Asking for it

My parliamentary MP, Nigel Griffiths, is a smart dapper man with a neat side parting. Here is Nigel.



Mostly he is busy being nice, as his nice website explains.

Nigel Griffiths is one of the most experienced and active Members of Parliament. He is the Minister at the Department of Trade and Industry responsible for Construction, Enterprise and Small Business as well as for Export Controls and non-proliferation of weapons. Previously he was the Government's Consumer Minister and the Competition Minister responsible for the new Competition Commission.

When he is not busy being nice, he gets thoughtful about things like parking charges for OAPs at the local hospital. These are bad.



Sometimes bad things get him slightly angry.



But then he meets the Dalai Lama again, calms down and is nice again.



In his hip Cool Britannia moments, he chills out with Damon Albarn of Blur.



Nigel says



and that he's

Working For You

but it is not bloody true. Nigel has a sterling record of slavish NuLab voting behaviour. In the period 1997-2001 he attained a perfect 100% obedience score in his 885 votes. Since 2001 he became slightly naughty and rebelled on 6 (0.9%) of his 668 votes, but nowhere where it counted.

Nigel supported Blair in the run-up to invasion in 2003. More recently, he's faithfully obeyed his pager-prompted voting policy and remained on-message on issues of ID cards, variable tuition fees in higher education and the appalling Prevention of Terrorism Bill. What's more, he voted with the government for Foundation/PFI hospitals- the system responsible for his OAP constituent's parking charges.

I know a lot about Nigel's looks, because the shop-front windows of his corner-site constituency office were recently 'wrapped' with one-way film featuring a bloated 6-ft diameter blown-up image of his chubby-cheeked,smiling face. How long this window can last unbricked is debatable, since it's pure asking for it.