Search results for Boris:

Silvio Berlusconi passed away at the the age of 86. I saw a notice saying "Rest in Peace" and certainly the families of young Italian girls can now rest easy.

Ted Kaczynski also passed away, he was the Unabomber who killed and injured dozens of people before being arrested in the 90s. There's not expected to be many people at the funeral because invitations have been posted out but people are understandably worried about opening the packages.

Nicola Sturgeon still reeling from her visit from t ......

I hear that at hospitals across the land, they’ve given up asking patients if they can remember who the prime minister is, because this last week there has been only one story: Liz Truss’s discovery that a week may be a long time in politics, but 44 days is in fact a darned short time to be Prime Minister although to give her some credit, she managed to outlast Pope John Paul I as well as Brian Clough’s management of Leeds United. Think of her like one of Henry VIII’s wives, in so much as a lot of people never actually saw here and she’ll most likely be remembered as someone who turns up in the answers at a pub quiz.

For me the game was up when I heard Penny Maudant telling the Tories to get behind Liz, because typically conservative politicians only get behind someone when they have a knife in hand. In most other lines of work, 6 weeks would be considered seasonal labor, whether it’s picking hops at a farm in Kent, being the Santa Clause at Tesco, or when a removal company in Westminster realises they need a few extra hands to deal with all the extra work they’re being asked to perform. If the next PM was forced to call an election then that would potentially mean 4 PMs in one year, at which point I think Graham Brady will have filled up his card and get a free coffee out of it.

Of course, Liz Truss’ tenure in the job does come with the one benefit that you get £100k for life assuming she’s shameless enough to claim it. What Am I talking about? She’s a politician who used to work in marketing and was also a Liberal Democrat at one point. Obviously not as dishonest though as matter, which according to physicists makes up everything.

I guess talking about well paying jobs though the people making out on all of this are the removal company that the civil service pays to shift the PMs possessions. Boris made a few references to the Roman leader Cincinnatus who stood down as leader before being asked to come back later but really at the moment number 10 seems more like the late Empire where the position is for sale, hence Rishi Sunak’s coup d’etat with him being ushered in to the sort of public enthusiasm you only normally see at a cancer diagnosis. Why Rishi even wants the job I have no clue, he’ll be out in 2 years time after all. Ah well, for now just bask in the unfolding of history, days like this only come around every few months after all.

All political careers end in failure, but with the resignation of Boris Johnson, a lot of speculation has been made as to what he’s going to do with all that spare time on his hands. Perhaps go on one of those reality tv shows, I'd imagine Love Island would be right up his street albeit they likely don't pay enough. He famously lead a very expensive lifestyle and if you ever hear someone claim he’s outstanding, it’s very possibly a bank manager discussing his overdraft. As such I thought I’d do a review of what the last 10 prime ministers got up to when they left office

1) Theresa May has stayed on the backbenches as MP for Maidenhead, even staying on and keeping her seat at the 2019 election so she clearly has no plans. Very much like her strategy when it came to Brexit. There’s not much to say really, she hasn’t published a book although she did get some cash for speaking in America before the pandemic prevented her leaving the country. Curiously there’s been talk about her becoming secretary-general of NATO, and she was recently banned from ever visiting Russia. Not that I can think of many reasons you’d want to go there right now.

2) David Cameron famously bought a shed for £25 grand in which to write a memoir which got decent reviews and he was paid £800k for it. However, his main hobby really got going when he became an advisor to Greensill Capital. He was paid $1m per year for 25-days work, in addition to $60m in share options. He was certainly earning his keep though, he convinced Matt Hancock to get the NHS to use Greensill’s Earnd app and then when the pandemic broke out he convinced the taxpayer-owned British Business Bank to give them a largely unsecured loan of £400m. The whole grubby situation was sleazy enough that they’ve since changed the rules. So along with when he called UKIPs bluff by calling the Brexit referendum, it’s nice to know that he’s largely effecting change by messing things up, although I’m sure his mother and his bank manager are very proud.

3) Gordon Brown stayed on as a backbencher for a couple of years although he spent much of that time becoming involved in the Scottish Independence referendum. Of course his main ambition was to get the top job at the IMF, although David Cameron blocked the idea, correctly seeing that it would be like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Brown is famous for two things: [1] being one of the few PMs to never win an election [2] spending 10 years promising an end to boom and bust without realising he was manufacturing the largest boom and bust in the UKs history. He’s spent the last decade doing some laudable work with charities although he himself is paid via a charity foundation that means he doesn’t have to pay tax that would actually help solve the problems in the first place

4) Tony Blair left office and set up shop in the Middle East, possibly under the misunderstanding that the West Bank was a financial institution. He’s earned roughly £100m since leaving office although it always puts a smile on my face when I think about how his career’s work to rebuild the Labour party and be president of a federal Europe was all destroyed in about 3 years thanks to Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. I remember seeing him interviewed at Davos where he guaranteed a 2nd referendum and it must annoy him that out of a decade’s work (which included things like fixing Northern Ireland) he’s largely seen as a warmonger. He claims to have gone through a religious rebirth since although it’s typically a wishy washy form of Catholicism that includes new age symbols, magic pendants, a belief that the Bible something you can pick and choose bits from, and of course the bit where Vanity Fair claimed he had an affair with Rupert Murdoch’s ex wife.

5) John Major spent the day after the 1997 election at the Oval where Surrey won by 6 wickets which was won of the few victories Major had experienced for years, seeing as how his last years in power were very much like watching the collapse of an English test match side. He went on to be head of Surrey, and later the MCC and wrote a number of well-received books about cricket as well as the usual flotilla of directorships and charity appointments. His main charity appearances seem to be the BBC where he turns up from time to time to moan about Brexit or act as if he is owed respect simply for being less unpopular than Neil Kinnock back in 1992 Curiously he was also appointed a special guardian to Princes William and Harry after the death of their mother albeit the strangest of stories was more when it was revealed that he and Edwina Curry had been having an affair. How did they keep that a secret? Well like one of his cricketing heroes, I’m stumped.

6) Margaret Thatcher in government was polarizing depending on who you were and where you were living at the time. But after she left government, there’s really not a lot of positive things you can say about her and that comes as someone who watched her funeral procession outside St Pauls. She took up a job with Phillip Morris who paid her half a million pounds per year, and also campaigned for the release of Augusto Pinochet and encouraged both George Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq. She was quite a cheerleader for Tony Blair who was one those rare few invited to her 80th birthday dinner. Someone else in attendance was her old friend and later foe Geoffrey Howe who summed up how her true post-ministerial legacy was the sheer extent of how her legacy had changed the face of Britain. “Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible”

7) James Callaghan resigned at the end of the 1970s and the winter of discontent, and he stayed on until after the 1980 party conference where they changed the voting system so that Michael Foot could be elected. That same system would years later lead to Ed Milliband being elected Labour Leader rather than his Brother. Callaghan was one of the last vaguely honourable retirements, he was a non-exec director of the Bank of Wales and he was responsible for Great Ormond Street Hospital retaining the Peter Pan rights indefinitely. There’s also an anecdote kicking around that in 1997 a volunteer phone staffer was phoning random party members looking for recruits. Callaghan was asked if he’d thought about becoming more involved in politics to which he responded that he thought that being Prime Minister had been enough.

8) Harold Wilson resigned after a diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease although he claimed to be exhausted and simply retiring because he was 60. On his way out he handed out a few questionable honours including a Lordship to Joseph Kagan who manufactured his favourite jacket and had a brief stint at tv, hosting 2 episodes of Friday Night Saturday Morning. It’s terrible tv and often listed in top 10s lists of worst shows ever alongside that sitcom about Hitler, that naked gameshow hosted by Keith Chegwin and any episode of Question Time filmed since the Brexit Referendum.

9) Edward Heath spent years on the back-benches complaining about the Rise of Thatcher as both party leader and then Prime Minister, with many referring to him as the Incredible Sulk. Supposedly a meeting between them was so short that Thatcher stayed an extra half hour for coffee with his PPS so that the press wouldn’t cotton onto how badly it had gone. The 1980s saw him watch as the policies of monetarism and privatization went against everything he stood for and he continued to turn down offers of a cabinet position or an oversea role with the UN or ambassador to the US. There’s a lot of speculation about his private life but I guess the less said about that the better although maybe some of us will live long enough to see the private papers being released.

10) We’ll finish this list with Alec Douglas Home, the last PM born during the Edwardian era and the last to have been in the Lords before he took up the role. He got the job when Macmillan was forced to resign due to the Profumo affair which shows how trivial the Boris scandals were really. Macmillan’s defence secretary had been sharing a lady of ill repute with a soviet naval attaché, vs what, drinking some wine a staffer bought you from Tesco? Anyway, there wasn’t much to his Home’s premiership, one of the shortest ever and after a year in Number 10 he went on to spend the next quarter century back in the house of Lords where he’d started. He came from money so that explains things a bit, he mostly spent his retirement fishing, hunting, writing a couple books and keeping to himself. As they say, the past is a foreign country, although if it is then it does make you wonder why Daily Mail columnists keep saying so many positive things about it.

