All aboard... for a Titanic Tory crash

It was difficult to know which was the most farcical proclamation this week, they came so thick and fast - particularly thick.

We were asked to believe in more dubious revisionism and scarcely credible blather than a potential employer reading Jeffrey Archer's CV.

Former El Presidente Tony Blair came out and claimed he had no recollection of any involvement by him or his government in rendition and torture, which is a bit like Thatcher vaguely recalled a tiff with Argentina but it was all a lot of fuss about nothing - although that's actually more likely these days.

As conveniently selective amnesia goes, Blair's up there with Ernest Saunders.

Then, to show when it comes to terminological inexactitude you can't beat a Tory, there was David Cameron strutting around Asia with his coterie of arms dealers and eulogising his hosts the Indonesian government as being a beacon of light for democracy.

Now most people could be forgiven for thinking that the only things resembling beacons Indonesia has ever had anything to do with are the burning homes of the victims of their brutal repression in West Papua, East Timor and Aceh province and the afterburners of Hawk fighter jets.

But not Cameron, who on Thursday said: "What Indonesia is showing is that it is possible to develop a democracy and a modern economy that neither compromises people's security nor their ability to practice their religion."

Uhuh. Not at all like those pesky Muslim countries who don't do what we tell them after we've had the decency to sell them all those fun weapons at massively inflated prices.

But as with most mendacious whoppers, the worst of the week was all about cold hard cash with millionaire George Osborne claiming to be shocked at how little tax his friends - er, I mean wealthy individuals - paid.

On a sliding scale of one to 10 on the chart of flat-out lies this, in the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, goes right up to 11.

It was pointed out that if the PM and Chancellor of the Exchequer didn't know what they professed not to they were criminally cretinous idiots unfit for the job.

On a slightly different but not unrelated theme, next week will see the commemoration of one of the worst civilian disasters in recent British history - no, not the Tories taking power. That's next month.

April 15 will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic with the deaths of over a thousand people - and people are celebrating it!

In many ways the disaster can be seen as a metaphor for this country's current parlous predicament. The toffs by and large emerged unscathed while the poor sods in steerage found some bugger had had it away with the life boats.

That the name Cameron has now become synonymous with an incident famously involving an allegedly impregnable but in fact fatally flawed vessel striking an unforeseen but fairly predictable obstacle is not without irony.

Director James Cameron famously made millions by flogging a largely fictitious account of the calamitous events to a gullible public.

David Cameron, by curious coincidence...

The city of Belfast has always been inordinately and bizarrely proud of having built the doomed ship, boasting about what an amazing feat of engineering it was while conveniently ignoring that fact that if it had been that good it probably wouldn't have sunk.

Still, at least they take responsibility for it rather than accusing the previous shipwrights of leaving them with dodgy tools or blaming the iceberg for not being where it was supposed to be.

The only difference between current government policy and the ill-fated course taken by the Titanic is that the captain of the Titanic probably didn't see the iceberg but refuse to believe it existed.

He also didn't scrap all the lifeboats as not being cost-efficient.

Francis Maude went one further last week, inventing icebergs that weren't even there, then sinking the ship himself and setting fire to the life raft.

If the coalition had been in charge of the White Star Line they would probably have announced a listening exercise on whether free floating ice masses were a good thing, ignored the results and appointed Ken Clarke as nautical catastrophes tsar.