Hundreds of irate punters jammed the BBC’s switchboards this week to vent their ire at the fact that a flagship programme had been destroyed because the dialogue was rendered completely incomprehensible and the central figures appeared to be mumbling absolute gibberish.

Well that’s the parliamentary channel for you…

I jest, of course. There’s no way hundreds of people watch the parliamentary channel.

The programme in question was a long anticipated historical drama from the esteemed pen of Daphne Du Maurier.

The plot of Jamaica Inn focuses on a group of murderous wreckers who lure innocents onto the rocks, slaughter them and pilfer their goods.

So it is actually quite like Parliament after all. Except that by comparison “wrecking” is an honest profession.

This week also marked the 450th anniversary of the birth of another great writer, the Bard of Stratford, William Shakespeare.

As is befitting, our elected representatives threw themselves into the festivities with gusto.

George Osborne opted for his usual portrayal of Shylock of course. Boris Johnson reprised his well-worn Falstaff yet again and David Cameron showed us his extraordinary reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with him as Bottom in which he shunned the traditional donkey’s head in favour of appearing as a horse’s arse.

Nick Clegg and Vince Cable weren’t going to be left out and fulsomely invoked the spirit, if not the humour, of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two hapless bumblers being sent unwittingly to their demise.

Clegg actually came out with something sensible on Thursday, but as with the afore-mentioned buffoon he so closely resembles, one suspects it was for all the wrong reasons.

The Lib Dem called for a separation of church and state, which it is hard to disagree with, especially as it’s bound to put the Queen’s nose out of joint. However, does anyone else think the timing of the comment was somewhat suspicious…?

Of course, being Clegg, he fudged it, but was it not convenient that his remarks came just after Cameron came over all evangelical and at the same time that pretty much every religious group you can think of is giving the coalition an enthusiastically ecumenical kicking over soaring poverty levels and foodbanks?

Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Tony Blair popped up again to put on a remarkable turn as that most dastardly of varlets, Iago. To be honest, it was always going to be a polished performance — he’s been practising for long enough.

Blair is the perfect Iago, mendacious, two-faced, backstabbing, hypocritical and arrogant. Just ask Gordon Brown.

This week he continued to wage his one-man war against extremism in terms that even caused this cynical scribe to raise an eyebrow.

Speaking on St George’s Day, he urged a deal with Bashar al-Assad in Syria and further Nato involvement in Libya as part of the “titanic” struggle against radical Islam.

The West had to focus its efforts on tackling religious extremism, he claimed, insisting it lay behind most of world’s most intractable problems.

So, not imperialism then?

Failure to shake off the legacy of Iraq and “take sides” with moderates in the Middle East and beyond could mean the 21st century is dominated by conflict rather than peaceful co-operation, he warned.

That would be “moderates” such as the military dictatorship in Egypt, presumably.

Blair described a global crisis with its roots in “a radicalised and politicised view of Islam, an ideology that distorts and warps Islam’s true message.”

“The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world,” he said.

Interestingly, unlike Cameron the same day, he did not attempt to use the spirit of St George to further his claims, but then the eponymous saint was probably Palestinian, which could have been awkward as we all know he couldn’t give a toss about them.

His comments, which were met with fury by many and branded “simple-minded” by at least one commentator, happened to coincide with the publication of a report by Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think tank.

Now, as its name implies, Rusi is not exactly a lefty peacenik organisation, but even it stated that “there is no longer any serious disagreement” that Britain’s role in Iraq had radicalised young British Muslims.

“Far from reducing international terrorism … the 2003 invasion had the effect of promoting it.”

Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, admittedly. Many of us have been saying this for years, yet it was still significant if only from whence it came. It also had a few choice things to say about Bosnia, Afghanistan and Libya.

With Cameron and his coalition cronies doing their level best to destroy this country — and a few others besides — and Blair continuing to enthusiastically cheerlead for mutually assured armageddon the only sensible option is to defer to the words of the Bard himself. 

“A plague on both your houses.”