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Most of this weekend’s news focused on the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral at Windsor, there was a 41-gun salute, followed by a phone call from Emmanuel Macron saying that they surrendered, and a protest in America demanding a ban on assault-style ceremonial cannons. No sign of Meghan of course, although perhaps she’s claiming to have attended a secret private funeral a few days ago with just the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance. I did personally wonder why there were so many people at t ......

Royal news this week as Prince Phillip the queen’s husband, passed away at the age of 99 which is a shame because if he’d lived another 2 months then he would have gotten a telegram from the queen.

When it comes to the royal family, I’m pretty ambivalent, they’re certainly better than having President Blair, they make for an interesting national soap opera and if it wasn’t for the royals then what would we name hospitals, railways and especially drinking establishments after. We can’t name all the pubs after coloured lions after all. Trawling through the acres of press coverage, Prince Phillip did lead a fairly interesting life and for everyone moaning about spent more than half a century living a life of idleness, you have to remember that unlike his kids he actually fought and risked his life for those war medals he wore on special occasions. He was at the Battle of Crete and the Invasion of Sicily, as compared to Prince Edward who decided to drop out of the marines and organise It’s a Royal Knockout. Or Prince Harry who seemed to be making himself a career as a soldier until he got confused and wore a German military outfit that time.

There’s a list of quotes and supposed gaffes through him over the years, most of them actually end up painting a pretty good image of someone who was probably quite fun to have a drink with, I quite like his comment that "When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife." and supposedly at the coronation he made a comment about the queen getting another new hat. I also used to occasionally look at the court circular in The Times and be surprised by just how much he and the wife actually got up to, attending charity meeting and spending decades seeing to a never ending stream of new lifeboats, museums, youth centers and so on. If he did dislike Tony Blair as much as they say then you can hardly blame him because all that extra money to upgrade schools and hospitals probably meant he was staring down the barrel of 20 years shaking hands with teaching assistants and hospital cleaners. I wouldn’t want that life, no matter how much swan the wife let me eat.

Now we have a week of mourning and round the clock news coverage and with any luck folks might get the day off work which would be good now that the weather is better than it was. There’s also talk about whether or not Harry and Meghan will attend the funeral, personally speaking I’d not be surprised if Meghan flies over early with a shovel to help dig the grave.

Oh well, the Duke of Deadinburgh, god racist his soul.

Tragedy as a 51 people were killed in a horrific train derailment, the accident was labeled, “made in Taiwan”
The BBC also announced that Sue Cook was going to be leaving A Question of Sport, presumably along with most of its viewers
And in Covid news, Scotland lifted its ‘stay at home’ rule, although it’s not expected to have any impact on whether the football team travels to the World Cup next year

The big story for me this week though has been the increasingly farcical situation involving France, the EU and the Astra Zeneca Vaccine. It’s perhaps worth looking at the timeline of what’s been going on

1. The EU made an absolute pigs ear of it’s Covid response, from evangelising on open borders in the midst of a pandemic, to promising a strong financial response that was a little bit like the dragon my little boy drew the other day, very cool on paper but utterly fictitious
2. The UK on the other hand is a world medical research leaders and was quick to test, license and roll out drugs faster than someone backstage at Woodstock. It even also rained a lot. But we ended up in a situation where for a while there were more vaccinated Germans living in the UK than there were in Germany
3. The president of France is Emmanual Macron and he played the EU anthem at his inauguration and sees the bloc as something to be embraced as a tool for French supremacy. He tried to block vaccine exports from Belgium and Italy in order to divert them to France and later when that failed miserably he was the ultimate bad loser and started spreading conspiracy theories about the Astrazenecca vaccine being deadly. It’s unknow whether he believes in other theories such as flat-earth or bigfoot, although he’s presumably called 30 cm in France. Either way, it’s like a petulant child claiming that they didn’t want any ice cream anyway.
4. Now we’re in a bizarre situation where having backpedaled, the French public no longer trust the medical establishment and the country is sinking into another wave of death and a second summer of lockdown, all while the British tourism industry is preparing to reopen. There’s an old Christmas cracker joke about how France's favourite pharmaceutical is “Parisetamol” but those Parisians are more likely to be staying at home than going to the doctor and vast stocks of vaccines are now having to be systematically destroyed because they’re passing their use by dates. Medicine does not get better with age like a bottle of claret or a slab of Roquefort. If I was going to use a cheese pun, I’d say the situation is not gouda and if I was going to use a wine pun then I’d say that things were far from rosé
5. Michelle Barnier of all people is now attacking the EU for compliance and incompetency which for the UK is like watching the poacher become the gamekeeper. It’s also an election year coming up soon in France and Emmanuel Macron therefore has no option but to go all in and drag the EU further into the gutter. Thus we now see him blaming Brussels and London for holding back France, which is a gameplan that Marine Le Pen frankly knows how to play a lot better.
6. All the meanwhile Germany is letting all this happen, languishing under Angela Merkel’s slow departure and a lack of strong leadership. Although given what Germany’s like when do get a strong leader every hundred years or so, that’s probably a darned good thing. France and Germany, as bad as each other really. I once heard that the Germans conquered France by matching in backwards so that the frogs would think that the were leaving.

Billy Joel once sang a song that mentioned ‘trouble in the Suez’ and right now that would be topical because the Suez Canal currently resembles another major transit route: specifically the M25 on a bank holiday Friday (albeit in a year when there’s not a pandemic: the roads are actually pretty good right now actually even if there’s nowhere to actually drive to)

But this week a container vessel named the Ever Given collided with the side of the canal and managed to get stuck sideways. If you can imagine Diane Abbot trying to shuffle sideways down the aisle of an passenger plane, it looks kinda like that really. Unfortunately, whilst that would be hilarious, this situation in Egypt is not and the shipping route being closed is costing the global economy about $10bn per day in lost trade as boats queue up at both entrances to the canal. The situation is also a lot worse because experts say it may potentially take a couple of weeks to get it sorted and with those sorts of timescales I’m assuming they have a team of broadband engineers or possible a crew from my local council flying over to deal with the mess.

The current ideas being floated (geddit?) to get the stricken boat moving again involve lightening it by syphoning off most of the fuel and removing the containers from it, so that a tug boat can get it shifted from the sand it’s lodged into. Alas these boats carry literally thousands of containers and the cranes are pretty specialist so the process of getting the boat to lose weight is going to go as slowly as if it were you or I trying to lose some weight before just like the boat going on a trip to Greece, or wherever it was that the boat was heading to.
All this of course takes place at the same time as the EU is trying to ban exports of Italian covid vaccines via the Mediterranean and the Suez canal and if the EU were competent you could call grounds for a dastardly conspiracy theory. Except as we’re all more than aware the EU is far too incompetent to pull something like that off. If it were the Panama Canal that was closed then yes I could see that they got the wrong location and they’d screwed it up and that would sound exactly like something Ursula von der Leyen would attempt. Similar to when they raided that Astrazeneca warehouse a few weeks ago and it later transpired that the vaccines in that location were actually a stock headed for Europe anyway and that they got the wrong address. Join me next week for more tales of EU misadventure.

