It's always particularly delicious when some politician who should have been thrown out of office a hundred times for all the wrong they have done is finally run to ground for doing something right. One of the classic examples was the Affair of Edwina's Eggs, in which Edwina Curry, one of the more disastrous cabinet ministers of recent times was hounded from office for telling the truth.
Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen to the entire House of Lords!
That place has been a bastion of conservatism with a big and small "C", cronyism, corruption and the worst kind of Toryism for over 300 years. There hasn't been one day since 1660 when the cause of the people of this country would not have been served by closing it down instantly and booting all the fox-hunters back to their shires.
Finally, they've done something right. They've come down, just once, on the side of democracy and freedom and they are going to be abolished for it.
For reasons best known to themselves - most likely because they were thinking about internal Labour party squabbles at the time and they are completly incapable of admitting that Blair or Mandelson can err - the government decided to saddle the next European Parliament elections with a closed list system - of all known forms of election the only one that is less democratic and more unfair than the "first past the post" that we use now. They got the neccessary law through the Commons easily enough even though it is an open secret that the majority of Labour MPS and at least some of the cabinet despise the closed list far more than the Tories do. And the House of Lords turned it down, then they turned it down again and again and again. And maybe again after that, I lost count.
And the last thing anyone heard was the sound of Jack Straw sneaking off into the darkness of a parliamentary recess (a short one - only a week this time!) turning back to snarl "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!"
This is glorious!
If things go right then we won't have the closed list for the Euros, at least until the next time round but one, if ever. And even if we do get it the elections after next we will have a functioning Scottish Parliament, a functioning (or otherwise) Euro-currency and possibly a Labour government with a reduced majority, any of which would change everything.
And we'll have even more Labour MEPs - which is good, because despite their Bonapartist tendencies Labour are still the only party with even half an idea how to behave. And anybody would be better than the Tories. (OK the BNP wouldn't be better than the Tories. For that matter the Natural Law party wouldn't be better than the Tories. But anybody with a chance of getting elected would be, and that probably includes the Monster Raving Loony Party. Better a fool than a thief.) Anyway, I'm in the Labour Party so even when they are shits they are my kind of shits.
And with any luck the Tories will tear themselves apart selecting crypto-fascist Euro-septic-tankies as candidates and the few that do get in will do more harm than good for their pathetic rump in Westminster.
And much more important than any of those, we'll finally be rid of the ermine-clad imbeciles who have ruled us these three hundred years. Or was it nine hundred? As Jack Straw's more famous namesake heard his friend John Ball say on Blackheath, not 2 miles from here, 617 years ago: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
A win-win situation. In fact a win-win-win-win situation!