It says something about the efficacy of the Mother of All Parliaments that its roof developed a leak today, with cold water pouring onto the heads of the people’s representatives.
The nation will therefore be deprived of another instalment in the on-going saga of ineptitude, idiocy and betrayal, which can’t be qualified as treason only due to the possible absence of mens rea.
Although plumbing isn’t one of the MPs’ direct responsibilities, the mishap certainly has plenty of symbolic value. And not only that: the Commons had to be suspended, meaning there won’t be any Brexit debate on Monday.
Whatever entertainment is thereby lost is compensated for by another torrent – that of jokes already flooding the social media. Many of them revolve around the possibility that it wasn’t just burst water pipes that rained on the Commons parade.
The Commons authorities have taken such jokes seriously enough to issue a denial. “We would like to clarify that this was not a sewage leak,” they said.
That brings to mind another story, one that happened in a faraway land almost a century ago.
When Lenin died, his comrades decided to mummify him like an Egyptian pharaoh and then use the sacred relics to attract worshippers from across the world. The mummy is still there in Red Square, although the once mighty stream of pilgrims has diminished to a trickle.
Yet the granite ziggurat housing the neo-pagan idol took a while to build. For the first eight months after Lenin’s death his mausoleum was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected by the architect Alexey Shchusev, who immediately began to design the now-familiar eyesore.
However, while the construction work was underway, the builders accidentally punctured a sewage pipe, flooding the sarcophagus with its malodorous contents. Many observers detected the hand of God in the mishap, and jokes were flying about then, just as they are now.
Patriarch Nikon, who at the time was held under house arrest, led the way. His Holiness commented on the accident with the wit not commonly exhibited by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. “The incense,” he quipped, “fits the relics.”
One can’t second-guess God, but perhaps he ought to have made his feelings known as clearly now as he did then.