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GORDON BROWN likes to know what we're up to. He takes photographs of our cars as we drive to work, he has spy drones in the sky to monitor hippies and he keeps photocopies of every businessman's eyeball.
He films our trips to the shopping centre, uses massive computer resources to establish how much money we earn, has facial recognition cameras all around London and he sometimes eavesdrops on our telephone conversations. Especially if we say that "the party went down like a bomb".
But even this endless probing isn't enough because now he wants to know what's in your FRIDGE.
I'm not making this up. In the wake of the Baby P scandal, Government agents in Harrow have been told that if they look in a family's fridge they will be able to decide if a child is being abused.
All I can say is that i'm glad they didn't come round to my house this morning because all of my kids would have been handed over to Elton John immediately.
The milk was cheese, the cheese was covered in a furry green blanket and the blanket, if you looked carefully, was moving. At the back, just behind the tub of coleslaw with a "best before the Boer War" sticker was a potato which had sprouted and become what can only be described as a tree. There was also a tube full of cream I use to stop fungus growing on my face, a cocktail sausage with the constitution of granite and a sorry-looking pork chop which had oozed pus on to the sherry trifle someone made for my birthday. In April.
It wasn't all bad news, though. In amongst this seething mass of bacteria, disease and goo were 16 bottles of Tiger beer, 14 of Peroni and half a crate of Chablis.
What information can we gather from this? That I am a culinary slob? Perhaps. That I am a compulsive hoarder? For sure. That i'm a drunk? Hmmm.
But a bad parent? The fact is that my children eat fresh food and if something's left over it usually goes in the dog. And what the dog refuses goes in the chickens.
Idiotic
The fridge is for food items that no one likes - stupid sauces you bought on holiday, bits of strong cheese that make you go cross-eyed and the lettuce your wife keeps buying even though neither you, your children or your dog would ever dream of putting such an idiotic and pointless thing in their mouths. And, of course, the fridge is for beer and wine.
If I was looking for signs of child abuse, I certainly wouldn't bother ferreting about in the ice tray. I'd look for evidence of malnourishment, cigarette burns and broken bones.
But that's the world we live in today. You are accused of being a paedophile if you take a child to school and now you are accused of being an abuser if your milk's a bit off.