Boris Johnson was finally forced to step down this week after weeks of speculation. Wednesday morning saw a landslide of resignations with the cabinet falling apart faster than an old one from Ikea. Officially he’ll remain in the job until the Conservative party chooses a new leader and he can get a reasonable quote from a moving company, good luck with that right now.

The last week had started off the same as previous weeks but the important thing to remember is that Boris himself had said that it would be “Irresponsible” to resign, and so at that point it was guaranteed that the prime minister known for being irresponsible would likely be gone soon. In the end the straw that broke the camels back was the emergence of the backstory of Chris Pincher, the Deputy Chief Whip who had to step down over a serious of allegations made against him. When MPs said that they’d felt the pinch they’re not talking about the cost of living. So then it was sadly inevitable that it turned out that the prime minister knew everything at the time but once more tried to cover the story up, as he’d done with the parties at number 10 and various other scandals like how many kids he has.

As an opening salvo to the battle to force the Prime Minister out, Tuesday saw Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak both turn in their resignations although there could be a job opening for Sajid because it’s only a matter of time before the diversity obsessed BBC or Netflix remake the Adams family and cast him as Uncle Fester. If you think that’s a silly proposition, the 2nd most read story on the BBCs website right now is “Friends creator admitted show used wrong pronouns”

Who will be the next PM? If I had to put down £50 I’d say Ben Wallace. The job as PM has for decades swapped between well known charismatic people and lesser known dull people and now it’s time for some boring stewardship of the country. Certainly the Labour Party and the SNP might regret the fact that their demands for Boris to resign have been answered because once you remove him and his unique cloud of scandal, the Conservative party once more looks like a pretty reasonable group of people that the public might vote for at the next election.

This last week finally saw the Conservative party call for a vote of no confidence and the Prime minister performed an art of escapology akin to what you would normally see in Las Vegas, to the extend that I could have see him choosing to replace Larry the Cat with 2 large white tigers. Under the terms of the party’s system, that means he’s safe in the job for another year and so for most onlookers it’s like seeing an old car where one of the doors is a different colour, somehow get past an MOT. And for the sake of metaphorical accuracy, let’s make that car an old 90s Vauxhall Cavalier, what with the word cavalier describing pretty much what went on, but also allowing a nice link to Charles I, and the topic of regicide and removing leaders.

The conservative party is quite keen on it as hobbies go, and seem to have a leadership election every couple of years in the same way that you or I might decide to buy a new laptop, in both cases it’s just easier to just get a new one that fix the old one, especially when it’s been permenantly damaged by an accident involving some wine

The Labour party have a system where it’s almost impossible to successfully challenge an incumbent leader, they tend to hang around until they lose an election, sometimes longer, which is possibly why Tony Blair remains the last Leader to have actually won any elections since Harold Wilson back in 1974. That’s a time so long ago that Rominic Raab was only 3 days old and Rishi Sunak hadn’t even been born, although he was perhaps already being listed as a company director on the books in order to hide overseas earnings.

Anyway, back to Boris, nearly 40% of his MPs voted against him although it’s genuinely hard to tell if that’s a good or a bad thing. The last Conservative leader to be removed successfully was Iain Duncan Smith who was supported by the grass roots members, all while the MPs wanted Ken Clarke in charge. Many forget that Theresa May survived her challenges and eventually resigned after the 3 meaningful votes on Brexit nonsense, a trilogy of voting that is probably up there with The Hobbit trilogy in terms of being a complete waste of everyone’s time. Comparisons could be made to Thatcher but at this point, why? We are where we are and I would probably have Boris in charge, for the simple reason that unlike many others in Parliament, he has no intention of dealing with Ukraine by placing the British Army under the command of a joint-EU defence force; he’s also not going to push for a vote on Irish Unification under the guise of Brussels rules, simply because a journalist mentioned it on Facebook; and because finally, quite frankly, he’s still a better electoral offering than anyone else on his side, let alone what the Labour Party has to offer. If Boris is a Vauxhall Cavelier, it’s still a preferable car to drive than a… (wait for it)… Kia Starmer.

In the news this week

Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey in trouble again and facing 4 charges of assault. In his defense, he said that all he did was ask the young men if they wanted the part.

America has a baby food shortage at the movement which is officially being blamed on the driver shortage as well as one of the few massive factories being closed in what is a tight and regulated industry. Although if you want my 2 cents, there were none of these shortages issue until met started letting men get pregnant. Based on what the BBC seem to claim.

Talking of the BBC, there was an incident this week when a BBC News broadcast briefly displayed the text “Manchester United are Rubbish” before it was taken down and an intern presumably given the sack. I’m not sure which is the stranger part of the story: that the BBC News reported something that was true, or that they felt the need to apologise for doing so

The main story is probably Ukraine but this week the media have gone all-in on the Partygate scandal, desperate to claim the scalp of the Prime Minister for 5 main reasons [1] he went to Eton [2] he was key in making Brexit happen [3] he sometimes criticises the more extreme aspects of wokery [4] He once wrote for the Daily Telegraph [5] Most importantly, they didn’t get an invite to the party in question. If Laura Kuenssberg or Justin Webb had been asked along then they’d have at Downing Street faster than party donor in search of a peerage. In the mean time Boris has sought to change the rules about people having to resign although if he really wants to wind up the left he should team with Quincy Jones to rerelease the song “It’s my party and I’ll lie if I want to”. Sorry, it wasn’t a “party” - it was a “work meeting with refreshments” or some such rubbish. That sort of rebranding is like if someone claims that they weren’t sacked, they just suffer from “earning disabilities”

Lots of stories in the news this week

- Joe Biden has promised a billion dollars worth of high-tech military equipment to the Ukrainian army, with the one stipulation that they have to collect it from Afghanistan.
- Boris Johnson announced that asylum seekers are going to be processed in an overseas centre hosted by the Rwandan government. Which is you’re an economic migrant travelling from Morocco or Libya essentially means that the prime minister has achieved the Guinness record for the world’s largest game of Snakes and Ladders. The key point in this story is that it is not aimed at all migrants, it’s literally just for those travelling to the UK “unlawfully” - in other words the ones using a raft to travel to Kent from the implied humanitarian disaster or genocide unfolding in suburban France.
- Although talking of which, there was a wave of violence in France after the first round of the election meant that next weekend the run off vote will be between Macron and Marne Le Pen. It’s a very modern attitude, young people don’t get their own way by shouting enough so they go and smash the place up like a petulant child. One Mélenchon supporter said of the upcoming vote, “it's like choosing between the plague or cholera” Or as a tourist would say like choosing between walking up the stairs at the Eiffel Tower or paying $20 euros to take the lift, all whilst shady characters try to pick-pocket you and sell you rubbish. And that’s just the local French politicians.
- Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are still holding out, despite being fined over the Partygate fiasco. Lack of morals aside, their lies and excuses are frankly ridiculous, it’s as if Fred West had tried to play innocent by claiming he'd purchased his garden's topsoil from a shop in Lockerbie. The two of them should be gone but they’re still probably the best 2 people to have that job, despite the lockdown boozing and people could probably name more of ‘colours of wine’ then ‘members of the shadow cabinet’
- One of the Russian flagships the armed-to-the-teeth Moskava has been sunk in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians have boasted about how their torpedo attack, although the Russians blame an on-board fire that hit a munitions cache. Either way the Ukrainian leadership have said it strikes a hit at the very heart of the Kremlin which makes them look pretty silly given that the Kremlin is actually a thousand miles away in Moscow, not a boat, and what a silly waste of an expensive anti-ship missile on a ship that was already sinking, what were they thinking?
- There’s a story about a GP who abused 48 patients over 35 years old. Which is a ghastly story although at least it makes a change from the ones where the women are under 35.

China has banned smoking in schools, although I think the children are still allowed to smoke in the workplace.
Controversy over music steaming company Spotify who have decided to not cancel their controversial but wildly popular and lucrative Joe Rogan podcast. Personally speaking, I’m not into that stuff because I still get my music the old fashioned way, pirated mp3s off the internet.
This last week, February 2nd, was Groundhog Day, the folky holiday from Pennsylvania made into the brilliant Bill Murray movie about a man reliving the same 24 hours, day after day after day and that story must ring very true for the Prime Minister

Once more the papers are full of speculation about how long Boris Johnson will last in number 10. The groundhog in Punxsutawney predicted that this year there would be 6 more weeks of winter but nobody has a clue whether we’ll get six more weeks of Boris or not. This week saw the police report, Aaron Bell submitted a letter of no confidence and Downing St saw the departure of 5 close advisors, but the cabinet seem to think that it will eventually go away if they wait it out and nobody views the Labour Party as being a credibly government in waiting. At another shouting match at the dispatch box, the prime minister looked at the opposition bench and made a reference to them being like Dick Dastardly & Muttley, although that would have been a better analogy a few years ago when it was Jeremy Corbyn and his friends because you could at least make a follow up joke about the Wacky Racists.