This week: Kate Middleton paid tributes to murdered woman Sarah Everard, palace officials were keen to stress that the event was not a rehearsal. Elsewhere rumours abound that Elton John is working on a new version of candle in the wind

Also, a bizarre series of photos were published of Shamima Begum wearing western style clothes as her supporters again try to make the case for her returning to Britain when in reality she’s about as welcome as Julian Assange with a USB US memory stick

But the main story this week was from Scotland where with 6 weeks to go until crucial elections a parliamentary committee concluded that Nicola Sturgeon has been telling lies as big as the ones when the Royal Bank of Scotland told investors “what could possibly go wrong”. I have a friend who was recently phones by the local school and told that his son had been telling lies and he responded by saying “Tell him, he's pretty good. I don't have any kids” In contrast, in 6th year I was voted Most Likely to Lie About Past Accomplishments. It’s true... or is it…

The result of the enquiry is not really a surprise to anyone, least not Nicola Sturgeon who says that the verdict was decided weeks beforehand. This is in stark contrast to the Alex Salmond case where the result was also decided weeks beforehand except then Alex had at least paid for a good lawyer to make sure he was acquitted. The Alex Salmon case and the waste of public resources was a damning indictment and really shows why it’s important to have a separate and non-politicised judicial system. It’s also one of only a handful of similar examples though. In Westminster the SNPs chief Whip Patrick Grady was forced to resign and it ultimately turned out that accusations had been swept under the carpet for years. Elsewhere there are a number of growing scandals including a contract for new ferries that I'm guessing must be managed by Francis Ford Coppola in so much as it's £97m over budget and 4 years late; also Prestwick Airport’s dubious dealings with the US military. There’s also another financial scandal where the Lochaber aluminium smelter was given government guarantees over energy prices, before the owners decided to backtrack on building a new smelter and instead use the government backed line of cash to renegotiate its borrowing terms and pocket the money. None of this is anywhere as well reported as it should be, and every one of them should be a resignation matter on their own, and yet for someone who claims to dislike Thatcher, Nicola Sturgeon does seem to claim to want to 'go on and on’ though Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign not long after that quote. For now, Nicola continues to blame Westminster and the English Press for his accomplices mismanagement, taking out court injunctions in courts presided over by Sturgeon supporters and SNP apparatchiks which have about as much jurisdiction in England as they do over Narnia. If Nicola ever does get her way and talk of a hard border with England comes up again, her wall will have a lot more in common with the Berlin Wall than Donald Trumps one, albeit Trump will still only have a golf course to the north of it and Berlin will probably pay for it again, much to the annoyance of most people, though to the surprise of no-one.

Covid news this week as the bureaucratic farce known as the EU have given up trying to steal vaccines and instead go crawling to Vladimir Putin asking if he has some spare vaccines he can sell them. The Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine has been shown to be quite effective although I’m guessing that its dispensed by members of the state police jabbing vaccine laced umbrellas into unsuspecting members of the public maybe asking if they want to with them to a small room to be shot, by which they mean a shot of the vaccine. But if Brussels wants to write a cheque to Moscow then Soviet (so be it)

In America the news was the announcement that the family of murdered man George Floyd were going to be awarded a $27m settlement. George Floyd looks set to be earning more than Pink Floyd, showing once again that perhaps crime doesn’t pay, but your grieving relatives might do quite well out of it.

Also this week a story that it seems that we’re not going to be seeing any more of Mr Potato Head and I initially thought that was a story about Piers Morgan being sacked, following his refusal to apologise about comments he made about Harry & Meghan. Not often I agree 100% with Piers but he’s pretty on point with this one and most of what they said in that interview was either sanctimonious garbage or just plain untrue, like the claim that she had her passport taken and was unable to travel, when in truth she traveled a lot during those years and there are countless PR shots to prove it. They claimed that someone was racist but then refused to divulge anything beyond that so without facts or a specific accusation who knows what happened. She mostly just seem to hold a grudge based on her being unable to use the position and its public resources resources to peruse a career as political activist or cash in on the role to get get rich, it’s like she thought that Victoria Beckham and Queen Victoria were the same thing and got confused because she was lazy and didn’t research the job. Admittedly the two of them both seem to be in on the jape, the two of them presumably have a lot in common, like how I don’t care for either of them. Where next though? There’s Netflix shows in the making and if anyone’s a betting man I wager £100 she launches a perfume in the next 2 years. And people are making comparisons to Princess Diana so if she does launch a perfume, maybe she shoud call it Tunnel No 5. You know what, it many respects she maybe has a lot more in common with Prince Phillip, like distain for the British Press, being born overseas and life expectancy.

A bit of news in France this week as Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of trying to bribe a judge in 2014. I'm guessing it was an actual judge, but then he's a former politician so maybe it was a judge on the French version of Strictly. Or perhaps the X Factor, he is an "ex" president after all and he's been married 3 times.

The main stories were from America though where the culture wars and cancel culture continue. This time it is the beloved children books The Cat In The Hat that's been branded racist and offensive. I'd have actually though that Dr Seuss' works were exactly what the woke left would want these days, he has that one with the characters Thing 1 and Thing 2 and I thought that those are the names that those idiots want to use nowadays instead of "mum" and "dad" I was quite tempted to just draw the cat this week, along with a Seuss-styled poem like as follows

No I wear not wear that mask
I will not do the thing you ask
I will not wear it on my face
I will not wear it any place
Go back home to your safe space
You really are a sad disgrace

But of course he big story is the Harry and Meghan interview which isn't out yet but it will be by the time this is posted. It doesn't matter though because I've decided to respect Harry and Meghan's request for privacy and not watch the thing. The only way it would be entertaining would be if Oprah went on the offence and asked Harry if his clothes got lost in shipping and if that's why the only thing he seems to wear these days is that grey suit with beige shoes. Maybe crack a joke about if he felt relieved when the chauffeur driven car made it safely to the studio. They presumably have to pay that driver a lot, being their chauffeur is probably up in that top 5 list of dangerous jobs along with Iraqi security contractor and gamekeeper in the Congo. As things stand it will almost certainly have been the pair of them wallowing in deluded self pity and the only way it would be worth it would be if it occasionally cut to the Duke of Edinburgh doing a Gogglebox style series of reaction shots. I continue to find it amusing that Williams wife Kate had topless photographs shown in a French Magazine, and yet she's still considered the classy one. I wouldn't mind if the pair of them wanted to just live out a quiet life of luxury in Santa Monica but I'm not going to be lectured to on climate science and history by someone with 2 middling A-Levels. If the pair of the whining spongers were and music album, they'd be that U2 album Apple downloaded onto everyone's phone a while back. Who's more annoying though, them or Bono. I guess Bono has the edge.

In the news this week
- Shamima Begum learnt that she’s definitely going to be unable to return to Britain after her court appeal process turned all ironic and blew up in her face
- Captain Tom was finally laid to rest although in bizzarely cruel turn of events, the casket was carried in a German-built Mercedes-Benz followed by a BMW.
- Harry and Meghan did two major TV appearances, being interviewed by Oprah and James Corden, leading many to demand that Harry & Meghan should change their attention-seeking ways and start respecting Harry & Meghan’s demands for privacy.

There was also a fairly big story in Los Angeles where Tiger woods was involved in a car accident. We've all seen him make a 300 yard drive except this was the first time that the drive in question was down the side an embankment. Talk about landing in the rough. It at least answers the question of "Why did Tiger Woods buy a new car?" "To make a hole in one" Supposedly the sheriff who oversaw the accident investigation confirmed he wasn't drunk after making him do a field sobriety test where Tiger was asked to count from 1 to 1000 counting in 50s which was probably pretty easy if he was counting out $50 bills as he was doing it.

But of course the other big story of the week was from Scotland where Alex Salmond was giving evidence at a hearing at Holyrood as to whether Nicola Sturgeon deliberately mislead parliament. I say “hearing” but there's a salmon and a sturgeon so perhaps this one is pronounced “herring”
What are the two competing sides of this story though:

1. Mr Salmond claims that there was an ongoing campaign led by the government to damage his reputation and potentially throw him in jail despite his innocence. He says that the prosecution service threw vast public resources at a fabricated court case when then there was no real evidence against him. The SNP led government supposedly forced it to do so, against legal advice but backed by perjury and lies and an easily coerced civil service allowing it all to happen. There is institutional bias and corruption at the top level and SNP apparently stands for Subterfuge ‘n’ Perjury
2. Nicola Sturgeon on the other hand claims it’s all a bizarre conspiracy theory with no evidence to back any of it up and that after they fell apart Alex decided to drag her reputation into the mud and force her to resign.

The key thing is though that Alex Salmond has no evidence to present because he’s currently under a court order to not share the evidence he has, supposedly damning texts and the very communications proving that Nicola Sturgeon (allegedly) used the law and coerced the prosecution service to throw him under the bus. I say bus but if it’s Edinburgh I should say throw him under the tram. We are currently now living in a world where Alex Salmond of all people claims that the Scottish institutions cannot be trusted to run an independent country, and that’s coming from a man who’s spent his decades long career fighting for that very one thing. It’s akin to if Carolyn Lucas had done a lap around the Top Gear track or if Jamie Oliver was doing an advert for McDonalds, although given what happened to his business empire stranger things have happened after all, the only dough he has these days is that sourdour starter sitting in the cupboard above the spice rack.

