The Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, has just cut an Armed Forces Minister's bollocks. Study the following two versions of a parliamentary moment last Thursday.

First, Hansard as it appeared the next day. A Tory MP, John Baron, has just listed “life-threatening shortages of kit” from which he claims troops fighting abroad suffer, including “electronic equipment to detect roadside bombs” -

Minister for the Armed Forces (Bob Ainsworth): Absolute bollocks.

Mr Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): Is that a parliamentary expression?

Mr John Baron (Billericay) (Con): I shall move on...

Now read the report that appears online today and will appear hereafter in the bound volume of Hansard,

Mr Baron: ...electronic equipment to detect roadside bombs - I shall move on...

The expunging of the record arises from the Speaker's ruling this week, after Mr Baron protested about the minister's remarks. Mr Martin replied that “audio and visual” recordings were unclear, so the whole exchange “will be removed from the permanent record”.

Really? Remove a minister's arguably contemptuous response to complaints about troops' equipment? I do not know if Mr Ainsworth is denying he said “absolute bollocks” because he has not returned my call, but the note taken by the Hansard reporters, who are present physically in the Gallery, is usually relied upon because recording equipment is notoriously poor at picking up comments from the sidelines. Both Mr Baldry and the Hansard reporter must have thought that they heard this; and any denial from Mr Ainsworth could also be placed on the record. A small matter, but not entirely trivial. Memories fade; newspapers are pulped. Hansard will be what historians rely upon.

I dislike the cavalier spirit (and I think it has grown in the past decade) that simply kicks awkward truths aside, as though failing even to acknowledge something means it isn't there. Owing something to modern marketing, and something to the old Soviet Union, this marriage of the Kremlin with PR consultancy is very Gordon Brown. As Paul Flynn, MP, once said of new Labour, his party: “Only the future is certain. The past is always changing.”

Almost as these exchanges were taking place on Monday, I was yomping along the top of Froggatt Edge in the Derbyshire Peak District. For my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programmes our guest was Joe Simpson, the climber whose near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes (he was the one dangling on the rope when it was cut) became the book and film Touching the Void. Joe's chosen great life was that of Hermann Buhl, the famously super-daring, self-reliant Austrian climber who died in a climbing fall at the age of 32; and as both Joe and my other guest climbing-writer, Ed Douglas, live in Sheffield we decided to record the programme not in a London studio, but outdoors on Froggatt Edge in the Peak District.

The driving rain was almost sleet, the wind was fierce and the ground sodden. I wanted to impress. Wearing my battered old Gortex, snow-gloves, woolly hat and serious walking boots, I strode alongside these two hard-ass climbers dropping casually into my conversation references to my own derring-do, injuries, mutual climbing acquaintances, familiarity with the Huayhuash mountains in Peru, etc.

I was fancying that I was coming over as credibly hardcore. My mobile phone rang. It was my mother. Her final “I love you” was loud enough to be heard by all.

Those Big Ideas in Full - Part 2: Gordon Brown's new Risk and Regulation Advisory Council, set up to supervise supervisory bodies such as the Health and Safety Executive, and stop them stopping things, prompted a funny third leader in The Times yesterday, but though this latest evidence of the madness of King Gordon does reach new parodic heights, it goes beyond a joke. Wielding a sticking plaster to cover the wound caused by the scissors wielded to cut the sticking plaster to apply to the cuts sustained while trying to extract the scissors from their packaging, is evidence of a mind in serious danger of disappearing up its own bottom. “Vision for change” indeed! It's a sort of intellectual constipation.

A late e-mail: the makers of a BBC television drama want permission to use a clip from our Great Lives radio series.

“In one scene, we have two characters talking while the radio is on in the background. No reference to what is playing on the radio is made, but we wanted to show the character as being intellectual and so thought Great Lives would be suitable...”

Oh joy! Once, little round glasses and French cigarettes would have been the signpost to an intellectual; now it's listening to Great Lives.

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money