Surprise Surprise

Blair's "surprise" visit to Iraq? A surprise? I am surprised they weren't waiting for him with a battery of SAM's.

Dave is God

No, honest, he really is. He is just brilliant, fantastic, young , vibrant, call me Dave, potent, fertile, all-embracing and, dammit, a winner. I would let my daughter marry him. I would encourage her to give him a blow job whether he married her or not. But he would remember her name and thank her nicely afterwards, I bet. He is the man to lead the Tory party to victory. He wears nice suits. He can shave himself, unlike some of those blind Labour bastards. He is married to posh totty. He is great. And please forget anything I or anybody else has said about the Tory party before this. Thankyou.

Hello, Hello, It's Good To Be Back - And Dave

Inspired by my one fan - thank you soooooo much for the message - I have decided to stage a comeback. That Cameron bloke, eh? What a toff. Personally, I would like to see his entire class wiped off the face of the earth, preferably by a painful disease. Or, as I have often advocated, we should give the buggers free heroin (cut with something nasty). That said - and his wife has a tattoo on her ANKLE, woo hoo, despite being the daughter of a Duke, how f**king amazing - the Tories have finally made a good choice. The bastards.

Whack Whack Whack

Why was Timmy Mallet back on television last night? He appeared to be on Question Time pretending to be some chap from the Daily Mail called Quentin Letts.

And what rebate on fees do you think parents of pupils at Brighton College should get for allowing that preening pixie and Blair "biographer" Anthony Seldon use the school they pay for and of which he is headmaster (how does he find the time?) as a backdrop to his overweening pretensions on the dreadful This Week (ha ha, ho ho - copyright Andrew Neil)? God, it's awful. Bring back Mark Mardell and his train driver's uniform. Please.

Blackpool

Should be nuked. Now.

Finally Getting To The Bottom Of It

It has become clear. The penny has finally dropped. The veils have lifted. A discussion in a Westminster pub illuminated my world view and explained a lot. "What you don't realise," said a special adviser for a Cabinet Minister after a few pints of Youngs, "is that we are all Leninists." Well, it's a start.

Willetts Backs Davis For Tory Leader

It really could not get more exciting, could it?

Piers Is In Paperback

With his crap and highly inaccurate diaries of his time as the editor of an alleged newspaper. If you must have it, steal one - don't give that cant any money.

Revision: It's only £3.99 on Amazon - so please wait until they put the price back up before stealing one.

Nice But Dim

Well, not particularly nice, according to John Humphrys, but the saga of Tim Allan, former Number 10 spindoctor, and the "Humphrysgate" tape is a fascinating little snapshot of the links between New Labour (the Labour party you CAN eat between meals) and Mr Murdoch's multi-national empire. But before we come on to that, perhaps we should discuss the sheer incompetence of Mr Allan's behaviour. The first rule of spinning is DON'T GET CAUGHT, and the first thing that Tim managed was to get caught. He was the only person in Britain who had a tape of Humphrys' speech. So who leaked it to the Times? It doesn't take Columbo to work that out, Tim. So there we have Alastair Campbell's former right-hand man, former spin-chief for Sky and then "independent" PR consultant (main client - Sky. Tax dodge, anyone?) committing a PR sin worthy of the most junior wannabe with a 2:2 in public relations from the University of Ilkley. So how did Tim reach the dizzy heights of PR hero-hood? Well, there is the Number 10 thing, of course, and when he left there he did an MBA and then worked for Sky. Strangely, Margaret McDonagh, when she left as general secretary of the Labour party, also ended up doing an MBA, which, last I heard, cost money. Thanks Rupert? Tim's wife, of course, works for the Sunday Times, where she heads up the cutting-edge Homes section, and Tom Baldwin, the reporter who received the tape, lives in north London and up Alastair Campbell's a*se. Campbell's a*se is well-set on a chair at the Times where he writes a sports column probably written by more people than read it. Oh that the levers of influence should be in such hands!

