intervention starting, "What he's trying to say is..."

Boulton began to be about to start thinking about interesting himself and he said: "I asked for a straight answer, and you say you don't know!"

There would have been a time when Blair would have said: "You're talking about figures below the margin of error," and left it at that. But now he is wading. It can't go on like this until May can it? I suppose there's no reason why it shouldn't.

"Machine-gun prisoners"! (I'm just relishing the words.)

simoncarr@sketch.co.uk

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