Perhaps he doesn't have a computer

We all know that Paul Uppal isn't exactly au fait with the modern world: he had a party mandated blog for about a week in the run-up to the election, and deleted the few comments he received, before getting rid of the whole thing after having an unpleasant rant about the 'race relations industry'.

Judging by the questions he's asking in Parliament, he seems to be treating government ministers as some kind of personal search engine.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education what mechanism he has put in place to (a)train and (b) monitor the performance of Ofsted inspectors.

I'd have told him to sod off and have a look at Ofsted's website. But the minister asked a highly trained and expensive civil servant to do the research. Shockingly, Ofsted trains and monitors its schools inspectors intensively. Rather unpleasantly though, it subcontracts some of these activities, which bothers me. An inspector should be highly trained (expensive) and thorough (also expensive). Introducing the profit motive encourages corner-cutting. Though I doubt Paul sees it this way. I wonder if his children go to state schools anyway.

Cheers Paul - another few quid of our cash gone to raise your profile.

That answer cost us several hundred pounds.