Published: Thursday, 23rd April, 2009 7:00am

We'll be optimistic when you give us a reason to be

by Maurice O'Brien

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THE smile resembled a sinister combination of alligator's pout and an open-toed sandal.

The hand-made suit cost several months of an average British salary, not a hair was displaced, and all was tickety boo and hunky dory with the world of Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham.

And why wouldn't it be? When he did whatever deal brought him scurrying back from Brussels, ostensibly to save Brown's skin, he didn't exactly arrive empty-handed.

There was £234,000 from the EU to help the poor lamb re-settle in his primitive motherland where, as we know from his murky past, he already owns a luxury home or two, Europension rights worth £31,000-a-year and an annual £78,000 top-up to ease the pain of getting by on his paltry Business Secretary's salary of £104,386.

To top it all, of his last four proper jobs, he was sacked from two in disgrace and the others he acquired as a reward for favours done or anticipated.

But Lord Mandy was at his most sanctimonious during the Cabinet's pointless away day to Scotland last week, ignoring the trivia of unemployment rising at record levels of 140,000 monthly, and manufacturing output dipping at equally eye-watering rates.

"Frankly it's about time people stopped being so damned pessimistic," he weaseled, to applause from a hand-picked audience of gullible sycophants.

Well, excuse us suckers with zero-rate annual pay rises, ropey job security and ever-shrivelling savings. Pray tell, what on earth have we got to be so damned optimistic about?

And if those Mandelson words carried a hint of 'let them eat cake' then surely that's also the clicking sound of revolutionary knitting needles coming from the guillotine's shadow.

- HIS LORDSHIP was promptly driven away in an electric Mini, having launched the Government's latest sleight of hand bundle of measures for low carbon cars which are nothing less than another green con trick.

Using £250 million of our taxes to provide a five grand subsidy for each of us to buy an electric car might seem like a jolly wheeze, but who will they mug to replace the fuel tax and VAT lost on petrol and diesel?

And just where is that electricity coming from? A bunch of windmills won't do it and they're still plucking up courage to go nuclear, so all those electric cars will effectively be pumping out more fossil fuel CO2 per mile than their petrol counterparts.

- TALKING of smear today gone tomorrow, did you read THE apology?

"I take full responsibility for what happens, and that's why the person who was responsible went immediately," burbled Old Prudence.

Surely both halves of that sentence can't be right. Can they?