John Reid – a generic apology

I, John Reid, would like to apologise for (insert details of latest Home Office cockup here).

I accept full responsibility for blaming the BASTARDS in my department who are determined to make me look stupid. Also the judges, who keep forgetting that the Home Office now halves any sentence they impose - SO DOUBLE IT, DUMBNUTS - it isn't rocket science, for fuck's sake. Honestly, the cretins they give me to work with.

If I have given any facts to Parliament recently, I would like to apologise for their almost inevitable inaccuracy. This applies particularly to anything I might have said regarding asylum-seeking criminals. Any errors are entirely the work of my officials, who are in fact BASTARDS, and nothing to do with me.

(Incidentally, when I was told about the murderer, the rapist and the paedophile I assumed it was the beginning of a joke rather than an account of the latest foreign criminals to be accidentally freed, and therefore didn’t pay attention. Sorry. If you or your children have been murdered or raped by foreign criminals we have inadvertently released, I’d like to make a particularly sincere apology, and encourage you to focus your anger on the real villains of the piece : civil servants. BASTARDS, the lot of them). If you or your children have been raped or murdered by British criminals we've released, then no apology is necessary, as this is Government policy. Get over it.

Apology over. If you have been inaccurately branded a criminal by my department’s admirably imaginative IT system then naturally I make no apology. Branding innocent people as criminals is a price we should be happy to pay for the zero crime levels we enjoy in the UK. (At least, that's what the latest figures are showing . . . I'm almost certain it's accurate)

So if you are one of the 1,500(?) 2,000 (?) innocent people who have been labelled unfairly as criminals, then I would suggest you go out and do something naughty. There's f*** all chance of us sorting out this IT system, so you may as well enjoy yourselves as you've now joined the ranks of the unemployable.