Rhodes on drugs in Parliament, bad news for home buyers and crisps with added bumf

Curious, isn't it, that when every other price rise is regarded as inflation, and therefore bad, when the price of the biggest item we ever buy goes up, it's portrayed as something good?

For example, it was cheerfully reported this week that “Britain’s housing market has made its strongest start to a year since 2005”. In other words, the house you'd set your heart on is suddenly beyond your means. What's strong about that?

The new “Brexit Freedoms” Bill is promised to eliminate £1 billion of red tape for business. Good luck with that. I've just consumed a small bag of crisps. The packet carries no fewer than 281 words and figures and it took longer to read the bumf than to eat the crisps.

The most fascinating exchange during Boris Johnson's public flaying in the Commons this week was the one about drug taking in Westminster. The Labour MP Luke Pollard, referring to the culture of heavy drinking highlighted in Sue Gray's report on Partygate, asked: “Is there also a culture of excessive drug taking in Downing Street?” To which Boris Johnson answered: “Any drug taking would be excessive. Perhaps he should direct that question at the Labour front bench.”

And that was that. In the finest tradition of the mainstream media, the exchange was either downplayed, ignored or trashed, as by the Left-leaning Independent which denounced Johnson's answer as: “A preposterous and outrageous insinuation.”

So if it's preposterous and outrageous, why has Speaker Lindsay Hoyle publicly declared that “there is a drugs problem in Westminster”? And isn't it strange that when the Sunday Times secretly tested parliamentary lavatories for traces of cocaine a couple of months ago, 11 out of 12 returned positive tests? And don't you find it vaguely concerning that, while a soldier armed with no more than a rifle can be sacked for a single positive drugs test, politicians debating sending the British Army into battle may be out of their skulls on coke?

Thankfully, if all the allegations are preposterous and outrageous, no MP could possibly object to routine drugs tests, without warning, for all members of the Commons and Lords. No, I can't see it happening either.