Just asking

We had the Man from the Ministry here the other day, unveiling something educational. The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education, no less. No, I will not call it the Department for Effing Wossname. It is the Ministry of Education. Or would be, if Labour did 'education'.

My question is, is it usual for Sir Humphrey to be allowed an awayday to go and unveil something? Isn't that customarily the job of the appropriate minister?

But let's see... in the present case that would be Balls. He would get short shrift around here (Labour voters went extinct some time ago) and anyway he's rather tied up at the moment, busy with his thesaurus, looking up analogues of and synonyms for the word 'deft', what with the Labour Conference in a couple of weeks, and in the medium term, important post-funeral manoeuvres, of course.

If not Balls, we might have had the choice of Vernon Coaker (stop laughing) or Diana Johnson MP (who she? Yes, exactly). Dawn Primarolo (tsk, really, you should know better) and the other 'ministers' in the Department of (oh, all right) Effing Wossname have non-jobs which anyway are Rockall to do with schools. So, Vern or Di, then. Sigh. As for the rest of the 'colleagues', I imagine most Labour ministers must be drunk or on drugs by now, to deaden the pain and stop the shaking. Yes... on reflection, one can see why it had to be Sir Humphrey.