Lord Patel has all the News - before it's fit to print - and headless chickens talk Turkey

There were probably some puzzled brows when readers on the 2nd February saw the headline " Chicken - natural goodness" and read the first paragraph from Lord Patel about the apparently unexciting subject of EU food and hygeine regulations and not a subject that forms part of the regular diet of scurrilous gossip and scatalogical comment.

" .....New EU hygiene regulations now require all food businesses to implement a documented safety management system based on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles." Wow, that sounds great !

"ACCP is a tool to assess hazards and establish control systems that focus on prevention rather than relying mainly on end-product testing. It is an internationally accepted systematic method of identifying specific hazards in plants and measures for their control to ensure the safety of food." Wow again !

Lord Patel went on to explain how the international firm of Lubeck, based Nordischer Maschinenbau Rud.Baader GmbH & Co. KG and their subsidiary Baader-Johnson, of Kansas City had at the International Poultry Expo in Atlanta last month Baader-Johnson introduced the BAADER 886 InspeXtor , which is an inline hybrid x-ray and colour vision system that gives processors a second pair of eyes allowing early defect detection.

....Production data can be viewed real-time on either the machine LCD screen or remotely via our Management Information System.

Then on the 4th of February the news suddenly broke that H5N1 Bird Flu virus was confirmed in the Bernard Matthews turkey farms in Suffolk.

Readers will have been treated to pictures of a Bernard Matthews turkey processing plant in Hungary - play spot the operators. Hardly an operator in sight , and they looked like surgeons tending massive stainless steel machines. HAACP systems and bioHazard systems prevent the spread of disease ? Evidently they don't.

Now are Jeremy Paxman , Jim Naughtie, (Guido Fawkes even) asking about the new Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems and wrestling with the concepts of "hybrid x-ray and colour vision system that gives processors a second pair of eyes allowing early defect detection ".... removing even more humans even further from the meat and it's inspection ?

Instead of worrying about whether some nosy Ministry box ticker discovered a scrap of label in a waste bin, it is perhaps time someone started asking serious questions about how these plants operate...although watching Milliband squirming about like a headless chicken (see pic of the oroginal Headless Chicken - his name was "Dinner") does have a high entertainment quotient.

.... and don't think it was a pure coincidence that readers here were warned (however obliquely) about trouble brewing.

Now run along and read "Copping a plea - conspiracies fall apart both sides of the Atlantic " from January 29th and discover how Tony Blair met Plod on his way to Davos with his solicitor in R ed Lion Square, W1 to chat over the Earl Grey about Cash for Coronets ... days before the world even learnt of the event ... which No 10 spinners subsequently say took place at Downing Street. The Dear Leader meets Plod at Downing Street, and nobody knows about it ? As if.

Just blowing our trumpet here at Patel Towers - and also to announce we have also taken on the well regarded, nay famous, Tony Fabuloso who will be our Climate Change guru.