I was struggling a bit this week trying to find a decent story to talk about, it’s mostly just been the Olympics this week. I tuned in to see a 2 hour long show where Claire Balding and Gabby Logan get their hair done but that’s to be expected for a show described as “extended highlights”. There’s probably also a good Olympics joke about an East European gymnastics team and the phrase “Czechs and Balances”

I guess the other news is maybe that Carrie Johnson is going to have another child, which maybe explains why the European Union are so keen to get Boris round the negotiating table to discuss what they meant by the withdrawal agreement.

I guess for me the main story was the internet exploding about Piers Corbyn supposedly accepting a bribe to not attack AstraZeneca. For those who missed this, there was a YouTube channel that did a sting operation on Jeremy Corbyn’s brother who has spent the last 12 months protesting and even going to jail over the cause of covid lockdowns and vaccinations. As Piers go he’s caused more difficulty for the government that Brighton’s West Pier. Anyway, this last week some YouTubers made a video of him accepting £10k to only attack Pfizer and Moderna, not AstraZeneca. They claimed to represent AstraZeneca shareholders which makes it strange given that the company is selling the vaccine at cost price anyway. All things considered it’s quite a strange and badly researched sting given that he Piers was doing that anyway: attacking Pfizer and Moderna’s RNA based approach to covid but leaving AstraZeneca largely alone. It’s like offering Nigel Farage to lay into the EU when he’s talking about Brexit. When Prince Harry recently signed a book deal to attack the Royal Family, we don’t call that bribe. The YouTube video itself actually ultimately involved the envelope of money being surreptitiously swapped for one containing monopoly money, presumably because 10 grand is a lot of cash and YouTube content providers don’t get as much of a payday for promoting NordVPN as they used to. It does mean that they now have an unusable Monopoly set though with no money it, probably the ideal Christmas present for Piers’ left wing wing younger brother. Or perhaps Jeremy plays a special left winger version involving hyperinflation, in which case I guess Pier’s has an envelope of it to contribute to the set. Alls well that ends well I guess.

However, the strange part of the tale is that this wasn’t even the only Covid story involving a Piers this week, as the smug self-aggrandising Daily Mail columnist Piers Morgan put out an article about how he thinks the vaccine saved his life. Personally I’m still not sure who he was appealing to, it suggests that if the vaccine didn’t exist then we’d live in a world with no Piers Morgan, I guess it was an article promoting the anti-vax movement.