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2022 Jul 22 - Prime Ministers after Stepping Down
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.
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 ......
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2019 Jul 13 - Sir Kim Darroch Resignation
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.
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 resign ......
2019 May 25 - Theresa May Resigns
Well the European election results aren't officially out yet but someone who is out is Theresa May, or last she will be soon because for the first time ever, May won't finish on the 31st but in fact June 7th. For the past couple of months she's been like a party guest who refuses to leave - you know the sort, you talk about ordering a taxi and they take it as a signal to start a discussion about much better Uber is and propose opening up another bottle of red.
As I said, at the time of recording those European election results aren't out though exit polls didn't look good, certainly it's a close race between the Brexit Party's share of the popular vote and the % strength of the drink that Nigel will be raising as he toasts Mrs May's departure. Certainly, it's likely that the only way Theresa May could have come out of it well is if Diane Abbott did the counting. But this is about much more than that and ultimately her final derisory attempts at pushing through a phoney Brexit deal, including a promise to include a 2nd referendum. It's saying something when the only posters of a prime minister being purchased party members are being used to construct dartboards.
So we are left with about a fortnight for potential prime ministerial candidates to make their pitch to the electorate. Boris is the favourite, with a popular electability that saw him win in metropolitan lefty London, twice again against Ken Livingstone. He'd be an excellent candidate. Nonetheless I'm tempted to put £100 down on Jeremy Hunt, on the basis that he's the most popular Remain candidate and it will likely be a stitch up once more by people who believe that the destruction of the party is a price worth paying to remain in the EU. What's that expression in the military about how sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it? Oh well, at least it would lead to some funny spoonerisms by John Bercow who against the odds somehow managed to outlast Theresa. Funny how things work out.
Well the European election results aren't officially out yet but someone who is out is Theresa May, or last she will be soon because for the first time ever, May won't finish on the 31st but in fact June 7th. For the past couple of months she's been like a party guest who refuses to leave - you know the sort, you talk about ordering a taxi and they take it as a signal to start a discussion about much better Uber is and propose opening up another bottle of red.
As I said, at the time of recordin ......
2019 May 18 - Huawei
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.
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 an ......
2019 May 04 - Local Election Results
A wipeout for Theresa May this week in a set of local election results worse somehow than the quality of the services being provided by the councils in question. I think it was best summed up by two Conservative spokesmen, one of whom said the night had "gone downhill" and the other of whom described it as an "uphill battle". That wordplay is precisely the sort of disconnect you'd expect though, the Prime Minister believing that the public are annoyed her repeated failure to get a Brexit deal where we get to stay part of the EU. The party could have lost yet another thousand councillors but the numbers are irrelevant, it's like troop losses during the 1st world war and explaining the true situation at this stage in the game is like trying to explain how ironing boards get wrinkles in them. Although the European elections next month will of course offer a fresh perspective on things. It's like the Rudyard Kipling poem about how if you can hold your head whilst others around you are losing theirs, then perhaps you've not fully grasped the seriousness of the situation
To me the main observation was that the prime minister was heckled by a member of the public shouting "Why don't you resign?" and when he was removed and Mrs May's supporters, whoever they are these days, shouted "Out! Out! Out!" the prime minister actually thought they were shouting at the hecker
The prime minister's sole existence and purpose for office is to force the UK into some kind of deal, however diluted, that enables it to continue paying money to Brussels in order to avert the economic disaster promised if the UK were to leave. A promise as trustworthy as the before and after photos on a slimming commercial. At this stage in the process, I don't think that the Prime minister is even being duplicitous, I think she looks at the ludicrous projections of 10 million people being unemployed and, like a naive teenager at one of Jeremy Corbyn's rallies, actually believes everything. I think she genuinely believes the scare stories because the alternative would be to admit that she'd surrounded herself with fools and wasted both her career, reputation and the best part of 5 years. 5 years and counting; alas I'm looking at the calendar and it may well be the start of May, but it won't be the end of May for quite some time, if you see what I did there.
