So David Blunkett's secretary emailed the immigration Director-General saying, hey what happened to that case I sent you? What of it? It seems faintly hypocritical to expect politicians to be sea-green incorruptible. Don't we try to process cases faster if we know someone at the top is involved, or someone particularly noisy? Perhaps not an absolutely impartial system, but not an unbearably corrupt one either; the system can take some low-level corruption, and absolute impartiality is surely not a credible fiction. This is of course all the wrong sort of thing for a civil servant to say.