With regards to the Salmond case though the one question I’ve not quite gotten to the bottom of is “why?” The SNP were fearful that they were going to lose seats because of the court case and their wrongly placed expectation that he would go to jail. It’s why they sided with allowing Boris Johnson to call that election in 2019, damage limitation at the ballot box. That’s the election that decimated Labour, gave Boris a thumping majority and ultimately led to Brexit being able to happen. If some of what Salmond says is true then Nicola Sturgeon gambled her reputation, allowing Brexit to happen, got her husband to allegedly commit perjury and possibly risked the public turning on the very idea of Scottish Independence itself. All for what? Because her and Alex disagreed about things? There’s clearly something else being hidden from public view here and unfortunately we have no clue what it is, unless there are secret clues as to what it is just south of Edinburgh at Rosslyn Abbey and that Dan Brown therefore writes a story about it. And it gets turned into a film with an action scene where Tom Hanks ends up in a car chase at Donald Trump's golf resort and there's cameo where Tiger Woods looks at the speeding car and then camera and shakes his head in disapproval.

A couple news stories this wee. Prince Harry has been told he’s not allowed to wear formal British Army dress at official functions any more. The new directive of course is an expansion on the existing rule about not wearing German military clothing after that story in the Sun a few years ago. His grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh has also been taken into hospital and so it’s a tense time for newspaper editors up and down the land as they wait to see if it’s time to finally send out the commemorative magazines they no doubt printed years ago. Let’s just hope they didn’t include too many pictures of Prince Andrew. I heard a discussion over lunch about whether when Prince Phillip passes they plan to bury or possibly cremate him and it really put me off my Greek kebab.

Also a big story from Australia, also known as the land down under, except on Saturdays when the nickname is switched to ‘the land hungover’. They’ve gotten in an argument with Facebook whereby Facebook have decided to shut down certain news services and sharing options rather than pay a new tax to benefit local news providers. People writing news in an office in Melbourne rather than Belarus is so often Facebooks way. Although if we’re being honest here the main beneficiary from the payments would be News International and thus Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch so in many respects I can see both sides of the story. Would Facebook be forced to hand money over to all content providers, fake or otherwise, or would perhaps an unelected commission get to decided what news the public were allowed to read? It’s all very 1984, or possibly 1985 would be a better year, that’s when Neighbors started and also Mad Max 3 Thunderdome came out. I always thoguht the problem with Mad Max is that if they just slowed down a little bit then their cars would get better fuel economy and they wouldn’t have to fight over the petrol so much

Anyway, in other sandy dry desert news, Thursday saw Nasa land the Perseverance rover on Mars which was greeted with great excitement although if you look up Mars on Yelp it only has a 1-star review, something about lacking atmosphere. Also very bad mobile internet speeds too: it says on Wikipedia that Mars only has 0.4g. Anyway, it’s been 8 years or so since Nasa last sent their last rover to Mars which is pretty impressive beacuse I once had a rover and it could barely make it to Sainsburies let alone off-world. One of my hopes for this mission is that it will once and all prove that they did in fact send it to Mars and not to a dessert in New Mexico where a combination of rain and snow currently make New Mexico look more like Newcastle. Less like the sandy planet in star wars and more the icy one but best wishes to them. I also saw a Nasa official who said that the 2012 Curiosity rover reminded him of when he met his wife: it was supposed to last a few months but here he was 14 years on. The technology behind it is all is pretty impressive although I was confused by an article stating “the software that got it to Mars' surface must now be exchanged for a software system that enables the robot to drive across that surface.” Perhaps memory cards were too expensive to install both sets before it set off, or they just took a leaf out of Elon Musks Tesla playbook with his constant software upgrades, I guess we’ll find out in a few years when SpaceX launches its own mission there. Personally I’ve been wondering if when Elon Musk eventually sends people to Mars, he’ll hire a number of Muslim Astronauts so that they can travel to mars and construct Elons Mosque.

Happy Chinese new year, apparently it’s the Year of the Ox, not to be mistaken for the year of the pox, which was last year. One of my favourite stories from China this week was the communist party’s decision to ban the BBC due to its “Unfair, Untruthful Journalism” which kinda makes me wish that Boris took a leaf out of Beijing’s book: if the PM wants to sort out the thing with the French fishermen he could start treating the English Channel the way that they treat the China sea. Obviously don’t copy everything, the genocide thing is a bit out of whack and I’d rather make sure the pets on Blue Peter were never involved in a cookery segment on the show but I would like to see the UK sticking two fingers up to the green agenda and getting petrol back to 70p/litre like it is in Shanghai.

So what does the BBC have for us this week? Stories on the front page include articles like: “What is Slovenian cuisine”, “NASA’s pioneering black women” and an article on “Racial imposter Syndrome” so I’d have thought if it’s the BBC then they might have illustrated with a picture of David Dickenson in orange-face or that time when Doctor Who was an African lady. In all honesty the private sector isn’t much better when it comes to newsworthiness, the Mail’s website have a story about how Ben Affleck went out on a motorbike and Hugh Jackman apparently owns a wooly hat.

There is real news out there but it doesn't fit the narrative about how Britain would struggle without help from overseas and so we end up with a "news page" filled with social justice wokery and a relentless fetishization about Donald Trump. There's his constant ability to not pay taxes, the fact his wife isn’t divorcing him, he never did any of the bad things the BBC said he would, plus he got covid and despite it being 100% deadly he lived to laugh another day. Then we have his acquittal in the senate and his troll-like response that he might well run for office again. It's hilarious really, they really want him to be in jail for something but there’s just no darned evidence. This is what happens when a news organisation hires hires kids from college who have never been told that sometimes you don’t get your own way no matter how much you scream and shout. That only works if you’re Tom cruise and possibly for Brian Blessed if Gordon’s Alive.

Of course in the real world the story being shouted from the rafter should be that Britain has been taking off as a world-leader in both covid vaccination as well as research into the new variants. The EU had to back down on its threat to militarise the Irish border, after it realised that without Britain to co-opt, the EU doesn't actually have any military presence in northern ireland to use for such a thing. Bizarrely they chose to apologise with reference to how people make mistakes and that only the pope is infallible. That's an analogy that would struggle to go down well in Ulster unless it was perhaps in an episode of Father Ted with an inebriated chief Jean-Claude Juncker playing Father Jack. Back to covid though, it seems to be available in many different variations this year. Much like when you buy a car you can get classic base model, or you can opt for the 2021 update features and just like a car some versions of the vaccine include an improved transmission. Except unfortunately that’s a bad thing in the case of a virus. Although in the BBC worldview, big pharma can’t be trusted or relied upon to combat the new variants and we should stop trying, given in and join with the EU in relying on masks and capitulation and an inability to win. With that sort of attitude it’s no wonder the BBC love Wimbledon so much.

This week I was going to take a look at the headlines in the various Sunday Papers but it's all the same corona stuff about how Boris is on the road to de-mask us (damascus)

So anyway let's look at some of the other front page things

The Telegraph has a story about how Prince Charles wants to save the planet by ditching scientific jargon. He would have done better making that suggestion 25 years ago so that words like 'velocity' 'underpass' and 'blood alcohol' weren't known. He's also behind the times though, scientists stopped using terms like 'global warming' years ago, when they realised that by calling it 'climate change' they could use hot and cold or dry and wet as "evidence"

The Mail has a tribute to Captain Tom who passed away which was sad because yes he was ill but many people thought he would walk it. One of my regrets is that he didn't get promoted to Major Tom, that would have been a good laugh, especially if David Bowie was still with us. But sad news nonetheless, although at 100 not exactly unexpected. I did read that a few weeks ago a man was arrested and charged with attempted murder outside Captain Tom's home after he was seen inflating an empty crisp packet. But yes, sad news for the family, especially after they realise he left his house and everything to the NHS

The Express, Mirror People, and Star are advertising £9 off at Iceland albeit on the condition that you spent £50. That's a heck of a lot to spend at Iceland though, when they're selling frozen turkeys for £3 where are you going to store £50 worth of produce? Any how are you supposed to get to Iceland now that all international flights are canceled?

