The idiom ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ describes an easy job – you just can’t miss.

Mythbusters helpfully experiment with different sorts of guns and containers to show what works best. (Advisory: best not to watch if you are a sensitive fish):

But that is a hard task indeed compared to blasting a minnow in a thimble – with a bazooka.

Which is what Matthew Norman does to Labour’s Douglas Alexander in today’s Independent:

"Are you proud," Paxo asked Wee Dougie, "when you see pictures of Mr Blair embracing Gaddafi?"

Rather than say something cunningly nuanced, such as "No", the pipsqueak’s pipsqueak trotted out some over-rehearsed imbecility about it being "the right decision" to bring Libya back into the international fold before it developed a nuclear arsenal.

This argument has a stale, musty whiff. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the idea of foreign policy being driven by paranoid fantasy about oil-rich tyrants threatening planetary survival with unsubstantiated WMD programmes lost its Lenor freshness a while ago.

You also, continued Paxo, defend the decision "to allow export of crowd-control equipment worth £200m, which we see being used against his own people.

"Well," said Wee Dougie, "I haven’t seen the individual licence applications…"

It was here that a follow-up was posed, very deliberately, though not for once by Paxo. "Now Douglas, dear," asked the million or so souls watching at home, "WHERE. IS. YOUR. CARER?"

How, you wondered in stupefaction, could someone so infirm be let out without a minder? I’m not sure this is such a cracking idea, but the Eds Miliband and Balls are currently seeking to impose on their colleagues the very control freakery which Mr Blair and Alastair Campbell pioneered in 1997. To this dubious end, every word of any article or broadcast interview must now be sanctioned by high command.

Yet they allow on to the telly a man whose response, on observing civilians being assaulted with tear-gas sold to Libya by the government in which he served, was not an expression of human feeling, much less the mea culpa suggested by collective responsibility.

Instead, Mr Alexander’s reflex reaction was that jobsworthian classic: nothing to do with me, guv, I never saw the paperwork.

Read the whole thing. Always good to see a writer so enjoying his work.