The unfortunate thing is that if you look past the stories of suitcases of pinot grigio and birthday cakes and photographs, there is actual news if you skip past the first few pages in the newspaper. You have a possible war brewing in Eastern Europe, Brexit is once again very much in the news in Northern Ireland and apparently there are now more open food banks than branches of McDonalds. But the only real food story that apparently matters is that about whether “Carrie Antoinette” let her husband eat cake.

In the news this week:
- The rock singer Meatloaf died, allegedly of covid, and if true then it would fitting that he was killed by a bat out of hell. I told that joke to a friend who responded by sining "you took the words right out of my mouth"
- There was also a terrorist siege at a synagogue in Texas. This was reported by the BBC as "A man from Leicester has been shot by police in Texas" and I thought that's from nearly 5000 miles away, he must be a heck of a good shot.
- Another article on the Beeb speculated about what would happen if the whole world went vegan. My answer is that I suspect we'd never hear the end of it.

To be honest most of the news this week has just been the ongoing fallout from last week's Party-gate story. Things are now in the secrecy stage where Conservative MPs may or may not be writing to Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee which ultimately has the power to force a leadership election if 15% of MPs vote for one. Boris has managed to largely distance himself from the details of what went on which is remarkable, especially as even Fred West eventually admitted to having had people in his garden. Do MPs think that they stand to lose their seat at the next election though. That wouldn't be for another 2 years by which point many expect that things will be forgotten, the economy will be doing well again and they don't want to potentially gamble everything on Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak when Boris, love him or hate him has a knack for winning elections. He’s very much like Manchester City in that respect, including wearing the colour blue as well as having very murky finances that none of us are allowed to know about.

Talking about replacing leaders though, the US has also seen a scramble at the top and DCs worst kept secret is that senior people are trying to decide how best to replace Joe Biden, either at the next election or possibly beforehand if need be. The president gave one of the first to-camera pieces for weeks recently in which he seemed confused, suffering from serious cognitive decline and one point accidentally it would be ok if Russia made a minor incursion into Ukraine, before later retracting that and saying he meant something completely different but at this point it's a like a small child covered in chocolate claiming to not know where the chocolate cake went. I probably shouldn’t joke though because it’s a tragic situation, he should be a care home living out his last years in peace and quiet, not being dragged out in front of a rabid press once every 6 weeks and expected to make nuanced statements. President Trump said crazy stuff but he did it to troll his opponents, no rational person thought jokes on Twitter were anything other than that jokes and he knew there was a line in the sand when it came to green lighting a land war in Europe.

If Biden were to resign then that would leave Kamala Harris in charge, but for the past 12 months she’s done little other than exude incompetency and it’s hard to stress just how unfavourably she’s amongst the general public. as far as potential female presidents go, she's less popular than any other possible choice out there like Hilary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, and that’s true even when you allow for fictional people like Medusa from Greek mythology. Crazy as it sounds, Hilary Clinton is right now actually considering a 4th run for the white house and there is a genuine chance the next election will be a literal rerun of Clinton vs Trump. Which at least makes forecasting the outcome easy because we already know how people will vote if given those two options.

2 main stories this week but first of all a quick sports news story after Novak Djokovic was barred from entering Australia due to not complying with their covid vaccination policy. In the process he became the first tennis player to be knocked out a on tennis tournament for just missing 1 shot. He's subsequently challenged the decision in court, lost the case and has now been banned from Australia for 3 years, which is pretty ironic because most of the Australian government officials are only there themselves because one of their ancestors *lost* a court case.

Anyway, the first big news story was the one that whilst the UK was locked down last spring the Prime Minister was really putting the "party" into "Conservative Party" and hosted a booze-up in his back garden. This was all of course at a time when many members of the public had visits from the police for having guests over, and the Beastie Boys famously 'had to fight for their right to party' There were initial denials, that it was a work event, and eventually it turned out that Boris was not handing out drinks but only due the technicality that it was BYOB and stories have since emerged about a booze-run to the Co-op on The Strand. As of yet it is unclear if they got value for money for the taxpayer by purchasing the wine as part of the dinner+wine meal deal. Another part of the story we're also still waiting on is when we eventually get to see the CCTV footage of a staffer dashing along Whitehall with half a dozen bags clicking away. The prime minister in response to all of this refused to resign and claimed that at the time he thought it was a work activity and therefore ok, and I actually even found myself agreeing with Kier Starmer for the first time, ever, when he described Boris' ignorance excuse as being so lazy as to be offensive, although in true Labour Party style he turned out to be a hypocrite after pictures emerged of him too having beers with friends at around the same time last year.

Someone else was also in the news though this week with stories about losing their job and that person was the Grand Old Duke Of York, also known as Randy Andy, also known as Prince Charles' idiot brother, also soon to possible be known as whatever number is on the piece of card he's asked to hold up when they take his picture. Earlier this week he was stripped of all his titles by the Queen, including HRH but also dozens of other things like "Colonel of the Grenadier Guards" "Commodore-in-Chief of the Fleet Air Arm" and "Royal colonel of the Royal Regiment of Scotland" Wowzers, the last time I saw someone lose that many titles they were managing Tottenham Hotspur. Anyway, having gone from Royal Highness to Royal Minus I suppose for now that all we can do is sit back and wait for the court case to start later this year. Presumably the lesson here is that if you really insist on hanging around with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and commuting crimes and the like, at least have the common sense to do it in Australia, before not getting vaccinated and blaming your absence on pen-pushers at the airport.

This week was quite busy and yet it started with some depressingly routine news.

Prince Harry just released a 15-point action plan to defeat fake news, although he seemingly missed the most important one out: [1] get rid of Meghan

President Macron expressed sorrow at the death of 30 economic migrants who were trying to Escape France in order to get to England. But he told Boris not to worry because there’s plenty more where they came from.

But then of course Covid is back in the news with a new variant. Literally, the Greek letter ‘Nu’. To quote Jo Moore then a good day to bury bad news. Be prepared therefore for a litany of damning government reports and statistics to be quietly published safe in the knowledge that few people will pay attention. This however is only the tip of a fairly large iceberg, there are seemingly a lot of things going on in the world that the press are not mentioning.

On the Covid front alone, lets look at that variant’s name again. These have been getting named sequentially after greek letters and this one should have been called the Nu variant, I’m sure a number of tabloid editors already had pub-based headlines set to print, but as of this morning, the WHO have decided to skip a couple letters and they’re going straight to Omicron. Interestingly, “omicron” is an anagram of “moronic” and it seems that the WHO decided to skip Xi, written “X, i” in english, in order to not offend or embarrass the China’s dictator, I mean president, democratically elected president, who spells his name XI. Because the last thing the west would want to do would be embarrass are the Chinese government. I mean it’s not like they were responsible for Covid or anything, although lets give them some credit, most people didn’t think something Made In China would have lasted as long as it has.

On the China front though, there has also been a remarkable amount of military manoeuvres going on, all unreported in the West. This week saw the US congress introduce the “Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act” which is a stack of laws allowing the US to go to war in the China Sea without actually declaring war, it’s similar to how the US never officially went to war in either Korea or Vietnam, simply calling them ‘police actions’ instead. There’s been a lot of talk of stationing nuclear weapons on Taiwan, all as part of a last ditch retaliation shoud the island get invaded. Maybe they already have them, it’s fairly scary and Joe Biden was even explicitly asked: "Are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan's defense if China attacked?" to which he replied, "Yes. Yes, we have a commitment to do that." And yet despite this, we stil lave the stuation where the US military is preparing to lay off literally hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve mentioned this a couple times but that clock is still ticking, the deadline is January 4th and on that date the armed forces will by presidential decree disband a huge vast number of personal, everyone from pilots to mechanics to civilian contractors. It would be somewhat ironic if the left wing president that gutted the armed forces, was the same one that later started a proxy against China.

Closer to home though, here’s an interesting question that hasn’t been see on TV, what is the deal with the Queen? She disappeared for several weeks and apparently all is well, the only story about the Queen I saw on the BBC was one about Freddie Mercury and LGBT rights. Nonetheless if you venture online the general concusses is that she has leukaemia and possibly had a stroke, there’s real shades of the Spy-catcher scandal here where things were widely discussed everywhere else in the world except from in Britain. The same thing admittedly happened in the US though recently: the governor of California gave daily press briefings for two years and then about a month or two ago he had a Moderna vaccine on live television. Then he canceled his trip to the climate change wokefest in Scotland and nobody saw or heard from him for 2 weeks until he eventually showed up to give a scripted interview where we only got to look at him from one side. He’s since been out of the public eye since and leaked reports all suggest that he suffered palsy down one side of his body and they’re trying to fix him before the day comes when he has to actually take part in active politics. He’s not up for election for another year so for now he’s largely hiding out in a bunker with a round the clock staff of doctors and experimental medicine, not to mention a complicit media reporting every press release as gospel truth.

