Paper Monitor
11:38 UK time, Tuesday, 13 October 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
When taken last year, it was just another photo of an MP at a youth centre. And would never have made the front pages. Today, however, is another day. And that file pic from the archives is the BIG picture on page one of the Daily Telegraph - Jacqui Smith laughing under the word "theft", which is on a mural at said youth centre.
Paper Monitor imagines that an eagle-eyed picture editor has had this snap stored on their favourites for just such an occasion as the former home secretary's public apology for claiming her sister's house as her main abode. "But no need for Smith to repay £100,000 in incorrect claims," thunders the Telegraph's headline.
Meanwhile, talking of headlines, the Daily Mail has a goodie of a headline for its : "Where did I leave that coathanger?" (Can't quite believe shoulder pads are back? Check out from the Magazine).
Returning to expenses, the Times sketch writer the goings-on Westminster Cathedral, as the faithful queued to file past the bones of St Therese of Lisieux, and at Westminster, as MPs queued at their pigeonholes for the letters giving the verdict on their claims.
"The first queue waited to be healed, the second to find out if they were heels, or worse. Never have two queues seemed so mutually exclusive."
It's a bit of a tenuous link between the two groups, but Paper Monitor does so like Treneman's turn of phrase. Here she is on Jacqui Smith's less than apologetic apology to the House of Commons:
"[A] little speech that was as bereft of true regret and as miserly as someone who claims for an 88p bathplug knows how to be."
Yeow.
Amid the blizzard of revelations of other MPs' claims for duck houses, moats and feminine hygiene products (a claim submitted by a male politician), one had clean forgotten about the bathplug.
And finally, the Guardian has an article about nothing. Well, an article about how its been .
"Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented - for the first time in memory - from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret."
All of which serves to heighten interest in whatever the question, the answer, the asker, and the legal obstacles, might be. There's nothing like a good mystery...
The 
