MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Now it’s time for you to face the music, Ms Smith

Why can’t you find a Home Secretary when you need one?

Jacqui Smith surely ought to be answering all the questions about her department’s serial habit of losing important confidential information.

She is not unwell or out of touch on an adventure holiday. She is in her Redditch constituency. And she was available for interviews earlier last week.

But for some reason her deputy, Tony McNulty, was shoved in front of the microphones of Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, to make the best he could of the latest lost data fiasco.

Mr McNulty is a smooth and accomplished fielder of difficult questions, and the Government makes much use of him as a plausible and confident defender.

However, he is not the Home Secretary. In the absence of Parliament, the Today programme is the toughest forum in which Ministers can be questioned about their failings.

It was her job to be there. The BBC would doubtless have been happy to arrange a radio car in her front drive if she had wished to appear. But she did not.

It simply will not do to say that Mr McNulty was closer to a BBC studio. The person in charge should be the one who feels the heat.

Security is just a ritual

Many of us have begun to suspect that the wearisome ordeal of airport security is no more than a ritual, designed to persuade us that something is being done to prevent future terrorist acts.

The experiences of MP Gisela Stuart suggest that we are right to be cynical.

Ms Stuart, a former Minister and a serious and responsible person, was dismayed when she found that she had inadvertently taken a 3in knife aboard a plane and not been detected.

In an era when nail files and hand cream are ruthlessly confiscated from humiliated travellers by stony-faced ‘security’ operatives, this was surely an alarming lapse.

She alerted BAA as soon as she realised what had happened. Yet it was many days before the troubled company responded properly to her.

Even now, their reaction seems feeble and complacent. They appear to regard their main activity as running shopping malls, with the airport business a secondary concern.

In return for the almost endless patience and tolerance of innocent passengers treated as suspects, BAA should at least ensure that they are efficiently performing the most basic security checks of all.

Get him out of here

There is plainly no longer any such thing as disgrace. Once, a man such as John Prescott would have quietly stolen away from public life, shamed by his squalid extra-marital affair and embarrassed by revelations of personal greed and indolence.

But nowadays notoriety serves to propel celebrities of the worst kind into broadcasting careers.

Mr Prescott has been hired, ridiculously, to present a ‘documentary series’ on the British class system for the supposedly upmarket BBC2. He has ‘acted’ in a BBC radio play.

Now he is also to feature in a Five programme on driving, strapped into a high-performance Jaguar.

How long before the one-time Deputy Premier is merrily chomping creepy-crawlies in a snake-pit in Australia?