A wipeout for Theresa May this week in a set of local election results worse somehow than the quality of the services being provided by the councils in question. I think it was best summed up by two Conservative spokesmen, one of whom said the night had "gone downhill" and the other of whom described it as an "uphill battle". That wordplay is precisely the sort of disconnect you'd expect though, the Prime Minister believing that the public are annoyed her repeated failure to get a Brexit deal wh ......
2019 Apr 27 - Nigel is back for the European Elections
If scientists ever develop a beer that comes in capsule form, then you could say that it was a "bitter pill to swallow" Apologies, that was dreadful, but something that is going to be a bitter pill to swallow for establishment politicians is that there's some elections coming down the line. In the past you'd normally get 2 parties, both of whom were variations on the same, like having to choose between water and molten ice. However, in both Europe and the US the last year or so has seen the emergence of parties and candidates that look set to do well, even if in past year's they'd have received fewer votes than if Botswana offered to host the Winter Olympics.
All across Europe there has been a resurgence in smaller nationalist parties and the first demonstration of this will be this weekend where Spain will have it's 3rd election in 4 years. Possibly a preview of what Theresa May's upcoming future of never-ending leadership challenges will look like. In truth however, it's more a preview of next month's European elections when traditionally a low turnout combined with a solid vote from the main parties' bases has guaranteed a stitch up and a return to business as usual. This was how Nick Clegg became a member of the European Parliament back in the 90s, when he won a seat after a few dozen Liberal Democrat activists and a stray dog turned up to vote that evening.
This week however saw not only the emergence of Nigel Farage's Brexit party, it also saw it go straight to the top in the opinion polls with many local Conservative Party activists switching allegiance faster than a sports commentator who, having realised that the previously "British" athlete is going to lose, reverts back to describing them as "Scottish" The Scotland connection really is the most amazing part in all of this really: The rise of the SNP in Scotland following the Independence referendum saw the utter collapse of the Labour Party in areas where votes used to be weighed rather than counted, and yet now the Conservative Party is surprised to see the rise of a mainstream Brexit party challenging it, somehow also geared around a singular issue. No concept of cause and affect, no learning from history. The only thing that comes close in political short-sightedness is the SNPs new apparent policy that referendums don't have to be binding, that's one that they may live to regret in another decade or so when Scotland one day votes in favour of independence and Tony Blair once more comes out of the woodwork to lecture BBC listeners about how people earning less than 100k/year are too racist and ill-informed to know what's best for them.
Of course Theresa could kill the Brexit party dead in the water by actually just leaving the EU without a deal, but that would be like when you promise to give up wine on December the 31st - easier said than done. And Theresa May might not like wine quite as much as Jean Claude Juncker does but she does like the EU just as much.
If scientists ever develop a beer that comes in capsule form, then you could say that it was a "bitter pill to swallow" Apologies, that was dreadful, but something that is going to be a bitter pill to swallow for establishment politicians is that there's some elections coming down the line. In the past you'd normally get 2 parties, both of whom were variations on the same, like having to choose between water and molten ice. However, in both Europe and the US the last year or so has seen the emer ......
2019 Apr 06 - May Asks Corbyn for Help
I was once told by a motivational speaker to stand up for what I believe in, and I wondered, "what if it's comfy chairs?" Well this week Theresa May continued to stand for nothing and show no shame as she decided to invite Jeremy Corbyn in for talks, in a similar but different manner to that in which the Ulster police used to regularly invite in Mr Corbyn's friends in for questioning. This has of course gotten nowhere because Jeremy Corbyn is ideologically opposed to both aspects of what she's asking for: [1] helping the UK remain part of an emerging federal state which has strict laws preventing everything the hard left stands for from happening [2] helping Mrs May remain prime minister, he doesn't like that at all! I imagine Jeremy Corbyn has the same desire to help the PM out as he does to go fox hunting. In the mean time, Labour have no doubt promised to back changes to the deal under the condition of reopening coal mines or renationalising the phone industry or introducing a new bank holiday to commemorate Hammas.
The whole pathetic exercise in duplicity and constitutional vandalism is largely futile because any negotiations, especially those involving Europe and trade, take years to conclude and so Theresa May trying to clobber something together in the last week or two before riding off into the sunset is like someone eating all the after eight mints before leaving half past seven, just as the guests arrive. If there was ever any chance of a good deal being struck, which there wasn't, then the government had 2 years to prepare it in and it wasted half of it by calling an election and gambling on the assumption that they'd win more seats and bribe those new MPs with ministerial salaries if they helped legislate for a brexit deal that was nothing more than a rebranding exercise. That kind of idiocy is the reason why the gene pool needs a life guard.