The Observer has a lead article about how EU trade is down 68% duce to Brexit, then in the detail it's revealed that number is comparing this January to January last year. Hmm, I wonder if anything else happened last year to affect trade.

But it's ok, the People have an article "Margot Robbie as you've NEVER seen her before". Well the last thing I saw her in was Scuidice Squad so perhaps they're giving away a DVD where she acts in a film with a coherent screenplay, I don't think I've seen her in something like that before. And actually, while we're on the subject of the Sunday People, it now has a tagline next to the logo saying "Proud to be independent" Which it kinda weird because I thought that was already a tagline that applied to The Independent? Maybe given what happened they should switch it to "Proud to be: in circulation" or just replace it with a note telling you which page the Hagar cartoon is located on. I'm quite a fan of Hagar the Horrible and I always thought that one of the worst editorial decisions made by the Murdoch Press was when the discontinued the Funday Times cartoon supplement. Phone hacking was bad of course but as Maude Flanders once said, "won't someone think of the children?!"

And just looking at the BBC they have a story expressing profound concern about the LibDems new stance of possibly accepting the result of the Brexit referendum, apparently they want to be Pro-EU but not a party that's going to campaign to re-join it. But with 11 MPs I doubt many people really care at this stage, they have few enough MPs that more than half of the Westminster MPs could sit down in a room without breaking the rule of 6 social distancing rules and right now their prospects will remain about as dim as the energy saving bulbs they spent the last 20 years campaigning to force on people.

Let’s go for a bit of financial news this week. Normally when stories about business make it into the headlines it means one of only 5 things:

1) Petrol Prices are up and the BBC blames it on Brexit
2) Petrol Prices are down and the BBC claim that it's the start of a Brexit-induced recession
3) Maybe petrol prices are flat but an economist from the Labour Party is brought on about wider Brexit-related economic concerns. You know, I'm starting to spot a trend here...
4) Maybe unemployment is up because George Osbourne keeps taking all of the jobs, to add to his roster of other pretend jobs and nepotistic directorships. And of course at that point someone points out that if it weren’t for the Brexit referendum he’d maybe still have his job at Westminster.
5) The perennial favourite, a football club that has gone into administration because of paying people £300k per peek to play football isn’t really a viable business. Sad news though of course for the fans though, plus the loss of 11 jobs, or perhaps more if you include the manager and the subs bench. Said news as well for the taxman as well, sometimes the footballers pay tax on their wages, if they’re at a mid-ranking club.

Anyway, the stock market. This week we’re talking about Gamestop, the computer game retailer which this time last year was $4 per share, started the year at $17 and a couple days ago hit $469 at traders piled in on the “event” and traders with keyboards competed with Gamestop fanatics who had presumably visited the store in order to pick up one fo those controllers with a Turbo button. At the heart of it all is the online trading site RobinHood where members of the public can log in and trade stocks and shares and derivatives products and given what happened it makes you wonder if they were asked for their username and password and instead entered the Konami Cheat code.

To break down what happened, the shares were seen as overvalued by some in the finance world so a lot of short sell options were placed. That’s when you place a bet by borrowing shares from other traders, sell them with an intent to buy them back later and effectively profit if the price goes down. But these positions are recorded and a group on Reddit spotted that they could cause a lot of damage if they manipulated the price upwards and so thus began a crowd-funded buying spike, sending the price upwards. In trading terms this means that the short sellers had a choice of either selling at a huge loss or buying yet more shares to cover their borrowed position, and this of course sends the price upwards further until it's higher than Jerry Garcia. This situation continues until enough people have been forced to sell out at a loss and the price can once more find it's true market price. Effectively it means crashing to earth and wiping out anyone who bought in at the top. As GameStop would say, it’s how you play they game that counts and the wall street firms were left haemorrhaging billions and looked like Sonic the Hedgehog when all the golden rings spill out of him. This is what Occupy Wall St spent years trying (unsuccessfully) to do, except they did it by setting up a shabby campsite, whereas the Reddit group behind this week’s events achieved it all sat luxury chairs in their office with cases of energy drinks and probably eying up a sports car or two with the money made from trading it back and forth, possibly a Tesla, ironically another share with suspicious activity on it. This was no 'workers of the world unite' moment though and the kids behind it were playing with mummy and daddy’s money but the reasons or cause are irrelevant so much as the outcome: namely the era of populist anti-establishment action did not die with the election of Joe Biden, anymore than than people’s dislike of Harry & Meghan didn’t die when they decided to flee the country with unpaid bills

Flash forward a day or two and the RobinHood trading app banned buying or selling of those Gamestop shares, which is interesting because there’s a series of financial links between Robinhood, the bank Citadel, and the GameStop business at the heart of it all. Go look it up elsewhere if you’re interested, it’s quite the rabbit hole. There’s also so many lawsuits now being filed against the company that the legal profession are envious for the workload they had when it was only President Trump trying to either sue a trade commission or maybe just scam a local contractor out of an invoice. The whole situation is actually so crazy that Ted Cruz, the darling of the right retweeted something from hardcore leftist Alexandria Cortez. It’s like when you find a Socialist Workers leaflet warning about the dangers of the EU and you realise just how bad things have to be for that broad a spectrum of people to be in agreement. I was going to make an analogy of the spectrum being from infra-red to ultraviolet, but if the hard left are involved then I guess that means it's pronounced “ultraviolent"

And thus ends four years of President Trump, and the Queen moves onto eventually meeting her 13th US President. Unlucky for some, especially if you live in Syria where the last 4 years have been somewhat of a reprieve from the Obama-Biden era. President Trump though. I’ve found it strange and astonishing that many people I know in remote parts of the UK have seemingly spent the past 4 obsessing over him, despite him having as much impact in their day-to-day life as my choice of breakfast today. It’s like a religion for some I guess, the trump thing I mean. As to breakfast I had 2 slices of pizza and a glass of wine because hey it’s the weekend and I don’t think Special K is special enough. While we’re on the subject:
- What do the military have for breakfast? Conflicts.
- What does Covid have for breakfast? Coughy.
- What do scientists eat for breakfast? Special Potassium
- What do programmers eat for breakfast? Just a byte.

Back to the subject, even in the US itself the president rarely actually impacts that many people’s lives and it’s always fun to challenge people who hate Trump to name some policies that cause them to dislike him so much; they’ll probably talk about the cages thing on the Mexican border but that was an Obama-era policy that Joe Biden oversaw. A lot of things seemingly only because bad when it was President Trump doing them. They might mention the covid response to which you can challenge them to what world leader did it better. Their beloved Europe has been about as utterly useless as a a cricket bat made out of glass, although at least the bat is transparent. If they need some hints on good government to copy a Covid strategy from, maybe you can help them: leaving Sweden's approach of doing nothing aside, Israel has been the one country that went down the distance+vaccine route and is presumably the one to copy if that's how you think things should be done: it's great fun telling lefties that they should urge the government to emulate Israel more and that the Israeli state as a beacon of hope in the world.

Anyway I will go through a longish list of Trumps a achievements in a minute but for now this week saw President Biden’s inauguration in scenes that will go down in history as… televised. Didn’t watch it myself, nor did I watch that royal wedding a few years back, because they’re long and dull and actually I did see a bit when I was flicking through the channels and the scrolling news said he was on his way to Arlington National Cemetery and I thought, “wow he didn’t last long”

As to what lays in store during the next 4 years, it’s worth noting that the expression ‘President Joe Biden’ is an anagram of “Join indebted spree” There’s a good reason why bitcoin has tripled since the election and we’re probably going to see the slow collapse of the dollar as Biden's friends run up trillion dollar deficits and everyone scrambles for the exit door as the economic endgame rears its head. And on day one a priority was to pass an executive order saying that schools have to allow guys to compete in girls sports and use the women’s changing room, because of feeling and gender equality. Although maybe it's part of a plan to get more lazy boys to get active, if they're allowed to use the girls shower room afterwards.

