Lessee. You’re a politician who is famously bad at buying property, selling your house just before a huge rise in prices, then buying at the top of the market. You know that you’ve only got a few more years in your current job. Your wife is a lawyer, making most of her money suing the Government for breaching the Human Rights Act.

Money’s tight, heavy mortgage, will lose job soon. What to do, what to do?

Introduce a new law requiring ID Cards, making certain to do so in a way which breaches the Human Rights Act. We can have class action suits in the UK courts now, double fees for the lawyers that win them, yes, that’ll do it, get wifey to make pots of money:

The European Convention on Human Rights – which Labour
incorporated into law in 1998 – does not bar ID cards but the committee
suggests that ministers’ plans to gather and record personal data go
further than the law allows.

Under Article 8 of
the convention, interference in private lives must be justified by a
"pressing social need" and it has to be shown that the aims cannot be
achieved by less intrusive means.

The committee
says the details that can be held on the register, including previous
addresses, travel abroad and records of the occasions on which such
information has been provided to other agencies, would potentially
provide "a detailed picture of private life".

The
European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that holding
information concerning an individual’s distant past raises issues under
Article 8. The Government maintains that the details to be held are
unexceptionable and available elsewhere.

Makes as much logical sense as any other reason anyone’s given for introducing the damn things.