I could go on with these stories, there are remarkable number of famous people who’ve died or disappeared from public life in the last 6 months but I do try to keep these videos short. And to be honest of all the stories going on the one I find saddest is the decision by Westminster council to allow Marks and Spencers to demolish it’s art-deco headquarters on Oxford Street in favour of something so generic it could be build anywhere in the world. Although at least everyone will be in agreement that it will be better than that ghastly mount thing that the council built round the corner at marble arch.

In the news this week:
Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson was shot, although the gunman later claimed that they were act aiming for the giant chip on her shoulder.
There’s an article in the paper about the food supply asking “when will insects be on our supermarket shelves?” To which the answer is “15 years ago when I lived in North London”
And in personal news I’ve decided to boycott a number of companies that sell items I can't afford.

The main news this week though was the from Dominic Cummings who was giving testimony to the Commons Health and Social Care Committee on the subject of the Government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was a solid day’s worth of evidence, consisting several hours of him venting and trying to settle grudges. Cummings, give him his due, blamed officials, including himself, for falling "disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect" which is surprising in so much as most people expect appointed advisors to have no standards. It’s like the sign in a train station toilet asking you to find the place as you’d expect to find it, which surely is implying you should write some graffiti on the cubicles and bust a lock off the door on your way out. It should be remembered that Dominic Cummings isn’t an elected official or even a member of the Conservative Party, it’s not as if he’s going to lose a seat or be sacked so in many respects it was like watching this week’s other matchup: Brentford vs Swansea in the Championship playoff where they’re basically fighting for the right to be relegated out of the Premiership next year

So what of his answers? Ys or no? I recently asked my German friend if he knew the square root of 81 and he said no. So what did Dominic Cummings have to say? Well for one that Boris wasn’t a “fit and proper person” Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been fired for lying, he used the expression "lions led by donkeys" which is a bold move given that Boris is a keen historian but then when asked about Boris Johnson, Cummings saying that there were "thousands" of people better suited to run the country than him. The BBC and Guardian were lapping this up, largely because they believe that the UK should be run by an army of several thousand EU officials and bureaucrats. Cummings later contradicted himself saying “You should have had a dictator to run all this” but then we’re talking of hours of exposition and showmanship in from of the cameras. Imagine if you’d gone to see Ked Dodd except instead of several encores of jokes it was just him vocalizing his personal grievences for several hours. I’m sure one day it will be spliced into an educational video explaining the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath but the real takeaway was not that that nobody knew what to do, but that there wasn’t even a pre-written plan as to what to do. We know for instance that if Argentina invades the Falkland's again, there is a game plan ready to put into action, and it was genuinely surprising and somewhat scary that the civil service had no plan whatsoever as to what to do in the event of a pandemic. Covid could have happened when Harold Wilson was in power, or David Cameron, but Boris was the prime minister left standing in that game of historical musical chairs. In hindsight it’s easy to blame Boris but he didn’t really have anything to work with, what was he supposed to do, personally invent a covid vaccine or assemble an alliance to launch a military invasion of Wuhan?. Hindsight is 2020 but it's 2021 now. Most of the press coverage of course though has been given to Cummings’ distain for Carrie Symonds, I imagine that if he’d lived thousands of years ago he’d have looked at the story of Samson and blamed it all on him trusting him to let his girlfriend to do his hair. If anything that line of question+answer has done Boris a favour, distracting the public from genuine scandals by dragging everything back to being about his personal life which nobody is terribly surprised by and in which few people even really care. Perhaps the lack of a story is the story.

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.

Doesn't 2019 seem such a long time ago? In Britain people were talking about leaving the EU whereas nowadays people are more interested in talking about when they're going to get to leave the house. This week, yet more of the same, depressing fatality numbers while we all sit eating through the cupboards and freezer. Earlier this week the wife asked me if I wanted canapés for dinner and I thought "yum yum there must be some in the freezer to heat up in the oven" but it turned out that in fact she was talking about a can of peas in the cupboard.

Mind you most of us have had it better than Boris Johnson who spent most of the last in hospital. Unlike one of his normal visits to a hospital there was no PR blitz, in fact there was no video footage at all this time, leading many to speculate whether he actually was in a far more serious condition than he was letting on. My goodness, if you can't trust a politician to tell the truth what's the world coming to? Ultimately he's made a good recovery, let's just hope he doesn't shake hands with the medical staff when he says thank you on his way out. That'll be in a few days from now hopefully before he goes back to his usual job of surrounding himself with advisors, ministers, staff, and all the other factors that make being a politician an almost guaranteed route to catching the virus. Hanging around with 650 people in a confined House of Commons was in some respects a very silly thing to do though I guess it depends on your priorities and how you assess risk, I mean you could go out and claim that all zoos are petting zoos if you don't mind being mauled to death by a tiger.

For now though we'll just have to wait and see if the virus ultimately does take anyone important from us. A week or two back there were even rumours that the Queen or Prince Phillip may have had it. And we know that Prince Charles did get it. And there's always a risk that Prince Andrew may have breathing difficulties too, though for him it would almost certainly result from a tragic unexplained accident involving a rope.

It's not often you hear the left wing news media saying something positive about the Prime Minister but this week they were simply reporting that Boris had tested positive for Coronavirus and will therefore be working from home which is pretty convenient as his office, the cabinet room, is just down the hall from his bedroom anyway. You have to admire the irony of Boris having not apparently used enough Johnsons baby wipes to clean his hands, although it does show the dangers of saying things like you'd rather be dead in a ditch than shake hands with Michel Barnier who has also now tested positive for coronavirus.

The virus certainly pays no regard for class or wealth, Prince Charles also tested positive this week and seeing as the name 'corona' derives its name from the latin word for 'crown' you have wonder whether this will be the closest Charles is going to get to a crown. Nonetheless, as with the Prime Minister he's going to be working from home, though I use the word 'working' in the very loosest sense unless he's getting his staff to put ribbons across the doors of the palace for him to cut has he moves about the place.

Elsewhere what's been going on? Russia has just announced their first Coronavirus death. A man presumably by the name of Ivor Chestikov. A man was also put on trial for stealing toilet paper and when asked how he pleaded he replied "not quilty" Oh dear, it appears as if I'm trapped in the midst of a pundemic

Getting back to business I suppose, I should probably save the rest of those terrible jokes for future weeks as it seems this is going to be going on until the summer. In the mean time stay safe and try to stay optimistic. One ray of sunshine I thought was when I heard some civil servant mentioning "ration books" and I thought isn't it wonderful that in spite of the internet, enough people are still reading books that they're going to start having to ration them

Happy Valentines day, or for those with breathing difficulty, happy ventolins day and to those who are especially thrifty, it's just a day or two until the shops are selling chocolate at a heavily reduced price! In Westminster though it's been a bit of a Valentines Day Massacre though with Boris acting like Al Capone with a reshuffle. Actually, in that analogy, it's probably Dominic Cumming's who's the mob boss because for a Brexit-voting country that voted to get rid of unelected busybodies, the government certainly seems to like them, to the extent that I wonder if John Lewis is handing them out to any cabinet minister that signs up for its rewards store card.

Talking of people putting things on a credit card, Sajid Javid announced that he was quitting as chancellor. This came as quite a shock to most people, probably including Sajid who seems to have resigned before he was sacked for not surrounding himself with new Number 10 appointed advisors and doing what he was told. The SNP also seemed to have been caught on the back foot as they made a slamming attack on the story, conveniently leaving out the part where they just lost their top finance person too, albeit in circumstances you normally more associate with former Top Of The Pops presenters.

He certainly didn't leave because he lost interest because interest payments look set to explode over the next decade as Boris prepares to spend money on infrastructure projects, many of which will likely be named after him. Somewhat like Boris bikes or that Boris Bridge that remains as complete as Schubert's last symphony or that time I thought about losing a bit of weight. Right now I'm just a stone and a half short of my plan to lose a stone. Not to worry though because Boris has now mentioned building a bridge between the UK and Northern Ireland in the quite literal sense. Also HS2 and parliament is going to cost about £6bn to fix up over the next decade unless someone can convince Carol Smillie and Handy Andy to come out of retirement. Signing the cheques for all this will be Rishi Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs person turned MP who is now content to do the bidding of a different set of secretive overlords, and I hadn't heard of him either until today.

Boris Johnson has been re-elected and Jeremy Corbyn has resigned after being shown to be as popular on the doorstep as that childhood joke where you set fire to a paper bag with a dog poop in it. I thought this week I'd look at the online Labour reaction, using the 7 stages of grief framework.