I was once told by a motivational speaker to stand up for what I believe in, and I wondered, "what if it's comfy chairs?" Well this week Theresa May continued to stand for nothing and show no shame as she decided to invite Jeremy Corbyn in for talks, in a similar but different manner to that in which the Ulster police used to regularly invite in Mr Corbyn's friends in for questioning. This has of course gotten nowhere because Jeremy Corbyn is ideologically opposed to both aspects of what she's a ......
2019 Mar 30 - Theresa May fails a 3rd time
There's that expression "third time's a chart" but it's not always true, as Theresa May found out this week after her third attempt at passing her "deal" achieved about the same level of success as someone heading into a pub claiming they can only stay for one. The Prime Minister's actually discussed having a 4th go at it and it's almost become like watching someone repeatedly failing to give up smoking or learn a foreign language. I wonder whether Theresa has a copy of the novel Finnegans Wake on a shelf, waiting to be started for the 6th or 7th time?
The problem with Mrs May is that you're increasingly unsure whether she knows that she's trying to sell a terrible deal that achieves nothing, or whether she actually believes the lies and spin that her staff repeat to her several times per day, like some kind of weird cult where everyone wears bracelets with the words "strong and stable" etched on them.
The most telling part of the whole vote at Westminster was that its defeat was celebrated as much by Brexiteers as Remainers, at this stage nobody has a clue what will happen, though in the real business world nobody cares, employment is up and the scare stories being put out by number 10 seem about as believable now as a Scooby Doo story set down at the old abandoned amusement arcade. Personally I'm inclined to think that the EU will tell London to sling its hook and that Remain supporting Theresa will have, in the end, unwittingly delivered a WTO rules brexit that, for people like myself who've devoted decades to the cause, will be quite a surprise. And it's pretty hard to surprise me these days. What, there's a toy inside the Kinder Egg? Woop-de-doo, what a surprise.
In the mean time, we can only play the waiting game and possibly await a general election this summer involving yet more deselections, parties splitting and the swingometer replaced with a strange 4-dimensional thing. Still, whatever happens at least we'll be discussing policy and the viewpoints of the candidates, rather than Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich, or the David Cameron story that also by happenstance featured a pig.
There's that expression "third time's a chart" but it's not always true, as Theresa May found out this week after her third attempt at passing her "deal" achieved about the same level of success as someone heading into a pub claiming they can only stay for one. The Prime Minister's actually discussed having a 4th go at it and it's almost become like watching someone repeatedly failing to give up smoking or learn a foreign language. I wonder whether Theresa has a copy of the novel Finnegans Wake ......
2019 Jan 05 - Happy New Year
Happy new year, it's 2019. I imagine that if you asked Diane Abbott what 17 plus 1 is she'd reply, 20(or)019. This is also (finally) the year that science fiction film Blade Runner is set in so while we count down to Elon Musk selling us tickets to the off-world colonies, let's maybe take a look at what the next few months have in store down here on earth,
First to America where a new house of representatives have just taken their seats and promised to pass all sorts of crazy laws for the senate to of course veto and vote down a few days later. I was going to make an analogy about the Democrats having a shiny new car but no petrol to put in it, except you could still use a broken car to store stuff inside, this is really more like one of those fake bookshelves you see in a pub. The US government will be like Michael Schummacher's race car in so much as it is not going to be doing or passing anything for a very long time. President Trump has even said as much, pledging to keep the current budget showdown and government shutdown going for months and even years if necessary, probably because the 2020 electioneering is going to kick into gear soon and he'll be busy on the campaign trail because elections in the US last longer than a Rolling Stones farewell tour.
