ONE of the great curiosities of the late 20th century was the concept of 'dress down Fridays' which spread so rapidly across the Atlantic that it became almost compulsory to show up on the last day of the working week in gardening gear.

Never mind that if a bloke dresses like a slob he's likely to behave like one, and if a middle aged woman giggles her way into work attired like a pre-pubescent school girl, well, you get my point.

So it was no surprise that the Speaker's Advisory Council on Public Engagement has spent 18 months deciding how to modernise the Commons and "win back public support" after the expenses scandal and, as well as recommending the sham matiness of MPs calling each other by their first names in debates, a highlight of its 16-page report is "dress down Fridays".

Not that many of them would be seen dead near Westminster on Fridays, but just imagine the response from a class of person incapable of paying their own bus fares to work?

Can't you see those expenses claims now?

Personalised Mr Men T-shirts here, silky replica football shirts there, jeans costing twice the price of one of my suits, and a replacement pair of trainers every time the bulb blows in the flashing red lights on the sole. Don't Bercow's berks know that handing custom-made suits covered in arrows to scores of Parliamentary bed blockers would have been a much cheaper way of regaining our support?

What difference between the fraudulent conduct of jailed Eric Illsley and 'stand in the corner' David Laws, except for the latter's better class of chum?

Instead of worrying about some luvvie's mobile phone trivia, or launching a new inquiry every time the Prime Minister spots a cheap headline, Inspector Plod should do some public engagement of his own; starting from the front benches and working back.

TYPING 'Tony Blair lied' into Google on Monday night produced 6,170,000 results in 23 seconds; albeit it displayed only 78 pages of them, with an apology that the other 6,169,320 entries were very similar.

Those numbers were undoubtedly inflated over recent days, amid fresh reports of lying to Lord Chilcot and new mysteries surrounding the death of poor Dr David Kelly in that Oxfordshire field.

So when Osama bin Laden got whacked it was intriguing to hear straight guy Blair say: "The Americans have given their account and I'm sure it is accurate." But hey, was that the first, second or third account?