Anyway, here’s that list I promised you of some things Trump did in 4 years:

1 Thanks to deregulation the US became a net oil exporter for the first time ever. The US is finally energy independent, something that nobody was able to do ever since Jimmy Carter promised it.
2 No new wars. Mostly because of that oil policy changing things. It will be hilarious in perhaps 30 years to mention how whichever president at the time is the first President since President Trump to not start a war. Trump will literally be winding lefties up for decades to come with that one.
3 Forcing hospitals to provide medical prices to patients upfront so they can shop around.
4 An order that if foreign drug prices are known then the Medicare system isn't allowed to sign contracts where they pay more than that
saving the U.S. an estimated $85 billion in savings over 7 years
5 Forcing Nato members to increase their spending by $400 billion rather than relying on the US to do everything.
6 Got rid of NAFTA
7 He got more Minority votes than any republican in 100 years, showing that the party is far from dying due to demographics
8 Doubled the child tax credit.
9 Eliminated the Obamacare penalty, which saved people thousands of dollars per year.
10 Instituted a Buy American policy within federal agencies to stop the government from buying from overseas competitors.
11 Instituted “Right to Try,” which means that if you're terminally ill you can legally buy potentially lifesaving but as of yet unregulated medicines.
12 Withdrew from Iran nuclear deal.
13 Made the Arab world formally recognise the state of Israel, something that presidents for decades have tried and failed to achieve
14 Withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, thus keeping America safe from that wishy hope nonsense. Biden will sign back up to it of course but he’ll never be able to enforce it now that:
15 The supreme court is stacked against him. It's all well and good signing a climate treaty but how's he supposed to actually do anything to meet the aims of it. Banning people from buying heating oil or forcing air passengers to take part in a rationing system? Well to quote Mr Trump, I’ll see you in court.

They say that "money talks" but when it comes to the government, all that ever says is good-bye as civil servants keep frittering it away like they're embarrassed to be seen with. And here you and I are watching it all from the sidelines, though I once met someone who says that the trick is to stop thinking of it as ‘your’ money.

Anyway, sit back as I count down some of the worse examples of UK government largesse

10) Nationalised industries
I thought I'd start of a prologue of sorts to show perhaps how bad things used to be. In the years after the 2nd world war, the government was in charge of a lot things but unlike someone playing the boardgames Monopoly, they didn't want to stop with just running the trains and all the utility companies. They went on to run travel companies, British Airways who made the planes for them, Rolls Royce who supplied the engines for the airplanes and BP who made the fuel. All run with balance sheets redder than Rudolph the Reindeers nose. The government also decided to get into the car game. A lot of people decide to buy a little 2-seater sports car when they're in their 60s but for the government in the 60s no less would do then buying up all the Jaguars and the MG factory as well plus Austin, Morris, Rover, the list goes on. British Leyland went on to lose roughly £100m per year, all in an pre-inflation era when a pint of beer was only 35p. Eventually almost everything was sold off and in 2002 Stephen Byers told people that Network Rail was officially a "not for profit" organisation as if anyone was under any illusions otherwise. Nowadays of course, the government has even started weaning itself off of bank ownership and the post office is free to lose money on behalf of investors rather than taxpayers. That last major injection of government cash was probably when David Cameron decided to spend millions posting a Brexit leaflet to everyone in the country and in the process convinced people who didn't like him to vote Leave in order to spite him. Evidently if Dave thought that god was looking down on him it was because he was plotting his revenge.

9) F35s
The harrier jump jet helped win the falklands war in 1982, the same year as the musical Cats opened on broadway, and both things lasted a very long time indeed. Nonetheless the sea harriers were in many respects also like another 1982 thing, namely the album Thriller by Michael Jackson who was universally applauded in the 80s then but was viewed as slightly tarnished by the turn of the millennium. Just like the Michael Jackson, the Harrier went through many cosmetic upgrades over the years before being discontinued as part of a defence review which led to the infamous F35 project, probably the most expensive project to come out of America that hasn't involved going to war, largely because decades on those F35 fighters are no closer to going to war than than the very pretend and very 2 dimensional thing that I'm drawing onto a piece of paper right now. Nonetheless, the cost to the UK taxpayer is somewhat shy of £10bn for a hundred or so aircraft, all of which will face numerous farcical problems on delivery like outdated software based on Windows XP and electrical issues that mean they have to stay 25 miles from thunderstorms. Sure you have to remember that the plane was being designed when the only conceivable use for them was flying over a never ending war on terror but the RAF do have a tendency to test these things in Scotland where a lot of the stories begin with the lines "it was a dark and stormy night" Many of the design problems haven't been helped by internal arguments between the navy or air force, or by changing government priorities, both in terms of spending money and whether or not to spend money in Gordon Brown's old constituency where the aircraft carriers were being fitted for the sea version. It is worth noting again that the Harrier was a 40year old design and woefully underprepared for a modern war. But at the same time it was probably better prepared than an empty runway or a telephone with which to dial someone else and beg for help if anything goes wrong in the meantime. The US are still using theirs until the new planes arrive. Although that's possibly like my doctors' surgery having a fax machine because they're still waiting on a new computer system to arrive, more on that later.

8) Gordon Brown’s gold sale
That sounds like a terrible gameshow on ITV 3 but it couldn't be a list like this without including this one. A lot of comedy is timing and as such you have to give credit to Tony Blair who generously allowed Gordon Brown to begin the premiership just in time for the biggest financial collapse in a generation. The political equivalent of a pie in the face, if John Prescott hadn't likely eaten all the pies first. Let's go with a different slapstick analogy perhaps. Gordon Brown spent 20 years crafting an image of himself as a clever financial whiz who boasted about "an end to boom and bust" before presiding over the largest boom and bust since the 1920s before seeing the whole thing blow up in his face like Wile E Coyote in one of the old Road Runner cartoons. Over the previous decade, Brown had carefully sold off huge quantities of pounds of gold at bargain basement prices, only to see that gold suddenly become the most sought after an expensive commodity in the world. It makes you wonder if when he gets home he has a cabinet full of Beanie Babies or whether his wife trusts him to visit the garden center in case he tries to get it back by remortgaging the house and buying up all the Dutch Tulips. There's a certain schadenfreude about Brown having presided over it, given that he was Shadow Chancellor during the ERM debacle 15 years earlier and spent 2 decades carping on about how only he could be trusted not to mess things up, but unfortunately it was not just his reputation he bet on that trade as the taxpayer ultimately lost around £5bn thanks to his negligence.

7) Foreign aid
One of the legacies of the British Empire was the large network of countries abroad that retain ties, both diplomatically and economically to the UK. Westminster is the mother of parliaments and countries like Australia, India and Kenya are Britain's children. At the same time though, I'm a parent and there's nothing I've learned from being a parent that I couldn't just as easily have figured out from setting fire to all my money. The UK spends roughly £15bn on foreign aid every year although the number is very difficult to pin down because so much of what is going on is classified as loans, export credit guarantees and the sort of financial dealings that made the government so keen to acquire the Royal Bank of Scotland and read it's training manual. There are of course some very worthy things that this money goes to but at the same time there the long list of ludicrous examples too such as continuing to write cheques to India who are supposedly so poor that they have active space program. The list of spurious uses of the foreign aid budget could itself be a separate top-10s video though it is important to note that the US spends $50bn on their equivalent budget, not including the line item simply marked as "Ukraine - don't ask questions" Much of what is going on is an international game of quid-pro-quo where payments to tinpot dictators have, over the years, resulted in business deals or mineral rights being pledged in return. David Cameron of course decided to frame the whole setup as an ethical one and made an equivalence of the government giving foreign aid to a normal person having a series of direct debits set up to mainstream highstreet charities. The sort of charities where they're run by one of Dave's friends on a 6-figure salary. I'm inclined to remember the expression that big charities are largely designed to transferring wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

