It has been the dog's frolics down at DRIP this week, as even the gormless readership of this column might imagine. Naturally, as a Minister of Her Majesty's Government I was among the very few insiders to know about the cut in VAT - in fact Darling Alistair got on the blower just as soon as he'd spent the entire weekend blabbing on to every vile scribbler between Whitehall and Whopping.

And thus it falls to the noble staff of this ministry to prepare the ground for the seismic shift in spending patterns that Ali D's boundless largesse will entail. Imagine, folks, the economic defibrillator administered to the UK economy by slashing a penny off the price of a Curly Wurly. Watch out, Jack Barclay, the Bentleys are about to fly off the forecourt!

Quite reasonably, no-one expects the collective repository of salmonella that is the nation's c-stores or the cathedrals of avarice that are the big four to actually pass on Santa Alistair's bonanza, so the cohorts of DRIP have been ordered out to police implementation . That means the Pumster, Mrs Rolfe the tea lady, Danaher the DRIP driver and Laetitia, the latest PA poppet from civil service central casting, have fanned out across the country to cover off a mere 40,000 retail outlets.

Never slow to seize to sniff out a PR opportunity for some Extra Special Merde de Taureau, the retail press offices were soon on the blower, offering their own Finest 'help'. And so top Supermarket Spinmeisters Church, Burch and Lurch are also on the case, pledging to monitor prices with all the credibility of an internal Government probe. Boy, am I looking forward to the wall-to-wall drivel that will seep from the newspapers .

Talking of which, Laetitia has been looking a lot more appealing this week than our Darling Alistair. So, while the nation waits to see if his 2.5% works, it won't be anything like as long before Laetitia finds out where the term 'intern' originated. Laetitia! Fan out!