Thanks A Million, Kelvin

How fitting that Kelvin Mackenzie, the former editor of the Sun, has generously agreed to help raise money to rebuild a home for retired journalists.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1563981,00.html

After all, he personally "retired" quite a few.

Into The Garden, Maude

And please, please, please do not come back, is the view held of dear Francis, Tory party chairman, by many party activists and insiders, right across the Conservative political spectrum.
It is now clear, say those who claim to be in the know, that the move to shift the voting power in leadership elections from the grassroots to MPs will be lost when it comes to a vote.
Leaving the party in its customary state. Hopeless.

Right Up The Trousers

How farcical it really is that Peter Mandelson should be at the centre of this debacle over textile quotas from China, dubbed by the tabloids, of course, "bra wars" in a deliberate reference to Mandy's lack of contact with such garments. You have to wonder how this ridiculous figure, the self-proclaimed king of spin and architect of New Labour (now there's a boast) can continue in public office.
The only man to "resign" from the cabinet twice, and the only politician ever to go back IN the closet after he was first "outed" by the News of the World in the 1980s, Mandy is now wreaking his particular brand of havoc in the EU. How amusing it is too that the man who has brought us this clothing crisis was secretly nicknamed "trousers" by political opponents inside the Labour party. They were not, however, referring to his dress sense.

The World's Worst Newspaper Columnist

Has got to be Mary Ann Sieghart of the truly appalling Times, which is fast resembling one of those glossy magazines pushed through letterboxes in the posher parts of London. The ones full of ads for upmarket shops and articles by middle-class women who refer to Daughter Number One and Himself. I'm sure you know the sort of bourgeois crap I mean.
Anyway, Mary Ann - known as Mary Ann Pointless by her News International colleagues in what must be a rare outbreak of accuracy in E1 - has excelled herself today in the Times's T2 section.
In fact her column is a masterclass in self-referential bollocks the like of which, truly, rarely does manifest itself on earth.
Not only does the column - ostensibly about sport, about which the World's Worst admits she knows nothing, which is the point of the column (still with me?) - repeatedly mention the man who sits next to her in the office, it then mentions a blog which she has plundered for opinions.
"My friendship with my colleague and office neighbour, Danny Finkelstein, has survived many a political argument, lots of dodgy canteen lunches, and even the nicking of each other's last Diet Coke..." twitters Miss P as the first paragraph of this spectacular work is launched into the world, as though anybody desperately gave a flying fuck, before going on to mention Harry's Place and a post about fair-weather cricket fans.
Note also that reference to political argument - I'm a Blairite, me, she's saying, hoping Keith Rupert Murdoch will notice, for Danny Finkelstein is a Tory, and New Labour, although out of fashion elsewhere, is still the religion of choice at Wapping, dominated as the place is by an American multi-billionaire who is rarely in the UK and relies for his information on people who tell him what they think he wants to hear, like Mary Ann.
So, Mary Ann - lazy, arrogant, desperately stupid and, er, pointless. No wonder newspapers, in the long term, are finished. As Mary Ann should be.

Surely Some Mistake

In the spelling of the title of Evan Davis's new Radio Four programme about schooldays. It's called Comp!, you see. Clearly trouble with the vowels, twinkle.

Give Winston the IVF Sign

Fuck Professor Winston, say I. As the papers are full today of "designer babies" and other such nonsense following on the Government's suggested changes to IVF rules, such as they are anyway, nowhere has it been exposed what a pathetic racket the whole thing is. Robert Winston, all round expert on everything, seems to be trying to reinvent himself as a TV star now he has worked out that IVF is no longer seen to be the panacea he told us all it was. In fact, it is a practice run by charlatans feeding off the desperate. The actual chance of an IVF baby runs at about one in five, and more like one in 20 for "older" would be parents, and as every gambler knows, that is one in 20 every roll of the dice. For what, £6000 a throw? Now this clown has used the pages of Associated Newspapers (The Standard and the Mail) to claim that chlamydia, the sexual scourge of our age (I mean one that does not kill you) has nothing to do with infertility. That's like saying the HIV virus has nothing to do with Aids - but he would not try to say that, would he. What an irresponsible twat.

