• home • about • twitter • archives • subscribe • email •

So, the likes of the Tory party, Alex Salmond and George Galloway have to wait a yet-to-be-determined grace period before indulging in political grandstanding but the wait for New Labour is over.

The Government has rejected knee-jerk calls for an enquiry at this stage and rightly so. An inquiry can wait until the funerals have taken place and the intelligence services and police (hopefully) have concrete facts about what happened.

Charles Clarke, however, has been allowed to make hand-jerk calls for the Europe-wide retention of telephone and email records. In an age of pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Hotmail email accounts and wi-fi points, how he thinks his plan will work is beneath him to explain. As is who will pay for the storage of the massive amounts of this new data – no doubt the internet service providers and mobile phone companies will be buying hard drives in bulk pretty soon.

Still, it looks and sounds good doesn’t it? Clarkie gets to bound breathlessly into top-level meetings with his European counterparts like a morbidly obese Jack Bauer, slam a thick folder down on the table and say: “Gentlemen, we need your help. This is how it’s going to be.”

Result. The Safety Elephant saves the day again and the mobile phone and internet companies (and by extension, their customers) stand the bill.