What is it with politicians and their sudden obsession with clarity? And not just clarity, their obsession with volubly stating their clarity at every given opportunity?
On BBC Breakfast this morning, Ed Balls MP, or Big Ed Small Balls, to give him his birthname, said "let's be clear" no fewer than six times in a five-minute interview.
What's truly startling is the disparity between Balls' oft-stated intention and the truth of the matter. Far from instigating New Labour's glasnost, Balls sidesteps and obfuscates like a dainty schoolboy winger about to get his head knocked off by the lock forward whose girlfriend he pinched.
He began by criticising Michael Gove's policy on academies by, let's be clear, rattling off dubious statistics about New Labour's successes in education when, let's be clear, our students have fallen from fourth to seventeenth in the
