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.