They say a week is a long time in politics - even the parochial kind - and also in the financial sector. Just ask the Reverend Paul Flowers.

Allegations of crack cocaine use, orgies, pornography ...

Flowers appears to have gone from being a jolly-faced middle-aged Methodist minister to West Yorkshire's answer to Scarface in the space of seven days.

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "let me introduce you to my little friend."

Perhaps the most damning claim to emerge is that he was a banker. Some things are just unforgivable.

Yes, a week is indeed a lengthy spell in the public sphere but apparently half a century doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

Exactly 50 years ago yesterday a certain US president decorated Dealey Plaza with the insides of his toothsome head with the assistance, depending on whom you believe, of Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA, the mafia or some combination of the three.

The official, ahem, investigation into the assassination was conducted of course by the Warren commission which, surprise surprise, came to the earth-shattering conclusion that Oswald had acted as a lone gunman.

Conspiracies have raged ever since with sightings of a puff of smoke on a grassy knoll and a suspicious figure unfurling an umbrella on a cloudless day. However I'm reliably informed Michael Fish has an alibi.

The Warren commission's findings failed to tally with the eye-witness recording of a local camera enthusiast who unwittingly chronicled the murder. The Zapruder tapes, as they became eponymously known, distinctly suggest that the fatal shot came from an entirely different direction than that of the book depository occupied by Oswald.

We will probably never know for sure what happened and who was responsible as the documents relating to the period have all been suppressed or "disappeared."

It's funny how that keeps happening isn't it?

Neither Oswald nor Kennedy are likely to be telling anyone.

The files will never be opened as they would confirm what many of us have known for a long time, that the Camelot of the Kennedy White House was a Potemkin village erected to hide the nefarious behaviour of its inhabitants and JFK's links with the mafia.

And, despite Uncle Sam's well-known proclivity for rooting around in everyone else's dirty laundry its own must maintain the appearance of being spotless.

At least superficially and for internal consumption. They've amply shown that they couldn't care less what anyone else thinks.

Fast-forward five decades and nothing much has changed.

This week it has been suggested that the US has pressured the British government to block the publication of the Chilcot report into the Iraq war.

Personally I don't think much pressure was required. I think the Brits and in particular a certain Anthony Lynton Blair may also have a vested interest in that report being hushed up.

Like Kennedy, Blair was seen as a new dawn by the gullible and like Boston's finest he was all style over substance. They were both young and photogenic when they came to office, at least compared with what had come before, which admittedly wasn't saying much.

Kennedy almost destroyed the planet in a suicidal game of brinkmanship and mutually assured destruction. Blair was well on his way to doing the same due to a combination of toadyism and monstrous egotism.

Kennedy launched an illegal and disastrous assault on Cuba and Blair, well, you get the picture.

In fact El Presidente Blair probably sees himself as a Kennedy-style figure.

But the fact is that Kennedy is only revered in the way he continues to be precisely because he was assassinated before all the dirt came out, like a rock star who dies young before putting out the embarrassing showtunes covers album.

Blair still crops up every few months like a perma-tanned bad penny.

So desperate for the limelight is he that he doesn't seem to realise or care that everytime his mug appears on camera and he's not in the dock at the Hague it just reminds everyone of why they despise him so much.

Still, with all these screenings of the Zapruder film doing the rounds at the moment Ed Miliband could learn a thing or two. Back and to the left ... back and to the left ...