I don't recall…

If like me - and you're all like me, aren't you? - you'll have been stunned by the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease amongst those running the country or producing newspapers. Tony Blair, David Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Dacre, the Murdochs - clearly they spent the early 90s eating British Beef and their brains have the consistency of Swiss cheese.

But how forgetful are they really? Well, one hardworking chap has done the analysis:

Being a politician        2.48% average    8x worse than the average person 

Being Prime Minister   3.77% average    12x worse than the average person 

Being involved in the Jeremy Hunt affair 5.94%  nearly 20x worse than the average man on the street 

Being a senior Murdoch Employee  5.77% 19x worse 

Being on the Government side in that deal 6.74% worse

Obviously I'm not an epidemiologist, but this looks statistically significant to me. Clearly being in the Establishment is bad for your health. And for the public sphere:

So government ministers, and their civil servants and special advisors involved in the Hunt affair have memories that are over 22x worse than  the average person. One government witness on their own had 58 memory failures, as many failures of memory as the total in the whole of the of the first module. or a rate of one memory failure every fifteen questions. 

Who has the worst memory? From this graph (click to enlarge), it's Jeremy Hunt's advisor Adam Smith, followed by Andy Coulson, with James Murdoch and David Cameron rather suspiciously close together. As the author points out, it's rather worrying for various other people that Rampaging Rebekah Brooks appears not to be relying on the Ernest Saunders defence - she'll be spilling the beans, we hope.

 More fine analysis here. Which brings us to the Readers' Poll: are our leaders liars or seriously mentally ill? Answers on a postcard…