Gaffe of the week: Harriet Harman fails to make friends, meat pies

On the spectrum of completely absurd utterances by clearly addled politicians, this one’s off the charts. Caught on camera wandering around her constituency surrounded by cops (right in front of the police station) and wearing a stab-proof vest (thereby indicating to her South London constituents that they are in fact living in Beirut circa 1985), the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, offers the following to the BBC:

“It’s almost like if you go to a meat factory, they give you a white hairnet and nobody thinks you are going to make a meat pie.”

And this defuses the situation how, exactly?

(Thanks to the invariably amusing Guardian correspondent Andrew Clark for passing this along.)

• Armour furore leaves Harman wounded [The Guardian]