Everybody makes mistakes; its one of life's certainties like death, taxation and pretending to like Scandinavian crime dramas.
Some mistakes are bigger than others, some are further reaching than others and some are better remembered.
The ones that are best remembered are usually those by made by people of influence as they are usually carted out to prove said person is either a hypocrite or they are flip-flopping.
In that sense, politics is like writing for Doctor Who.
Doctor Who writers have to contend with a myriad of rules and ideas laid down by their predecessors and somehow plot a course through them all to create some kind of viable plot and Heaven forfend if they get something wrong, lest the internet explode with extremist Whovian bile.
One imagines the show writers have an old file with the word 'Rules' crudely inscribed on the front it, packed to bursting point with every single restriction they have to consider with each law also containing sub-sections on how to get around them. Finally, the file has an ultimate checklist - the result of years of hard graft and shrill abuse - full of hoops which every episode must leap through without touching the sides before storyboarding let alone filming can begin.
In a similar way, politicians have to contend with often unworkable parameters set down by their forebears (or indeed, their own younger, immature, incorrect selves) and when they inevitably have to go back on them, Twitter users find every modicum of hypocrisy in the form of Twitpics and YouTube videos while old fusty people with too many surnames write to the Daily Telegraph complaining about them selling their souls for pragmatism.
Unlike Doctor Who writers, politicians and their aides lurch day-to-day, finding ways to get out of previous policy pledges and they inevitably crash and burn but survive more often - pretty much every day in fact.
Yes, not answering in the 50th anniversary episode how the Doctor and Clara are still alive when they jumped into the Doctor's time stream, scattering themselves across time and space, at the end of the last series is a tiny bit different to a policy of Nelson Mandela being a terrorist - which is less of a mistake and more of a monumental fuck up of gargantuan proportions - but that is another similarity between TV and politics.
You can be completely under-qualified to comment on it but the magic of the internet means you can.
