today

Home Secretary John Reid has revealed his mother may have cleaned a house for Tony Blair's grandparents. At the time, the hard-up Reids were living in a council house in the nearby coal mining village of Cardowan. Mary's husband Tommy was a postman and she cleaned the houses of wealthier families.

Cargo containers imported from China are said to be turned into temporary jails to ease the British prisons overcrowding crisis, reports say. This could be so the illegal immigrants - and others - can be shipped back they way they came in.

Reid announced his plans to clean up the Home Office only three weeks ago and has already lost the battle to put the police and security services together into a new “antiterrorism” department.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, is reported to have threatened to resign if the Foreign Office did not keep control of the security services.

A lot of high-level opposition is yet another blow to John Reid’s efforts to create both a ministry of justice and a new terrorism department with himself as “security supremo” in charge of police, security services and terrorism. By now anyone can see that the Tories had fallen for a lot of "Yes, Minister" pranks and the Home Offfice is a mess as Reid said in the first place. But now the civil servant ploy merchants are making sure it is not put right, and at every step more jobs seem to be demanded.

IMO: Well Reid is not doing much of a job of cleaning up the Home Office so far but he certainly seems to "go postal" a lot.

["go postal" is a US term referring to indulging in on-the-job mindless anger and often extreme violence to the point of massive multiple murder - see for example wikipedia. ]