Hold the presses. The Ministry of Justice has an official Morris Dancing troupe.

Surely the Home Office can’t be outdone by its erstwhile colleagues? Surely a hobby is just what they need to keep them busy and stop them messing so many things up!

Suggestions please: what hobby should the Home Office take up? Tiddlywinks? Cheese-rolling?

The Identity and Passport Service (the guys building the ID cards database) has a slogan:

Everyone’s unique. Let us keep it that way.

Thanks to Ideal Government I have finally realised the absurdity of this statement. Are they trying to suggest that without Identity Cards there would be an outbreak of cloning?

Liam Byrne inhabits a parallel universe, it appears, in which Identity Cards are like nineteenth century railways.

The BBC has the full story.

Here’s hoping for a modern-day Dr Beeching to close them down again as soon as possible.

Today we uncovered the worrying fact that over 100 children have been put on the DNA database before they even reached their tenth birthday.

DNA is stored until you hit 100 (whether or not you die) so those files will be stored for at least 90 years.

The rest of the data shows that, as of January, we had nearly 4.1m people’s DNA stored, so Britain retains its place at the top of the international league, with the largest database in the world.

I’m also fascinated to note that there are 46 DNA samples from people over the age of 90. Is a nonagenarian crime wave sweeping the country?

As you’ll no doubt be aware, Dr John Reid has announced that he won’t be hanging around for the inevitable Cabinet table musical chairs that will follow Gordon Brown’s leap into Number 10 - this barely over a year after Dr Reid told the Daily Mirror that he would be working “18 hours a day” to sort out the Home Office (unsurprisingly, we don’t think it’s sorted out yet).

Consequently, there’s going to be a Reid-shaped hole in the Cabinet and the troubled department will be getting another new broom. But who?

Will it be Brown’s friend and fellow Scot Alistair Darling? Will this Government’s first Home Secretary, Jack Straw, be rewarded for managing Gordon’s leadership campaign with a return to his old job? Could a strong second place in the deputy leadership contest put Hain, Benn, Blears, Harman or Johnson behind the big desk at Marsham Street? (We confess to discounting Cruddas.)

We’re big fans of democracy, so we’re leaving it up to you. (Not the appointment itself - that’s still up to Gordo.) We’ve selected ten possible replacements for Dr Reid - who do you think it’ll be?

Are the police going to get the power to stop and question people - on pain of a £5,000 fine - or not?

First there was the leak - the government was to extend powers currently only held in Northern Ireland, for the police to stop and question anyone without the crucial safeguard of reasonable suspicion.

But fortuitously, there’s a Labour deputy leadership election going on and the candidates are trying to out-do each other on sounding, at turns, like a socialist and like a liberal.

So Peter Hain pops up to defend our liberty (and his campaign) and says it’s a bad idea. So did Nick Clegg, by the way, and he’s not even in the running.

Someone at the Home Office then briefed the Guardian that they had “dropped” the plans.

But in his statement to the Commons John Reid said

Consideration [of stop and question] is at a very early stage and is currently subject to a process of internal government consultation and we will report the outcome of that in due course.

Is that “dropped”? Or is that “put on the back burner until we need to sound tough on terror again”?

Incidentally, what’s especially interesting about Hain’s intervention is that the idea of extending stop and question seems to have come from the Northern Ireland office. They are getting rid of its counter-terror laws as part of the devolution deal, but wanted to keep stop and question and thought it would be less controversial if it were a UK-wide power. But just who is the Northern Ireland Secretary…?