Very occasionally, one of those popularly circulated round-robins emails escapes the deleted folder and catches the eye. The current talk of Britain’s water-coolers is of an organisation with fewer than 650 employees of which, says the apparent spoof: “29 have been accused of spouse abuse, 7 have been arrested for fraud, 9 have been accused of writing bad cheques, 17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses, 3 have done time for assault, 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit, 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges, 8 have been arrested for shoplifting, 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits, 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year.” Perhaps inevitably, the punch-line is that this “company” is the poor old House of Commons. Though the Prospect team found such numbers hard to believe, there is a slight plausibility to elements of the list. So we asked the Sergeant at Arms’s office. “I’m not aware that any of these statistics are accurate,” came the almost unequivocal reply.