Watch Your Bakri, Mohammed

However politic it may have been to get out of Britain, and acknowledging the existence of a Lebanese passport, were I a firebrand Muslim cleric accused of inciting violence I do not think I would have moved somewhere nearer the Israeli security services, who are often happy to do favours for their friends.

He's Behind You, John - Oh No He Isn't , Says Blair

How uncharacteristically immodest of David Blunkett to claim to be "helping out" in running the Government while Tone is away on his holidays. Strange, too, how this claim - made on BBC News 24, audience 3 viewers - happened to end up in the papers when it is well known that Blunkers never, ever, talks to them.

Who KIlled Cock Robin?

He was the cleverest man in British politics. I know, because he told me. Several times. RIP.

Dixon Of Paddington Green

Good old Jack "Evenin' all" Warner used to give wrongdoers a clip round the ear. Now you get a clip in the ear. And one round in the shoulder.

Isn't It Ironic? No, Actually

Peter Hain told the Today programme this morning that it was "ironic" that the IRA had pledged to give up violence when Britain was under renewed terrorist attack. That was either highly disingenuous or the tanned one has about as much idea of what ironic means as Alanis Morrisette. It is not ironic - the IRA has been out-terrored comprehensively by this new breed of lunatics and looks about as up-to-date as a ration-card and as parochial as a church hall. Although, as has been said, it did have the first suicide bomber in Europe - Edward "eejit" O'Brien, the English-born "Irishman" who blew himself up on a bus in 1996. But that (and who could make this up?) was a mistake. Then there is the American taste of terrorism on 9/11 which seemed to change minds about the "boys" over there - so, no, Peter, it is not ironic.

Sofa So Good

The Serjeant at Arms department in the House of Commons is considered by most MPs to be a law unto itself and the real power inside the building. As well as allowing his Sargeness to ponce about in tights wearing a sword, the department is in charge of all sorts of things including the furniture in MPs' offices. So they quickly guessed the culprit when their sofas - so useful for a quick nap after lunch - started disappearing. Apparently, it has been decided that the sofas were too small for two people to sit on without being "over intimate", and over intimacy would never do in the House of Commons. So they are being replaced with single seater armchairs to keep our democratically elected representatives chaste. Carry on, Serjeant.

Having a Brazilian

My girlfrend has been a big fan of that for a while but I am not entirely sure it was a good idea for SO19. There we all were, thinking how good it was that one of the bastards had got his comeuppance and what happens is they shoot some poor South American electrician, who may or may not have been illegal and may or may not have had some Columbian marching powder in his pocket. I mean, how incompetent do they have to prove themselves to be? Take that along with the intelligence report which said there was no group capable of mounting an attack and you have to say....er, what he f**k? What we do know is there is a bunch of homicidal, tooled up psychos out there. And they haven't found the 21/7 bombers yet either.

You Know it Makes Sense

Surprisingly little human rights concern over the shooting of the alleged would-be bomber on the Tube. Which, shows, I suppose, how far we have come. After all, there was a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland for years but nobody would admit it. Mind you, they refused to admit there was a war going on either. Anyway, the solution to security on the Tube is simple and an old one - arm the People! There are more of us than there are of them.

Have you anything to say to a grateful nation?

Sorry to go on about Channel Four, but the international dictatorship of the proletariat will never be brought about by public school boys in garish ties. How on earth Jon Snow was allowed to give "Red" Ken such a soft ride last night over the suicide bombings is beyond me.

To the barricades, Comrades

How nice to see that Elinor Goodman has been given a job on a government quango trying to get more homes built in the countryside. A fair and just reward for years of political reporting on Channel Four. And another example of the "great" and the "good" helping eachother to be, er, great and good. How can you report the government and then take a job with it? Surely that is a comment on what went before? Anyway, thing about the countryside is, it's full of trees and full of....