IT has been a funny week at Westminster, almost as if the dreaded "silly season" - no news and lots of nonsense - has started early. MPs, Ministers and officials should have been run off their feet. The summer recess is creeping ever closer and the Government needs to knock the country into shape before it puts its feet up for three months.

Yet the only activity has been a Minister sticking her foot in her mouth, Prime Minister's Questions without the main man and a quite wonderfully useless Early Day Motion.

Let's start with the Minister - straight-(or should that be fast)talking Education Secretary Estelle Morris.

It is only 12 months since communications chief Alastair Campbell took a roasting for describing comprehensive schools as "bog standard".

But Ms Morris, in a speech on education reform on Monday, had clearly not learnt from his mistake. There were, she announced, some schools she would "not touch with a bargepole".

It has hard to to imagine what motivated such a statement. Was she demonstrating the new, "spin-free" Government is not bothered who it upsets in pursuit of a better Britain.

Or was she painfully aware that for the rest of the week Ministers would have very little else to say?

Either way, it upset Harrogate MP Phil Willis and countless head teachers across they country. Exactly which schools did she have in mind, they wondered?

Mr Willis, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, fumed: "The outstanding success of the comprehensive movement should be celebrated, not condemned."

Tuesday was desperate, with arguably the most significant domestic announcement of the day reading: "Construction Minister, Brian Wilson, welcomed the recent opening of a new glass toughening plant in Norwich."

Normally, Wednesday would have offered some hope. Prime Minister's Questions is the highlight of any week.

But, alas, Tony Blair was at the G8 Summit in Canada - it is often said Government stops the minute he boards a plane - and his Deputy, John Prescott, was at a "summit about a summit" in Brazil.

This left the honours to Mr Cook, Leader of the Commons and - as Parliamentary convention dictates - his Tory counterpart, Eric Forth.

Both are good value for money and Mr Forth's spectacularly ghastly ties are always worth seeing. But they have their own sparring session at Business Questions every Thursday and you couldn't help but feel slightly cheated as they traded blows for the umpteenth time this year.

The next day they did it all over again - exceept for 50 minutes rather than 30 at PMQs. And today the Commons was not sitting at all because MPs disappeared back to their constituencies.

So, it was against this background that Labour MP Dr Lynne Jones managed to add at least some value to the week.

She did this by tabling an Early Day Motion titled: "Debate of Early Day Motions".

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, hundreds of EDMs are put down every year on topics ranging from the important (missile defence) to the ridiculous (Marmite).

Yet they are never debated - even if they attract, as was the case with one about "Son of Star Wars", more than 200 signatures.

The purpose of Dr Jones's EDM was to call for the introduction of a mechanism which allow such debates to take the place. If more than half of the House support them, they should be given time in the chamber, she said.

But it was impossible to escape the fact this was an EDM pointing out that EDMs are pointless.

And, in a delicious irony, hardly anybody signed it.

Updated: 10:44 Friday, June 28, 2002