The bank accounts of my friend and colleague P. J. Mara – even if details of one, as he claimed, had been omitted by oversight – showed no irregular payments of any kind and he was hard done by. I recall an interim statement from a senior person in opposition a few years ago to the effect that "Heads in baskets, that is what politics are all about". I fundamentally disagree with that assertion, but I remember, approximately 15 years ago, giving my children a boardgame called "Scandal". The principal characters one played were Ronald Reagan, the Pope, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, etc., and the object was to uncover a scandal that would knock out one's opponent. One cannot entirely overlook the fact that one of the motives, perhaps, in establishing tribunals has been the hope of achieving that type of knock out. Indeed, one can argue that the beef tribunal did, in one case directly and in another case indirectly contribute to the fall of Governments. However, it is a pity to see any party investing its hopes in that type of deus ex machina rather than in its own political platform and programme.