One or two newspapers gave Gordon Brown a hard time yesterday after the PM made a slip during Commons exchanges about the EU's weekend summit.
We all heard him saying that David Cameron's Czech Eurosceptic ally - and prime minister - is now warning that failure to support the Lisbon reform treaty would result in what GB called the "Czechoslovakian people'' being isolated in Europe. But that's not the point.
Brown often seems awkward with foreign words - far clumsier than Tony Blair, who once pronounced the EU summit city of Gothenberg - Goteborg - five different ways in a single statement before settling for "Yacht-a-boray" which sounded very impressive. The point, however, is that this modest gaffe about a country which has ceased to exist appeared in yesterday's Hansard as uttered: incorrectly.
That's as it should be. Just a slip. Contrast that with last week's drama when Ed Balls shouted "so weak" during Cameron's reply to the budget and the Tory leader accused him of responding "so what?" to Cameron's alarm that public borrowing is going up sharply.
It was the splash headline in the Daily Express next day and the rightwing bloggers had a lot of fun. Cameron is pretty fast on his feet and I'm sure it's what he thought he heard. But you can't actually hear what Balls said above the hubbub in the audio version on the internet, but that never stopped them, did it?
Next day Michael Martin assured a protesting MP that Hansard (whose reporter was sitting 10 feet above Balls's head) was satisfied that "so weak" was what its staff had heard - this after a Tory MP had suggested the official record had been nobbled.
Hansard staff, who sit all day there taking down what MPs say but can't answer back ("Sit down and shut up, you old windbag"), resented being used as a football. They do their best to make sense out of MPs' speeches. It's not always easy.
But they were much crosser last month when the BBC's Nick Robinson took a quote wrenched from context in a Conservative press release, wrongly attributed it to Alistair Darling, then got John Humphrys to accuse the chancellor directly of saying it. Even Darling snapped back at that one.
You may remember, it was the remark that ''nationalisation would lead to a slow lingering death for the jobs of the Northern Rock workers'' and ruin for Britain's financial reputation. It was uttered by local Labour MP, Jim Cousins, and referred to what was then Lib Dem policy only.
The BBC and Tories dug it out after the government nationalised the Rock when the private options failed. Darling's reply agreed with the MP's attack on the Lib Dems while carefully not ruling out "all other options" ie nationalisation among them.
On the Today programme next day Nick Robinson and Humpo discussed the quote and contrasted the text version with the (slightly different) sound feed transcript. They agreed to blame their own error on Hansard.
Read Nick's sort-of-apology and both versions of the original quotes and make up your own mind. I say the meaning is clear in both.
Why do I mention it? Because Hansard's long-suffering staff are still cross about it. They keep telling me so. Caught between politicians and the media, it can't always be fun. But we know which lot has the best shorthand note.