6) The EU
Let's stick the foreign aid theme with the European Union, Britain may be out now but that was quite an expensive 47 years. The EU famously went for the naming style of using the word "union" in the same way that the Soviets did, or how many countries today use the term "Democratic" in their name. So here we go: there's an old saying that you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars. Well true to form the EU does have billions of Euros had has at the same time been repeatedly criticised for decades for being unable to produce accounts explaining any of it is hidden or what they've been spending it on. In many ways that fact alone was the cornerstone of how every aspect of the European project is reliant on backhanders, greasing the wheels of politics, money going purposefully missing in order to buy support against a public who saw their money being frittered away on vanity projects. All while the political aims were mainly failures, whether it being preventing the war in Yugoslavia, providing a unified approach to Covid19, fixing systemic financial problems in Southern Europe or producing a Eurovision Song Contest winner that anyone actually remembers. And note that the EU came into being with the Maastricht Treaty so ABBA doesn't count. There were lots of reasons for the 2016 Brexit vote, both social and economic but the vote would never have even come close to happening without decades of press-reported, almost weekly examples of taxpayer money being squandered. Comic books promoting the EU as a federal country, museums of EU nationhood, José Barroso once spent €28k on a four-night stay at New York's Peninsula Hotel. At the time of the vote, 214 senior eurocrats were being paid more than David Cameron. It was actually a strategy at the time of Cameron's: to force the EU to accept modernising and reform, and put its house in order and regain the public trust. None of that happened of course. In response the council failed to produce accounts, voted itself a bigger budget and told Britain that they'd have to pay regardless thanks to majority voting. And that it was David Cameron's responsibility to accept it or risk being the PM that took Britain out of the project. Which in retrospect is like threatening to give someone the keys to your car.


5 ID Cards and that IT system
In 2005, the government wanted to institute a biometric passport system that would require people to get new IDs and it would also require the government to get a shiny new computer system. The government estimated the cost of the IDs to be approximately £93 per person and the cost of the equipment to be about £5.8bn in total and even Alan Sugar in his 1980s heyday couldn't get you that many computer for that price. The true costs turned out to be about 3 times that at £300 per person and between £12bn and £18bn for the equipment, which presumably doesn't include the ongoing costs of the time spent by the civil service on the customer service hotline at £1.50/minute. The government recently upgraded the passport system in a £265 million contract with IBM which could only be justified on the basis that IBM sponsors Wimbledon so some of the money found its way to grass-roots tennis. A year or so ago The Independent investigated Labour’s 10 most well-known IT mistakes (I'm surprised they could narrow it down to 10) and they calculated a cumulative total of £26bn in wasted funds. The biggest waste was a £12.7bn plan for the NHS to start using new electronic records. Fewer than 200 out of 9,000 health organizations are using the technology despite the fact that the money was spent on it faster than a drunk sailor on shore leave.

4 Iraq
Looking back on things it's remarkable to believe that Tony Blair was once very popular and trustworthy, so much so that he convinced the UK to back an illegal invasion of Iraq. The strangest part was that he'd just spent years concluding the Good Friday Agreement and brought peace to Northern Ireland and he would probably have a moderately respectable reputation these days if he hadn't tried to boost his poll ratings by feigning a mid-Atlantic accent and getting involved in a war. The financial cost of Iraq & Afghanistan is quite a complicated mess. Officially it was around £8bn although that is a ludicrous under-costing and doesn't include, for instance, equipment that had already long been depreciated off the MOD balance sheet. Some forms of accounting place the number at more like £20bn, though again that still doesn't account for the long term health care of wounded troops which will linger for decades, or the cost of the resulting retaliatory attacks like 7/7, or the the rise of ISIS or when oil went to over $100/barrel and come to think of it I heard that a few people died, I actually have a friend who killed over 30 people in Iraq: going to be honest, he's probably by far the worse mechanic the RAF ever hired but the long and short of it is that the whole region in in just as bad a way as it ever was. Tony Blair, having learnt not a lot from the whole debacle still defends his decision to invade the place with other peoples money and lives, and these days continues to mull around in that part of the world as a "consultant" although given his propensity to cash in on things, I imagine the only reason he signed up to get involved in the West Bank, was because he thought he'd be on the board of directors at a bank.

3 Public Private Partnerships
There's an old joke about someone asking their careers advisor about pursuing a career in organised crime and the teacher responds by asking whether they were meaning the government or the private sector. So public private partnerships or PPP were an idea thought up whereby consultancy companies would pay for lots of shiny new schools and hospitals, then slowly sell them back to the government, "slowly" being the key word there. But it would mean that Gordon Brown could officially be seen to be borrowing less money, and debts wouldn't be shown on the balance sheet and the likes of Capita could afford to give everyone a big pay rise. I'm joking of course, it was just the senior management that got the pay rises. As an example, the shiny new St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London cost $1.4bn to build, but will cost UK taxpayers $9.1bn by the end of the contract, or in the case of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the government will never own it because it's perpetual lease in which the government can only get out of the bad contract by walking away and closing the hospital. Probably the only way the Chancellor could get out of it would be to just let the SNP get their way and have the thing if they want it so badly, like a divorcing couple arguing about which of them in on the hook for the timeshare they signed up to years prior, before Corona meant it was not only expensive but also illegal to visit the place.

2) Nuclear programs
If you don't know the price of nuclear power wait until you see the Cherno bill. I could make point as to whether I'm talking civil or military but the thing is that all the UK nuclear programs are part of the same machine. At least the French are honest enough to admit that they subsidise the nuclear electricity industry so that they can nuclear armed nuclear powered submarines. How does the UK play out? Well back in 2006, the government managed to sell the idea of the Trident Nuclear Missile System by citing a cost of less than £25bn. However, in an accounting manoeuvre presumably stolen from the desk of Robert Maxwell, this cost didn’t take into consideration the long-term costs of maintaining the equipment once it was in place. The real cost for this program ended up at more than three times the initial projections and again, this is before the contracts for the pre-requisite power stations were agreed, roughly £20bn. Each. The real problem here was that the government forged ahead with the plan without actually allowing a debate to take place. More recently a sensible debate was impossible, in part because of Brexit and the involvement with the French. But largely because the opposition party was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a man who on paper passional despised nuclear weapons yet at the same time was unable to decide whether Russia or Iran having them was ok or not. Before he was forced to step down I always wondered if he would discover that the sun is in fact a large thermonuclear reaction, and therefore make it Labour party policy to "open a dialogue" with the sun and ask it to please stop shining. A policy that would no doubt go down well with Owen Jones who thinks the sun shines out of his rear end.

1) HS2
The go-ahead for the High Speed 2 railway to the Midlands (or possibly Scotland) comes in as the biggest public project in peacetime at a cost of anywhere from £32bn to perhaps £100bn depending on the price of land and who you ask and what route they eventually choose. It's egregious enough that it attracts an interesting set of activists from across the political spectrum being forced to act together. One one hand you have traditionalists who object to profligate waste and destruction and the colossal cost. And they're being forced to hold hands with the green activists who like trains, but whom also dislike the concept of long distance travel in general and they hate bulldozing the countryside but they also take delight in it largely carving its way through and spoiling the sorts of places that voted for Boris and for Brexit. HS2 is at this point the definition of sunk cost fallacy, nobody wants to be the person who admits that the fortune so far spent was money wasted that could have gone on better things. There's probably a joke in there about the government wanting to cover their tracks or what there loco-motives are at this stage. Either way it's a ludicrous vanity project that will ultimately save commuters about 20 minutes on the trip between Birmingham and London, and all being planned at a time when businesses are forging plans for people to mostly work from home in the future. Forget the idea of upgrading existing rail lines, or building a genuinely new line like the oft-talked about Stranraer to Northern Ireland sea-tunnel (costed at only about £6bn) And forget about that high speed line going as far as Glasgow or Edinburgh. It is really saying something that the part of the rail link that would link Scotland to London and bring potential financial benefits to Scotland, paid for by London, was ruled out because even the SNP failed to back the dubious financials underwriting the whole project. That's like offering to buy Oliver Reed a drink and him turning it down because he'd had enough.

I guess to sum it up, part of life is living with a government that behaves like Oliver Reed. Occasionally professional, often respected on the world stage, but also incredibly keen to liquidise your assets. When it comes to spending myself though? I guess I'll always remember some advice I was once given which was that it’s worth it to spend money on good speakers. That was some sound advice.