1) Shock
When the BBC Exit poll first came out, people were astonished, to see something on the BBC saying something positive about the Conservative Party. It was surreal, like watching an episode of Through The Keyhole where Lloyd Grossman broke into the house before making off with the contents.
2) Denial
The denial part is where Corbyn Supporters saw the results and assumed that there must be several hundred Labour contituencies to declare. Even several days after all the counts are long done. Even putting Dianne Abbott in charge of the recount couldn't have fixed things though because the real denial though has been over the past 4 or years though, denying that Corbyn is unpopular outside of London. Denying that Brexit is happening, Denying the time of day to anyone that disagrees. That brings us to
3) Anger
Anger at traditional Labour voters who were apparently too brainless to do what they're told. The internet is a pretty dark place, just look at the anonymous comments underneath news stories about Prince Andrew, many of which are darker and more evil than the crimes being alleged. But the worst anger is reserved for the idiot, stupid, racist, bigoted, simpleminded scum that refused to vote for their local candidate who had cancelled a wine tasting and flown in all the way from Highgate to visit them.
4) Bargaining
This is where they think that it will be ok because the EU has the power to cancel Brexit, or the court system will intervene or maybe half the conservatives will still in principle be in favour of a 2nd referendum like that time Rory Stewart wanted to start a new parliament run from the upstairs room in a local pub. This sort of stuff is probably the most delusional part so far, more than that nonsense about putting Clive Lewis in charge of the nations broadband or banning airplanes or thinking that the British Army should spend the spring writing handwritten apology letters to Gerry Adams.
5) Depression.
Yes a lot of Labour students are depressed but the most depressed people surely are Theresa May who just witnessed Boris do what she couldn't, as well as Nick Clegg who knows that Boris is there for 5 years thanks to the rules that he put in place and the referendum that he spent years in opposition agitating for. There will be bearded man handing out presents this Christmas, but it won't be Jeremy Corbyn, although I suppose some Labour activists will take solace with the fact that St Nicolas was from the Middle East because everyone knows when a Turkish immigrant enters your home in the middle of the night it's because society is racist and the system (and you specifically) forced them to do it.
6) Testing.
This is where you finally "seek realistic solutions" which in political activism terms means the usual rubbish: Britain has changed for the worse and they're going to escape it and emigrate. Obviously they're not but it's important to suggest it so their friends know how liberal and left-wing they are. Actually, I will give Tony Blair some credit when it comes to this: fake mid-atlantic accent, 5-star hotel stays in Davos and a tan that makes him resemble the Cuprinol man, he's at leas made a decent go of staying as far away from the scene of his crimes as possible.
7) Acceptance.
This hasn't happened quite yet, the party isn't there, and be until a new leader takes control and does a full-scale review of what happened. As a shortcut guide though, 3 important questions to ask any Labour leadership candidates would be: "Was Bin Laden a goodie or a baddie?" "Do you think that Mossad controls editorial decisions on The One Show?" and "Do you know how to eat a bacon sandwich?"

It's been a very busy time of year for letterboxes, between the Christmas Cards, the election pamphlets as well as the usual assortment of local takeaway menus. Those places are presumably hoping to cash in on people burning their Christmas dinner and order in pizza, chicken wings and lamb kofta.

Those pamphlets though, there's only a couple more of them to come as it's just the last final couple of days before the election and I imagine for MPs it must feel a bit like being back at school a few days before the big exam. I say exam singular because having seen them going up against the likes of Andrew Neil, or just random members of the public, I'm not sure how many of the current roster of MPs have more than one qualification. Then again, I guess you do have the couple of hundred who got unto university by relying on their father wearing the right tie to the open day and there's those who whose understanding of figures and numbers doesn't go any further than knowing what a treble 17 on a dartboard is in the Sports & Social bar. I guess maths is also useful when you need to calculate how many postal votes you need to run off on the photocopier in order to win a marginal seat in the west midlands.

At this stage people already know who they'll be voting for so really the whole campaigning thing is a charade because everything will come down to a few couple of key constituencies and what the turnout is which will largely be determined by the weather. I don't know who I trust less really, political forecasters or weather forecasters. My take on it is a 22 seat Conservative majority but Boris loses his seat, because polling in his London Uxbridge is a lot tighter than people have been led to believe, especially with Brexit on the table. I'm half toying with putting £20 on Michael Gove being in number 10, pretty sizeable odds for something that's not too outrageous a possibility.

But don't worry fans of elections because the juggernaut that is the US Presidential election is coming down the road with a scale and a cost and a four year regularity that puts Star Wars to shame. But I'm sure we can get round to talking about that in the next, 47 [!] weeks...

A couple of weeks ago it was was commanded by the courts that parliament must return to session; it MUST sit, lest civilization collapse, like the England football team in a penalty shootout. So everyone was sent back and almost no work was done because there's frankly little that can actually be done now by MPs until the Prime Minister decides the next move. It's like the bit in a chess game where people are staring at the board while the clock counts down and half the audience are actually starting at their phones looking up the latest scores in the Rugby. Highlights of next week's empty schedule include the appointment of a lay member to the parliamentary expenses watchdog. I've seen video footage of 1970s car factories with more work being done.

The latest proposal on Brexit was to make Northern Ireland part of the customs union but removed from certain other parts of the single market such as freedom of movement and the like. Brussels said no which was a bit reminiscent of that time the band Queen sang "I want it all" mostly because the band ceased to exist a couple of years later. Brussels has made it clear that the single market is sacred and can not be picked at, it's like a bronze statue of a bull like the ancient Sumeraians worshiped, rather than the Sunday beef roast that gets picked at for several days. In both cases, Jean Claude Juncker has brought some wine though.

Of course, that means either no Brexit deal, or London just has to accept Northern Ireland being part of the EU and not the UK. At which though point we have the plot twist requirement that Boris Johnson legally has to suggest an extension, although it's unclear how this will actually play out. Some hope he wil lindicate how he has no intention of chaingins his mind but he'd like to waste everyone's time next year too, at which point many in the EU are keen to just decline the offer. Others have pointed out that a number of countries, Hungary being suggested as one, will threaten to veto any extension unless they get send billions of euros of additional grant money. Again, does the EU really want that to continue indefinitely or will Berlin count on them staying nice and compliant like they were in the 1940s.

One of the major things that hasn't been discussed much is what Nigel Farage has been up to for the past few weeks. He has spent some time in the UK but much of it has been spent annoying people in Europe, giving speeches and using his EU expense account to turn up at pro-nationalism events with the very deliberate aim of poisoning any good will that remains and focus all the EUs animosity that exists towards Britain in one last push to get them to pull the plug. At which point I look on the BBCs Europe news page and they do have a major article about what's been goin on in Vienna "selfie museum aims to make art more enticing" which seems to me about as newsworthy as Jeremy Corbyn's recipe for curried parsnips, and about a good as use of public money as that time the NHS tried to buy a computer.

The last couple of days at Westminsters have been a mess, certainly far worse than anything I've seen and I'm in the process of toilet training a 3 year old. But let's try to simplify and lay out the process of how we got here:

1) MPs don't want to want Brexit to happen, even though the public do and many of those MPs were explicitly elected promising to deliver it. As an analogy This is a like me promising to buy kitchen roll from the corner shop, then spending the money on wine and later refusing tidy up a spilled glass of the wine rather than admit that I didn't want to buy kitchen roll

2) This would normally be resolved by an election, except the MPs will lose their jobs, many are being actively deselected by their local constituencies, and now that Boris Johnson is in power, everyone knows that all they can do is try to delay Brexit as long as they can. It's like watching football supporters calculate how their team can still technically quality for Europe. I guess in this scenario, the constituents live in a small town up north and don't care because the MP supports a different team to them, probably Chelsea in this scenario, it's a London team and come on, only 1 win all season?

3) The upcoming election, when it comes, will comprehensively destroy the Labour party with the majority of its votes going to either the Brexit Party or the Lib Dems, depending on where they are. It will be an English repeat of what happened after the Scottish referendum changed the political landscape from right vs left to right vs wrong as the whole thing transformed overnight into a religious style crusade for vengeance with a show of Scottish anger that hadn't been seen that time Gordon Brown threw a laser printer across the room. Allegedly.

4) What happens next will be determined by who plays the system better. The thing about an unwritten constitution is that it's not written down. The bill supposedly forcing Boris to ask for an extension to article 50 might get lost or amended into uselessness. Maybe Boris will forget to ask the Queen to sign off on the bill, perhaps the EU won't want an extension anyway and don't forget it's also possible that the member states hold the power to veto the decision. I think I'm actually right in saying that (as a member state) Britain could veto it which would frankly be hilarious, watching Boris signing the veto and once more calling for an election while the Facebook servers caught fire. What is certain is that most MPs pushing for Remain seem to believe that it is a temporary thing or one where they are on the popular side, utterly fail to grasp both public sentiment outside of Westminster as well as the vast swell of resentment they're building up outside that bubble.

Ok, so here's a joke to lighten the mood back up. Vincent van Gogh is sitting in a bar and Picasso walks in, "Do you fancy a drink, Vincent?" "No, I've got one ear"

I was once recommended that if you're buying lottery tickets then you should wear apache war paint and an American Indian head-dress because apparently "fortune favours the brave" and talking about that expression, Boris Johnson certainly upped his game this week, finally moving the Brexit saga into the end stage and putting an end to the bespoke stalemate and 3 years of can nothingness that Theresa May had so expertly crafted, in order to grind everyone down. The last couple of years have seen so much can kicking, it was starting to resemble one of those old black and white videos of children playing football. But now May has gone, Theresa May has gone, summer has nearly gone and it's time to take a stab at goal.

