If Charles Clarke is announcing that ID cards are only going to cost £30, then the ID Cards Bill must be due back in Parliament any day now (yup, Tuesday), and Labour Party MPs must be looking for some threadbare justification for continuing to support it. And if that’s not quite enough (’Isn’t £30 pretty much what they said last time we bravely gave in?’) then Clarke also has a report demonstrating “strong public support for the scheme” and an “independent analysis” from KPMG backing him up on the scheme costs.

We now propose to demonstrate how Clarke, who announced the £30, the report and the KPMG analysis in a written answer to a parliamentary question on 13th October, was to all intents and purposes misleading the House. We should however note that he was not lying as such - he was merely giving his target audience on the Labour benches the tools to believe what they desperately want to believe, and the sad truth is that not many of them are going to be inclined to say, ‘Er, hang on a minute, Charles…’

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