Chaos this week in America with videos of a brawl and takeover of the capitol building that were both exciting, yet also slightly dull because normally when you see that sort of stuff happening, someone like Steven Seagal shows up. Or maybe Michael Bay is filming it so for some reason stones and rocks are suddenly flammable because physics in his world makes about as much sense as the concepts like integrity or decency in the world of Washington DC.

As to the violence and bloodshed, the main story for me has been more the fact that supposed Trump-supporting extremists have almost all been identified as hard left activists who were maybe paid to show up and undermine the president's tv reputation further, or perhaps they just like to smash things up and cause trouble. One of them was in Philadelphia a few months ago at a Black Lives Matter protest smashing up the Apple store. Who knows, maybe he thought the senate had some stuff in it worth stealing and to be honest the scenes did also remind me of those clips where you see a crowd running amok inside a Walmart or a maybe walking out of a Target store with a 60" television. Unfortunately the only things for sale in that building were the politicians who'd long since departed. But generally speaking, for all the talk of paid actors and protestors, I'm inclined to think they're more like the sort of England football fans that used to go abroad in order to get into a good fight and smash up the local taverna. The sort of idiots that heard Churchill talking about fighting them on the beaches and took that as an instruction to travel to the world cup and get arrested.

Nonetheless, there seems to be a sense by some the in 2 weeks it will all be over and the country will return to normal, or at least the definition of normal that includes being the sort of place where you can ask for a sandwich and tell the serve to substitute the bread for two pieces of friend chicken. This all seems wildly misplaced optimism on behalf of the left but wasn't it always so? If the election was indeed what they said it was then the best option would be to have an enquiry, answer all the questions, show that the result was beyond doubt and prove to the world the Mr Trump was at the end of the day a somewhat shifty businessman who lost reelection. Instead all lines of question have been shut down, people silenced, livelihoods threatened for daring to ask what in some cases are very legitimate questions. Thing like why are there videos of boxes being brought into the room after the officials and observers had finished up for the day. Why was the count trusted to a company that was donating millions of dollars to one of the two parties involved.

Apparently you're dangerous or racist if you don't accept everything you're told and those lines of question have thus been shut down faster than Jamie Oliver restaurants or branches of K-Mart depending on what side of the pond you want your analogy from. The end result of the censorship and media blackout is that Donald Trump is being actively transformed into not a failure but a martyred man of the people, like some kind of rightwing Bobby Kennedy. The one thing you'd think people would learn by now is that if you want to stop a conspiracy theory the last thing you want to probably do is ban people from mentioning it: that's about as effective as trying to shovel water with a pitchfork. Thus in 20 or even 50 years a solid chunk of the population will still mention that time when the media and the state had no option but to rig an election because it was the only conceivable way they could defeat Donald Trump because he was just too popular to defeat any other way. And personally speaking, I'd probably side with that theory if only because like I said the media have been so suspiciously keen to shut down and ridicule the debate.

Welcome back, how was everyone's Christmas break? Hopefully better than at Debenhams where they apparently had to cancel their nativity play due to a lack of a prophet (profit). In my house a memorable highpoint (or lowlight) was when someone tried to use "Brexit" as a word in Scrabble and thus caused a bit of an argument as to whether it was allowed or not, although at least after we confirmed the rules we accepted the result rather than trying to drag the game into next Christmas. Did you hear the one about how Old MacDonald had a very bad Scrabble hand: E-I-E-I-O. But yes, welcome to 2021, anyone have any new years resolutions? Mine is 1080p.

Anyway, the main news of course is the movement of Britain from being part of the EU, to an international sovereign country which trades on its own terms and exports to the rest of the world and it seems that one of the first exports has been a new strain of super-covid. If you’ve seen a chart of where the new super-covid has been detected, and you see them using red to colour in the affected countries, you’ll be patriotically pleased to see it looks just like one of those old British Empire maps where they used red. Rule Britania eh, makes you want to pour a glass of gin and raise a toast to the fact that hardly any of the stuff in the British museum is actually British.

But for now we’ll wait and see how the corona plays out. For me the highlight of new year is always the National Archives releasing some newly declassified stuff. There’s some interesting bits and pieces this year, especially one where in the 1970s the British government assumed that the US was going to invade Saudi Arabia and impose some regime change to lower fuel prices. But luckily they left it alone and the country never caused any geopolitical problems ever again. If I had to rate the political relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, I’d probably give 9 out of 11.

The other bizarre story is that 25 years ago, impressionist Rory Bremner called around a few back bench conservative MPs pretending to be John Major, to see if the impression was convincing enough. In the process he accidentally stopped a rebellion on the right that would have toppled the PM and almost certainly put Michael Heseltine or maybe Ken Clarke into Downing Street. The ultimately irony is that Bremner has spent the past 4 years being a vocal campaigner for a 2nd referendum and cancelling Brexit and yet it seems that he was personally responsible for stopping a chain of events that would have almost certainly have seen Britain join the Euro thanks to Michael Heseltine. And talking of tinpot rulers, apparently the MCC was blocked from giving a membership to Robert Mugabe. Apparently it was a decision made by John Major who asides from being PM at the time, was also thinking of his retirement and presumably didn’t want to risk having to sit next to him for 5 days. No quote from Mugabe although I’m guessing he thought the way they behaved just wasn’t cricket.

With both Brexit and Christmas only a couple weeks away I thought I’d look at how the 12 days of Christmas are looking this year.

Twelve drummers drumming. There’s an old joke about two cowboys riding through a canyon and they hear the ominous sound of drums beating. One of them said, "I don't like the sound of those drums." And a distant voice shouts out "He's not our regular drummer!" But anyway, most of the drummers I’ve seen the last year or two were the peoples referendum weirdos making a noise outside of parliament, who ironically have all had to beat it, and now they have their little Marxist get-togethers online rather than outside of branch of Itsu. With all this quarantining we have to be especially careful of drummers though in the spring, there’s a real worry that they could emerging thinking they've learned to play guitar and sing

Eleven pipers piping. I have a friend who was hearing bagpipes in his head, he was diagnosed with Scotsophrenia. Anyway, pipers 11 of the and presumably round at Nicola Sturgeon’s house which seems like it would be contradiction to the SNPs laws about large gatherings but hey, do as I say not as I do. Beside if you want a smaller act like The Proclaimers it’ll cost you a few quid, or Scottish pounds, or maybe Euros, it really depends what time of day the interviewer asks.

Ten lords a-leaping, I wish they were really but most of them will still likely be showing up at the House of Lords for their daily £300 attendance fee and they’re more likely to be leaping to submit a receipt than out of a window. These are the likes of Lord Heseltine and Neil Kinnock, Phillip Hammond and Ken Clarke who are too important to risk having to face the public or show accountability. Luckily not John Bercow though, denied a peerage, serves him right. I once read that he attended a Pride festival, though presumably because he thought it would attract supporters of Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Envy, and Wrath

Nine ladies dancing. Going to be honest here, with the addition of the dancers, we’re up to 42 people here. It makes you wonder whether the person giving these gifts is somehow involved in human trafficking? Do the girls speak with an east European accent and are they just there for dancing? What’s the next one of these I wonder.

Eight maids a-milking. I’m sure they were but apparently Prince Andrew was at Pizza Express that evening so he didn’t know. Someone once threw a pint of milk at me and I thought, “how dairy”

Seven swans a-swimming. Pretty sure you have to be royal to eat or trade in swans, although I’m not sure whether that was something that was ever regulated by Brussels or not. I do know that the Queen doesn’t actually eat them, even at Christmas. Although they’ve got white feathers and black skin so I’m frankly astonished that Meghan Markle hasn’t tried to appropriate them to push some kind of racial addenda. I guess that would involve reading and research on their behalf though. I'm currently reading a book about shipbuilding. It's riveting. And earlier in the summer I read a book about an immortal dog that was impossible to put down.

Six geese a-laying. I always found this was a sensible number of geese to have laying, because the half dozen eggs would fit perfectly into an egg carton. Although a number of years ago I remember there was a story doing the rounds that Brussels was trying to regular the number of eggs in a carton, presumably to make it a metric number like 10 rather than a dozen or force them to be sold by the gram rather than per egg. The last time I actually saw a goose though was down at the gold course. I remember I shot a birdie on the 7th hold, largely because the swan in question kept honking at me while I was trying to line up my putt.