Anyway, there's a couple things in life that can be relied upon, like for instance the more out of shape someone is the more liable they are to refer to their favourite football team as “we” and this week was no exception with an especially partisan response from the media. The PM decided to have the usual September break for the party conference season, but he also added on an extra 4 days which was portrayed by many as something akin to a violent coup in sub-saharan Africa. References were also made to Caesar and Napoleon, carefully leaving out the bit where those leaders were wildly popular at the time. It's a strange world the Remainers live in, no doubt they sit round dinner tables discussing how ghastly The Beatles were because of how they smoked, and perhaps (unlike the rest of us) they all thought that Game of Thrones ended brilliantly, if only because the chap sat on the throne at the end of it was disabled.

Really, though, those four days at the end of the standard time off are what the outcry has been about, 4 days when at the same time the complaining MPs could have easily called for an early end to their summer holidays but hey, there's a lot of good shows on Netflix to catch up with. I suppose that in the mean time, life goes on and November draws ever closer. However, two people will benefit immensely from all of this [1] frivolous lawsuit filing Gina Miller who'll be making plenty in tv appearance fees when she's not suing people; seems like she'd really be a lot happier in life if she moved to the US and filed vast predatory lawsuits there, for things like... I don't know... a footlong sandwich only being 11 inches long. Someone else: [2] Shane McGowan from the band The Pogues who will undoubtedly be racking in a few extra royalties after people go online and misspell the word prorogue. Maybe he can use the money to buy a new hedgerow to drag himself through.

Looking over the news this week, I wondered if the climate protesters were up to their usual tricks in London but it turned out to just be the 50th anniversary of the Beatles Abbey Road album and a bunch of idiots commemorated it by blocking the zebra crossing, which happens to be on a major road, while observing motorists sat motionless, wishing that the fans would start recreating the latter minutes of John Lennon's life.

There's also headlines about a power outage, although on further inspection that's something to do with the electricity and not the remainer powers that be losing control of the situation as it dawns on them what I've been saying for months which is that if nothing happens and Boris doesn't actively sacrifice his reputation for the sake of the EU, then the status quo is a no-deal Brexit no matter what they say or do, the timeline of events in already enshrined in law with a approaching sense of optimistic inevitability. It must feel like when you get one of those cards from a delivery company and the depot isn't open until after the weekend but you need that stuff tomorrow. In that analogy, maybe it's FedEx or UPS but Jeremy Corbyn claims to be a mix of the two: "FedUP" or at least he claims to be, on the off chance that he could call an election and get back to making spurious promises and soundbites. Honestly, I think if I had to listen to him stand in Trafalgar square giving a speech I'd rather lie down and cover myself in birdseed, it would be more fun being pecked to death.

Nonetheless there are now legitimate commentators talking about a 3 or 4 Labour front-benchers giving up their vitriolic anti-monarchy work online to visit the Queen and ask her nicely to sack her new PM and appoint them so they can beg the EU for an extension to article 50. It's at this stage you realise that Corbyn is less like Tito the authoritarian Dictator of Yugoslavia and more like Tito out the Jackson 5, a figure of fun, of entertainment value and yet a sideshow while the main act is going on.

The craziest part of all is the idea that a Corbyn government would either have support of the Labour Party, many of whom despise him, or indeed want to stop Brexit in the first place, given how most hard-left policies are now illegal under EU law anyway. All as part of the EUs policy of eventually making all nation state laws illegal I guess.

This week Boris Johnson finally achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming Prime Minister; I guess that becoming the Prime Minister is the one aspect of life where you might actually want to copy something that Theresa May has done, obviously ignore everything she did afterwards. Anyway, long before Boris had even gotten out of the car, there was of course wailing and gnashing of teeth from the media with words like "mandate" and "democracy" being bandied around shamelessly, no doubt those in the entertainment sector would prefer to have some sort of prime minister competition involving a premium rate phone number like they do on the telly. Especially if at the last minute they can change the result if they don't like it, like they do on the telly. Boris is a polarising figure mind but as long as all his ex wives and girlfriends don't live in a swing constituency, he should be ok.

Back to how we arrived there though, a lot of people banked on Theresa May stopping Brexit and they bet on the wrong horse, proving once again that the only political bet you should make is the one about what colour tie the chancellor will be wearing during the budget. Theresa was about as good at convincing people as a contestant on Big Brother trying to convince people that they'd read the original George Orwell book, or indeed any book. Big Brother is one of the weird shows where most contestants have written more books than they've read... Anyway, Boris Johnson is by no means a unifying person but in the vacuum of any substantiated policy or motivation most people are at least curious to see what he intends to do beyond the soundbites.

So on Thursday, there was an interesting set of barnstorming speeches and responses given: all drama, all shouty, all seemingly given following after a heavy night's drinking by some, at least according to the red complexions on show. The SNP leader Ian Blackford made a point about Boris having no mandate, despite Nicola Sturgeons having faced neither a contender nor vote. Gordon Brown made the same point a few days ago, seemingly forgetting about the unelected years he spent at Number 10. Maybe he's tried as hard as the rest of us to forget they ever happened. Brown is likely not the only person from Kirkcaldy with 3 years that they claim not to remember.

Oh well, let's see how the next week goes before we race to judge. One huge thing i will say about Boris is that during the 2011 London Riots, he was the one that as Mayor went out to talk to the crowds and calm the situation, whereas Home Secretary Theresa May disappeared and drove off in a Jaguar. A sign of things to come perhaps.

We'll talk about some Brexit news in a moment but first I guess it's worth mentioning that it's 50 years this weekend since man walked on the moon and as Michael Collins remained alone flying overhead in the orbiter, we was one of the only the people in history to be both sad and both over the moon at the same time. Unfortunately though for the folks like you and me the prospect of commercial flights to the moon still remain as far in the future as the idea of a supposedly conservative government passing a budget surplus. To this very day the world still remains divided between countries that have sent a man to the moon, and countries that use the metric system.

Oh well, talking of space and the stars. The Bear, the Big Dipper, The Plough, are also all names of pubs in which you might find Nigel Farage and a number of senior Conservatives plotting, following this week's shenanigans in the House of Commons. For a quick summary, Boris Johnson has previously hinted at proroguing parliament to force a No Deal Brexit through. That would work by ending the parliamentary session early come September, causing a few weeks to be spent waiting for the Queen to officially open the new session and preventing any last minute attempt in October to prevent Britain leaving the EU on the 31st. At this stage it wouldn't surprise me if I saw Ken Clarke filling up the PMs car with diesel if it meant it could delay proceedings for an afternoon while he nips down the garage.

The Grieve amendment, passed this week, added a legal requirement for the parliament to sit for 5 days every 2 weeks on the alleged basis of discussing the northern Ireland assembly and budget. Theresa May expressed the sort of emotion you'd normally me to show if I heard that someone had bought some new socks while they were out. Fans of history will remember that King Charles I decided to mess around with closing parliament and it didn't end up well for him

The whole things leaves two possibilities: Option 1) Mrs Johnson (if he does become PM) continues to have parliament remain open and fights for a deal in such a confrontational manner that the EU tell Britain to make like a tree and leave. Option 2) Convince MPs to back an election and then get a pro-Brexit majority by relying on enough remain MPs, Labour and Conservative alike, losing their seats to Nigel Farage's Brexit party, possibly unchallenged by the Conservatives in some areas.

I suspect the first option is the more likely of the two, though like a man in an orthopaedic shoe, perhaps I'll stand corrected.

Quite a few stories of note this week: Iran threatening to seize a British ship, the Tommy Robinson sentencing, Facebook being fined $5bn and Jeremy Corbyn's team denying accusations of antisemitism and saying the story is being concocted by a global jewish conspiracy. Plus looking at at the news there's also a new "weird health tip" that a mom in the midwest has supposedly discovered that doctors don't want you to know about. Wait no, the last of those is an advert.

Let's talk about the resignation of the UKs ambassador to America, Sir Kim Darroch. He's going to be busy looking for a job on the after dinner circuit after a news leak publicly revealed a number of less than flattering comments he'd made about the President. He's certainly not the first person to head home after a failed career in the US and it's now probably one of the few things the career diplomat has in common with Cheryl Cole. He's also one of the rare cases of being someone who's resigned from a job in Washington who wasn't previously involved in managing President Trump's finances or legal disputes.

President Trump responded to his claims of being "clumsy and inept" by going on Twitter and calling Sir Kim "a very stupid guy" although most people have missed the point when it comes to this story. The ambassador didn't resign because of his opinions, what changed was that he was left fundamentally unable to do his job, after those thoughts were made public and he was thus uninvited from the events he needed to attend in order to do his day to day job. I would say it's like a race car driver having his license taken off him for drunk driving, except those guys seem to swig back huge bottles of champagne after the race and the police never seem to breathalyse them on the way home. Another set of rules for the rich I guess...

On the other hand, perhaps Sir Kim leaked the story himself, in order to allow Theresa May to put a new ambassador in place in time to scuttle Boris' likely premiership. Let's wait and see I guess. If that's the case then I would imagine that Sir Kim might want to go down the hardware store and purchase some sandpaper, in order to familiarise himself with the map of whichever third world country Boris' new administration decides to appoint him to.

