You may have missed the Sun's campaign to have all MPs hauled back from holidays so they can sit in the Commons during August, but today it launched a national petition to "help stop country going down pan".
The paper's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, pens an opinion piece criticising Westminster's 646 MPs for their "marathon 80 day holiday", leaving the Commons "as silent as the Marie Celeste", under the provocative headline: "Let's Hope the Bombers Are On Holiday Too."
Now while it's true that MPs do get generous annual leave, with lengthy holidays over Christmas, Easter and half-term "constituency weeks", not to mention the many fact-finding missions that select committees and cross-party groups enjoy, or the Westminster working week of Monday lunchtime to Thursday, there are several serious misapprehensions behind the demand for an immediate recall of parliament.
Firstly, despite the appeals of Britain's biggest selling paper, there is actually no anti-terrorism legislation for MPs to vote on. It simply isn't ready yet. The home office's civil servants are drafting measures over the summer, following the one-off summit of Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy - plus the home secretary and his shadows - last month, with a bill expected to be ready for September or October. The Home Office's eight regional meetings with Muslim leaders this summer will feed into that, but there are still disagreements - notably over the length police could detain suspects without charge.
Bringing MPs back with nothing to discuss would leave them mulling over a typical day's dry-as-dust agenda at Westminster, which looks something like this - and which, naturally, the Sun would not dream of covering.
Secondly, there is no "magic fix" for terrorism. The government has already passed the Terrorism Act 2000, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (in direct response to the September 11 attacks), and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. None of these prevented the July 7 bombings in the capital. Indeed, the 2005 Act was necessary to patch up the 2001 Act, since the law lords had subsequently ruled that indefinitely detaining foreign terrorist suspects was discriminatory and a thus in breach of the European convention on human rights. Laws drafted in anger are often repented at leisure - remember the Dangerous Dogs Act?
Thirdly, MPs aren't actually on their poolside deckchairs for 80 days - many will be working in the constituencies, and while the majority will take a holiday in August, so will most of their constituents. Plus September sees the month-long party conference season.
Fourthly, if the message to terrorists is supposed to be "business as usual", then surely that includes "holidays as planned" - panicky over-reactions only play into the disruption of ordinary life that extremist groups are trying to foment.
Besides all of which, parliament can be recalled at any time if there is a new atrocity or genuine crisis. The PM and his cabinet colleagues may be on holiday, but all are on secure communications networks, and for top rank politicians, even summer hols will include two to three hours' work a day.
And finally, recalls of parliament do not have a good precedent - the last one, on September 24 2002 (the middle of the Liberal Democrat conference) was to discuss the Iraq crisis - and to publish the government's ill-fated dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ...