Five golden rings. The price of gold is up over 20% this year while the FTSE 100 is down a thousand points. Personally speaking, I’d probably sell the gold and buy in at the bottom of the market. I’m not a broker of course, nor though would I expect to get rich by listening to a broker, given that their job title is a verb meaning to make you go bankrupt.

Four calling birds. I do know when to buy the calling birds though, when they’re going cheap!

Three French hens. According to the Guardian they’re going to be staying in France. Maybe sat on top of a phone mast trying to make a long distance caw. The food stories about Brexit have all been fairly ludicrous, suggesting that French and Dutch farmers will choose to destroy their animals and crops rather than sell them on the open market. The part of the French story that seemingly hasn’t been mentioned as much is the fact that France is lining up to sign billions of pounds of energy contracts, the Sizewall contract alone may be worth £20bn and this is forgetting what happens if the UK brings in a tax to enter British airspace. But sure, French cheese might go up in price so focus on that. It’s not as if anywhere in England makes cheese.

Two turtle doves. Did you here about the marxist dove that lived in a coup? A coup, never mind that joke worked better when I scribbled it down on paper. Quickly moving on.

A partridge in a pear tree. An expression that now makes me largely think of Alan Partridge. Personally speaking If I’m getting a pear tree I’d rather it had a bottle on brandy on in it like those pear in a bottle things they make in Alsace. Yet another product that will probably be impossible to buy, unless by impossible you mean readily available on the internet, and in the shops. Let’s close with a classic joke, two men die and find themselves standing at the Pearly Gates. "Both of you were very good men," says St. Peter, "but heaven is getting crowded and I can only allow one of you in. What can you do?" The first, a farmer, plants a pear tree, and it grows huge, delicious fruits. "Wonderful," said St. Peter. He turns to the 2nd, a king and asks "What can you do, your majesty?" The king decides to visit to the toilet. Ultimately, St. Peter made the decision to allow the king into heaven. And the moral of the story is, a royal flush always wins against a pear, no matter how big.

This past year people might not have been paying attention but the Brexit clock has steadily been ticking along, although for me the only clock it reminded me of is that one in the movie Groundhog Day where it flips over ever morning and Bill Murray has to do the same story to camera day after day after day. But in a year where Covid has dominated the news story it’s almost somewhat refreshing, a throwback to last year, seeing Michel Barnier stumbling out of a limo spouting a bunch of nonsense from behind a blue and yellow-starred facemask. If the recycling of old news continues then I guess it can’t be long until CNN returns to it’s live search for that downed Malaysian airplane off of Australia. At the time of that story I came up with two terrible Malaysian Airline jokes, the first one got no response and the second one was shot down in flames. I wonder if they’re retelling that joke it at Diego Garcia, at least I think that was one of the conspiracies doing the rounds at the time.

Anyway, the main Brexit story as I said has been the EU going back to its Theresa May era tactic of refusing to budge on a couple of important things on the assumption that Boris will concede in much the same way that he’s had to when confronted by his former ladyfriends’ lawyers. There’s probably some good euphemistic jokes in there about how Michel Barnier wants to do to the PM what Boris did to Guardian journalist Anna Fazackerley. Supposedly the main sticking point in the EU negotiation has been fishing rights and given Emanuel Macron’s current unpopularity at home, if he were to somehow pull off this political feat then it would be one of the most spectacular surprises involving fish since that story about the 5 thousand and some loafs. Certainly leaks to the press heavily imply that everyone else around the table on the EU side are keen for Mr Macron to just be quiet so that they sign some kind of lose trading agreement, mostly involving German cars, and get on with the important business of whether to order the lamb, the chicken or the veal or discuss whether Han Shot First

The UK and the EU have until the end of the year to agree a trade deal as well as other things: especially getting round to translating whatever document comes out. EU law requires that it be published in several languages before they can legally pass it. It does lend a certain irony to the fact that draconian anti-trust laws and fines against Google are being legislated for at the very time when they need Google Translate more than ever. Unless of course Boris employs a retaliatory French move, stands up lighting a gauloise cigarette and walks out the room as someone plays some Debussy on the piano, safe in the knowledge that Germany is too terrified of a trade war to let anything very much actually happen. Perhaps was the plan all along though, that the EU needs to stick to indefensible demands in order for everyone to walk away from the table blaming the other side and with the UK no longer holding back further integration. Or perhaps they’re just stubborn. There’s a only expression that to Err is human but to successfully blame it on someone else shows political shrewdness and to really screw it up probably involves a plan. There’s also another one that to Err is human but to Arr is pirate and to Oar is canoeing.

There were a couple non-Covid deaths this past week, notable the Argentine footballer Maradona who finally kicked/punched the bucket at the age of 60. In England the passing was celebrated by many, although he was of course deeply mourned in both Argentina and Scotland. I'm guessing that as a mark of respect there was maybe talk about removing all the white lines from the side of the pitch seeing as how Maradonna largely died at 60 because he cut more lines than an Audi driver in a hurry.

Elsewhere the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (fra-keeza-day) was gunned down in his car, raising many questions in the media like "how do you pronounce his name" because it's spelled like something Network Rail would hang outside a train station in Wales. Nonetheless the Iranian regime has been pretty quick to blame Israel for a number of reasons [1] President Trump didn't tweet responsibility [2] Mohsen wasn't a Russian disident [3] an Israeli cabinet minister said he had "no clue" whilst presumably smirking behind a facemark, perhaps secretly sticking his tongue out. Or maybe it was on a zoom call and he was holding some very crossed fingers just out of camera shot. It's an odd time we live in I guess, who'd have thought a year ago that within 12 months you could potentially be arrested for walking into a bank and NOT wearing a mask?

What else? Apparently the UK and France have reached an agreement to tackle migrants crossing the English Channel with "special equipment". Presumably boats? Maybe boats armed with a gun or two? Talk about the obvious though, it's like that Jailbreak song by Thin Lizzy where there's a lyrics "Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak Somewhere in this town" and you think "presumably at the prison?" Oh well, the navy and armed forces are secretive enough at the best of times I imagine; I remember once asking a friend who's an officer what the lowest rank in the army was. He said, "It's Private." I said, "Come on, you can tell me, I've known you 20 years."

I’m back this week after a last minute arranged little holiday before yet more lockdowns, so I guess in some respects I was learning from Rishi Sunak’s example of running up the credit card. Or possibly Kier Starmer’s example of spending a week not really doing any work. Or Boris’ for that matter. He’s supposedly on a new exercise regime following his Covid scare but given his work ethic I wonder if it mostly involves doing diddly-squats.

Mind you, of all the potential holidays going on I was intrigued by the one that Mo Farah is taking, he’s a contestant on that I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here show. I’m looking forward to the episode where he goes on a bushtucker trial and has to face his greatest fear, a surprise drugs test from the IOC. It’s a pretty nice setup they all have though, dinner made of bugs and worms and the like which must mean that ITV shelled out to get Heston Blumenthal to do the cooking.

In the mean time I guess the big story has been the move towards a Covid vaccine with a couple coming to market soon. Pfizer claim a 95% effectiveness and the Russian’s have been talking about how they have their own version which at 90% effective makes it more reliable than their Novichok which continues to annoy yet not kill Vladimir's political opponents. Nonetheless, it’s good news for pharmaceutical companies with governments all over the world set to buy hundreds of millions of doses. I say “all across the world” - I of course mean specifically Europe and America: wealthy places, seeing as how the quoted figure is $20 per dose, that’s almost as bad a glass of wine in a London restaurant. If such places were open.

I guess the one story this week that reassures me that the world is kind of the same as it was last year was that once again everyone’s arguing over the BBC’s decision to censor the song “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues, because of a line where Kirsty MacColl accuses Shane of being a bundle of sticks. I guess it could be worse, they’ve presumably not spotted and thus taken offense at the word ‘fairy’ in the the title. Be prepared next year for “Alternative Lifestyle of New York” presumably sung by the cast of Mrs Brown’s Boys and all about as entertaining as watching someone die from Covid.