What’s been going on in the world this week? Well I could tell you all about my addiction to reading books. But that's another story. What has been going on is a round of votes to decide who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The post is actually still held by Theresa May who is being about as pro-active in the legislative process as she’s been for the past 2 years: in the past week she managed to pass three times as many Brexit bills as she did last year, because 3 multiplied by 0 is still zero.

Anyway, the new PM, that choice has been whittled down by the MPs from a pool of narcissistic attention seekers to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, both of whom have been eyeing the job for years although for those who are not members of the Conservative Party, never mind parliament, the past few weeks must have been similar to an American watching the cricket world cup, but with Radio 4 rather than the dulcet tones of Test Match Special. The two candidates will now be looking forward to yet more posturing as they make their pitch to the conservative membership. If you are one of the lucky ones then I suppose you’ll be receiving your polling literature with the mail, and if you don’t read the Daily Mail then it will likely arrive with either your copy of the Telegraph or the Sainsbury's shareholder magazine. Either way, make sure that if you’re voting for Jeremy then you spell his name correctly, because he's had problems with that in the past.

Once the winner has been announced then tradition holds that the Queen will ask that person to Buckingham palace. The new Prime Minister will later sit at the table with the most powerful woman in the realm, Arlene Foster of the DUP. At which point we either have Boris deliver Brexit, or Jeremy Hunt wasting 12 months on a renegotiation, even though we already know that it will be about as productive as a liberal arts student using music to prove that some squares have 3 sides.

This week I thought we'd take a break from Theresa May to discuss Huawei, the Chinese company with a name that people disagree on how to pronounce. A bit like when people disagree on whether it's "envelope" of 'on' velope or how about even something as simple as the letter H. If you want to reduce the cost of healthcare, I'd ban access to anyone who pronounces it the "en haich ess"

Anyway, Huawei, not to be mistaken for Hawaii. The company is supposedly independent of the Chinese government and has complete freedom, but so does a child who's given the choice between a red apple or a green apple (or straight to bed). And talking of Apples, the mobile phone industry is the heart of this upcoming technological and financial battle of 5G phone rollout: who has it, who profits from it, and who's intelligence services get to spy on it. For those struggling to keep up, the Chinese would like to have access to everything, and the US would like those rights to remain in California, and occasionally Langley Virgnia. The US has in the past couple of weeks made it pretty clear where it stands with the whole 'trading with China' issue and so if you're a tech company, you should avoid using Huawei products in much the same way that you or I avoid watching anything beyond first 5 seconds of a YouTube advert or anything beyond the penultimate season of Game of Thrones.

But speaking as someone who was too lazy to cook dinner earlier, sometimes buying in Chinese is irresistible, That's why the US Commerce Department just put Huawei on its Entity List, meaning American companies would need to obtain licenses to sell it critical components for its products and that could make it hard for Huawei to get the parts its needs. They've also told intelligence partners like the UK that they can do what they want but if they do, as has been suggested, allow Huawei into the UK then the CIA will cease sharing intelligence secrets with MI6. That means if the British government wants to learn about weapons facilities in Iran, they'll have to make time to tune in to live round the clock news broadcasts where John Bolton goes on tv and pushes for full scale regime change in Tehran, making W Bush seem lightweight and indecisive.

And all for the want of marginally faster internet when you're trying to get Netflix in the countryside. It's a complicated world we live in I guess, and makes you long for a quasi-romantic long since passed era when spies used to share briefcases in the park and the briefcases were actually just really large early mobile phones because Huawei hadn't started selling smartphones.

Birmingham once gave us the band The Moody Blues so is seemed appropriate that moody blue rosette wearing MPs gathered in Birmingham this past week for the Conservative Party Conference. There were fever pitch levels of excitement normally reserved in Birmingham for a nill-all draw at Villa Park. But this wasn't football, it was politics and rather than a game of two halves, this was more like 8 full pints and a bottle of whisky into the night as scheming ministers gathered to see if Boris would come out it as a leadership candidate or not.

True to form, Boris made a remarkable speech, the sort of one that would of course sound mad and pretentious if anyone else else reads it, the lexical equivalent of a 3 piece suit. If some people think the Conservative Party is stuck in a 1950s time-warp though then they were in for a surprise as Theresa May came out to give her speech to the hip happening modern disco sounds of ABBA, just like what the youth probably listen to when they're lurking outside off-licenses or perhaps in those underpasses, the sort of places that Richard Littlejohn warns you about.

Anyway, what did the critics have to say about Theresa May's speech? Well it was described by commentators as "about an hour long" and asides from some sharp critiques of "The Jeremy Corbyn Party" was the same sort of generic thing you'd expect a committee of dreary staffers. Two or three bright young things, who all graduated from Oxford with a first in English Literature from but who now spend their days correcting apostrophes and writing press releases for inane government plans too insignificant for Labour to even bother objecting to

At this stage it doesn't matter though because Brexit is 5 months away, Boris doesn't have the necessary votes to call for a leadership election and the EU has also started to realise that Theresa is so utterly shambolic at selling their bait-and-switch Brexit deal that there's a real reason that Britain could simply drop out, with no deal but also with £40bn pounds of divorce payments that Brussels was hoping on getting.

Theresa walked, danced, shuffled out to Dancing Queen but in all honesty the ABBA track played should have been "Our Last Summer" because she certainly won't be in Number 10 for the next one.

Well the US Supreme Court decision has delayed for a week. That's almost as long a delay as a Southern Rail train! So in the meantime let's talk about the Labour Party Conference which was held this last week in Liverpool. They were in Brighton last year which frankly always came as a surprise to me as there's not too many Bright'uns in the leadership right now

Anyway, there was much of what you'd expect, everyone out-doing each other with speeches about how much they hate money and why they should therefore be given more of it. There were also some student speakers who must have been studying theoretical physics and time travel because, in spite of having been born in the mid to late 90s, had vivid memories of growing up during the Thatcher era and subsequently drew comparisons to Theresa May. Frankly those comparisons probably play better with Conservative Party members right now who are watching Boris Johnson's every move with excitement and anticipation. There were also the comedy warmup acts like Diana Abbott who bizarrely forgot the phone number for the 999 emergency service and following a breach of rules, an EU flag was removed from the floor because if you're flying a flag with yellow stars they have to be on top of a red background like Uncle Joe Stalin would have liked it.

The main highlight of the Labour getogether was probably the much publicised motion that Labour would commit to a People's Vote on Brexit, a second referendum! But then John McDonnell clarified that it would simply ask deal or no deal – there would be no option to remain in the EU. And shadow Brexit secretary Keir Stammer added that “no one is ruling out the option to remain” So it's a 2 way vote with three options, similar in some ways to how Corbyn himself regularly polls not just behind Theresa May but also behind the Don't Know option and is therefore 3rd place in a 2-horse race.

So therefore we once again we pivot to the competing Conservative party conference in the next couple of days and ponder for yet another year whether Theresa May will make it out as party leader and whether people will focus on letters dropping off the wall this time or simply on Boris dropping letters into the Daily Telegraph. I personally don't know who to feel sorry for, the poor journalists who have to attend weeks of there, or the voters who have to live with the consequences.

I tell you what I don't trust: stairs, because they're always up to something. But talking of not trusting people, President Trump woke up this week to discover that one of his loyal inner circle had anonymously written a column in the New York Times that was the editorial equivalent of Gordon Ramsey going berserk in a badly run kitchen. This came just one day after scathing excerpts were published from yet another anti-Trump book, this one written by Bob Woodward who was of course famous for reporting on the Watergate scandal which also prominently featured a hotel.

So who wrote it this editorial? Suspect number one is vice president Mike Pence, who would inherit the oval office were Mr Trump to be ousted. Pence has in the past repeatedly said that he has no ambitions to run for the presidency in 2020 although at the same time he never formally ruled out making a move for it in 2018.

Also in the lineup are Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, James Mattis, Dan Coats, Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein and of course Colonel Mustard with the candelabra in the billiard room. Or for a more American translation of that, Sergeant Tabasco with the flashlight in the den. Because right now all anyone can do is make silly guesses; there isn't any evidence to go by other than some analysis of words and sentence structure that makes palm reading look like quantum mechanics and Mystic Meg look like Marie Curie. You may as well have a go at guessing who the next Dr Who will be, except that in this case it's all white men over the age of 50 so no luck there.

Finally two other stories this week: Boris Johnson he's been so keen practice Brexit that he's done a trial run by splitting from his wife, he's apparently drafting up a divorce agreement that gives him full access to the wife, not having to hand over any money ever, and a conditional clause allowing him to share any subsequent girlfriends with Nigel Farage, but definitely not Michael 'Judas' Gove.

Also, car chase film star Burt Reynolds passed away this week. My favourite film of his was that one with the French car factory exploding into flames, oh wait not, that's Burnt Renaults I'm thinking of.

