Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said the sacking had been “an inevitable decision” after Prof Nutt’s “latest ill-judged contribution to the debate”.

Anyone who responds like this to a scientific advisor speaking out against politicians distorting the advice given deserves a good kicking (metophorically speaking).

Funny how this sounds like a slightly less tragic version of the Iraq situation.

Is Douglas Hurd the last one to think that locking people up was generally a bad idea?

What worries me is how willing they might be to ignore the body of evidence that will be presented by the millions of experts who are soon going to vote for anyone but Labour at the next election

Ah the focus group idiot. Well that explains it then. Possibly the stupidest way of making policy ever devised by man. But then again, it to is supposed to give you only the results that you wanted to hear.

It would be comedic, if it weren’t so bloody serious.

No, I’ll have to stop you there. Labour couldn’t give a monkey’s chuff for the working classes. Like most of the left – and apparently, weirdly, Lembit Opik – they are hopelessly obsessed with Thatcher, and it was the middle classes ‘wot won it’ for her.

And of course all sensible middle class people of the smug irritating greenish lefty persuasion know for a fact that drugs are bad, m’kay, and harm children.

I wonder who could have told them that ? Repeatedly.

Oh and also, they are mostly parents. Which you can’t possibly understand unless you are one, apparently, and which confers some mystical power to be right all the time even when, in fact especially when, all the actual evidence is to the contrary. It’s like a super power, only much less attractive.

I take your point about Authoritarian Super Cocks, ably demonstrated by recent occupants, but I reckon that most people who get the Ministry of Daily Mail Sensationalism post are probably ASC’s to begin with.

This is almost certainly the case for the Labour mob, authoritarian statists to a man (or woman, or whatever combination Jacqui Smith is), and probably the case for most politicians.

The HO just allows them to stop pretending otherwise.