Two stories this week and just like spellings of the word Colour, one is from the UK and one from America.

Let's first talk about Boris Johnson was embroiled in a row after making comments about women wearing the Burka resembling a postbox, a row possibly inspired by the thought that the next tory leadership election will involve sending out thousands of postal ballots to the party faithful. The comment or joke or hate speech or leadership stump, depending how you view it, attracted support from Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson in The Times as well as The Guardian who published the same joke in an opinion piece several years ago, oh wait no, they came out on the side of political correctness this time, rather than feminism. If you want my take on it it's pretty simple to tell the burka and a post box apart: one is for first and second class mail, the other is for second class females across most of the Arab world. There's 200m women out there by the way if anyone wants to take a break from discussing gender pay differences at the BBC to focus on something more substantive.

Next to America though where Donald Trump, satisfied with the progress of his trade war with China decided to expand the scope of his presidential vision by announcing a new Space Force. The move came as a blow to toy manufacturers who've used names like Space Force along with Star Battles or Transformingers to sell knock off 3rd party rubbish to kids down the market. The kind of toy manufacturers who back in the 80s would have sold you a Back To The Future toy that where the DeLorean looked suspiciously like a grey Ford Granada from another toy set. Anyway, back to the Space Force, there's currently a 'choose your favourite logo' website which - this being America - of course leads onto a political donations webpage because frankly the President's 2020 campaign will likely cost more than the actual Space Force will. Alas for most of the fun science fiction imagery, the new branch of the military will most likely be responsible for cataloging boring things like the position of spy satellites and the like. If it does resemble Star Trek in any way, it'll be more like when the fans are arguing about plotholes in intricate detail from their mother's basement. But then I'm more of a Battlestar Gallactica fan myself anyway.

The news has been a bit quiet this week in the world of politics although former cricketer Imran Khan won an election and will be in charge of Pakistan if such a thing were in any way possible. But this is the age of celebrity of course where sportsmen become politicians, tv reality show host Donald Trump became the US President and the UK has a prime minister who frankly wouldn't look out of place on Countdown's Dictionary Corner, managing to somehow still misspell things and insist that her answer to the 8-letter conundrum is her version of "Brexit"

Anyway, let's talk about a few fires going on around the world. Alas none of them are the much-talked-about-never-delivered "Bonfire of the Quangoes"

First to Japan where it hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit (which is just over 41 degrees Celsius for those still obsessed about remaining in the customs union). Apparently 40 people have died in the sweltering temperatures. I'm going to be honest, I don't see how that's a record, I'm sure August 6 1945 was a lot hotter and there were certainly more casualties.

Next to Greece where a wildfire killed over 80 people. Authorities are still unsure the cause of the blaze with many German bankers suspecting it was an insurance job to get the money for the Greek debt. Greek fire was first mentioned by Thucydides and Boris Johnson has gotten his old job back at the Telegraph so if you're after arcane classical Greece references to Westminster than head over that way.

California also has some out of control fire too no doubt caused by a dropped cigarette butt and I'm not pointing fingers but Smokey Bear, he's called "smokey" and he lives in the woods. Also very hot though is the US economy. More than 10 years since the last recession so just make sure that if you have your money hidden away then be careful because cash is flammable, gold melts easily and computers don't do well in a fire.

Lots of Theresa May news week. I don't think there's been this much activity at Westminster since that time Cyrill Smith discovered it was possible to clear his internet search history. Over last 7 days, MPs had had a bit of time to read the details of the Brexit paper that Theresa May put out last weekend and was about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip

David Davis resigned, as did Boris Johnson along with a number of lesser known ministers and it's currently a case of seeing whether enough Conservative backbenchers (or front benchers) will get round to writing letters to the 1922 committee to trigger a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister. Curiously, the number needed is 48 and 48 BC was when Pompey was assassinated and I'm rather surprised that Boris didn't make a reference to that, classicist that he is. Nonetheless, Theresa's hoping that it's too late for anything other than her plan. I wonder if her and her husband act like that at home? I can imagine them sitting down to see Star Wars but then Mamma Mia starts to play and she points out that they've already paid for the tickets so they may as well just watch the remainder of it, regardless of what his views are on the subject.

Then just when things were starting to settle down, President Trump made his visit to the UK and a whole bunch of people decided to protest, although it was a weekday and if none of them had jobs to go to then I suppose it was something to keep them occupied at least. I just checked and Weatherpoons' share price ended 8p down at the end of trading, tells you a lot really. There was discussions about the trade war escalation with China, there was talk about the US pulling troops out of NATO countries and there was also talk about Stormy Daniels being dragged out of a bar in Ohio after the President's former companion was arrested.

In the end though, very little has changed since this time last week. It's like a sitcom where things happen and everything resets for next week's episode. Except Boris is no longer in a job so I suppose it's much more like President Trump's episodes of The Apprentice.

So a few days ago saw the end of the Labour party conference and a fun time was had by all, just as long as you weren’t Laura Kuenssberg, or wanting to play ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ on the jukebox. Party conferences are always curious state managed affairs these days. Originally they were for the grass roots members and MPs to meet and discuss what direction the party should go in, in the case of the Labour party the centre ground, to the left, the far left or extreme left. But no need for discussion this year, you’re either 100% with Jeremy Corbyn or you’re a traitor in need of deselection. Mr Corbyn’s speech had platitudes towards the NHS, about Labour being ready for government but essentially nothing about Brexit or detailed figures or mention of Uber being banned from London; it was a bit like an candidate making an under—prepared pitch on The Apprentice and after a week in front of the media spotlight a lot people still don’t know specifically what the shadow cabinet stand for, apart from the Red Flag, sung with gusto.

Moving from Brighton to Manchester, in the next few days we have the Conservative party conference. Pending a shock result Theresa will be giving the main speech: a speech that I imagine that will either see her gone by November or see her position secured for quite a few years to come. I was quite confused listening to one of her detractors on the radio who said he wanted her gone as soon as Brexit was dealt with, yet at the same time saying he wanted a transition period that would see Brexit (and therefore Theresa May’s premiership) last a nearly a decade. All I know for sure is that her main conference speech will be be shorter than the hour and a half that Mr Corbyn’s went on for. And that the events set to play out in the next few days in dimly lit hotel bars will eventually give way to hundreds of pages of bitter writing when Phillip Hammond eventually publishes his memoirs in a decade or two’s time.

It’s been a pretty bad week again in Central America, more tropical storms, Mexico suffering a another major earthquake and the other day I turned on the 10 o’clock news and for a while it seemed as though there were now dinosaurs on the loose in Costa Rica but then I realised the clocks don’t go back until next weekend and it was actually just the last half hour of Jurassic Park. The film holds up reasonably well actually, although if I wanted to see an older bearded man introducing dinosaurs I’d turn over to BBC Parliament in the next few days and watch the Labour Party Conference.

Also in the next few days we have Theresa May travelling for Brexit talks in Italy and shortly afterwards it’s the German Election. Everyone’s predicting Angela Merkel will romp home easily, but they also said that about Theresa May and political opinion polls these days seem are about as reliable as a promise from Boris Johnson to not be “up to something.” Never one to shy away from naked political ambition in the past, the foreign secretary has spent the last week or secretly plotting a takeover of number 10 with the sort of quiet scheming subtlety normally more associated with a vagrant outside a wine shop attempting to allegedly purchase a bus ticket.

At least when Vince Cable claims that he and his dozen MPs have a good chance of assembling the next government you can see it for the piece of subversive performance art that it is. Even when Ed Miliband’s claimed he would be the next PM, his expectations equally matched by his desire to wind up his brother.

It’s hard to tell, there’s a thin line between delusions of grandeur and politicians taking the piss. Boris may well fancy himself as a modern day Churchill figure, and he may very well end up as PM but for those who’ve read their history, or who were alive at the time, the 1950s were a pretty grim time for Britain and Churchill’s post-war record isn’t terribly great in any sense of the word. Although for now, Theresa May styling herself as a female Anthony Eden ain’t too great either.

Last weekend things got pretty darn serious and President Trump decided to ban people travelling to America from Iran, Somalia and some other countries, essentially because they’re predominantly Muslim places. I suppose you could maybe try to find the positives: perhaps the US will formally recognise Palestine as a country [?] in order so that Trump can then presumably ban Palestinian people from travelling to the US.

Curiously, Saudi Arabia didn’t make the cut. It’s a brutal Islamic theocracy with regular executions and outrageous human rights abuses in the name of strict sharia law, but Trump looked the place up and down, opened up his report card and wrote: Must Try Harder, C-

Curiously, Sudan was on the list but not South Sudan. Trump’s in his 70s mind, perhaps he’s still using Microsoft Encarta and is therefore unaware that the country actually split in two a few years ago.

And talking about places diving up, Brexit passed it’s vote in Westminster this week so we’re a few yards further into the steeplechase that is getting legislation sorted – then figuring out which cabinet minister can make the most money flogging books on the subject. I imagine Theresa May wishes that she too could just whip out a gold sharpie and get the thing over and done with in a weekend with an executive order, like they do in America.