In the UK, we are 80s or so days until Brexit happens. Thereafter Theresa May can finally leave, the Conservatives can break into civil war over the succession and the Labour Party can be relied on to stand to the side, arguing about anti-semitism instead or whether anyone finally figured out what the 'single market' was. The singe market, wasn't that the thing that Lembit Opik used to talk about? I guess the antisemitism thing will be a recurring story later in the year so I won't dwell on it and I'm not saying they're naive but I can imagine Corbyn and Ken Livingstone trying to recognise Jewish Labour MPs by emulating school teachers and handing out congratulatory gold stars, just like primary school teachers in 1930s Germany, before of course blaming a combination of the BBC and Paul Dacre, who I thought actually stood down as editor of the Daily Mail last year
Where will it all end up and where will we be next year? Well I don't know do I, I've not got 2020-vision, geddit?
Happy new year, it's 2019. I imagine that if you asked Diane Abbott what 17 plus 1 is she'd reply, 20(or)019. This is also (finally) the year that science fiction film Blade Runner is set in so while we count down to Elon Musk selling us tickets to the off-world colonies, let's maybe take a look at what the next few months have in store down here on earth,
First to America where a new house of representatives have just taken their seats and promised to pass all sorts of crazy laws for the senat ......
2018 Dec 15 - What keeps May going?
This week Theresa May finally grasped the idea that her deal has about the same chance of being formally enshrined in law as the 5-second rule or that one about stepping on the cracks in the pavement. A few days later and she flew out to Europe once more, expecting the EU commission to ditch ideological purity in favour of pragmatism or economics. There's about as much chance of that happening as there is of seeing Jade Goody being the face on the back of the new £50 note. After 2 years Mrs May seemingly still doesn't get it that the EU will never settle for anything other a deal that involves More Europe. To them the deal as it is gives them Northern Ireland. That's a cause for which the IRA fought unsuccessfully for decades, yet Brussels managed to do it in less than 2 years. Unless I'm wrong and the Prime Minister's simply adopted a mantra of "aim low so you’ll never be disappointed"
This last week Mrs May also finally faced a vote of confidence by her party in which she won albeit she received less than 2/3rds of the votes. This vote may have been a great song and dance number for the news media to discuss for 24 hours but in the long run it was ultimately as meaningful as deciding whether to wrap your fish and chips in the Telegraph or the Daily Mirror.
At this stage it doesn't matter who's in charge of the Conservative party, which I guess is good seeing as how nobody is. But as of this week it's now 7 days less than it was last week and Brexit is steadily coming down the line in March. Also in March? It's St Patricks Day so you can kiss goodbye to any chance of Jean Claude Juncker being in a sober state to make any last minute changes to the timetable. The irony really is that it was the remain camp that insisted that everything having to go before parliament. Now even if Mrs May formally came out and decided she wanted to cancel Brexit, she'd have to go with the LibDems instructions and get parliament to vote on it. It's likely the one single policy to have come out of the words of Nick Clegg and Tony Blair that I wholeheartedly endorse. On that bombshell I'll leave it.
This week Theresa May finally grasped the idea that her deal has about the same chance of being formally enshrined in law as the 5-second rule or that one about stepping on the cracks in the pavement. A few days later and she flew out to Europe once more, expecting the EU commission to ditch ideological purity in favour of pragmatism or economics. There's about as much chance of that happening as there is of seeing Jade Goody being the face on the back of the new £50 note. After 2 years Mrs May ......
2018 Dec 01 - That Brexit Bill
This week we got to see Theresa May in action. Wait, hang on, there's no space in there, it's one word: inaction. This week we saw inaction from Theresa May, a lack of action or persuasion, the amount of productive work you'd normally more associate with a Mediterranean country on a hot afternoon. Even she knows the Brexit bill is terrible but her advisors think that promoting it alongside Jeremy Corbyn on a BBC televised debate might make it seem more palatable, like a prawn sandwich that's past it's sell-by date but still smells sort of ok.
The Brexit bill will be coming to parliament and some Remainers are promoting it with the excitement level you'd expect if Led Zeppelin or The Smiths were getting back together whereas the bill itself is more a knock-off tribute band you'd see if you were on the ferry over to Zeebrugge. Or a get-together of the Brotherhood Of Man except not a lot of back-benchers will be 'saving their kisses for' May.
Currently there's a hundred back-bench government MPs voting against it, the government's science minister just resigned from the cabinet in order to vocalise his objection to it and in this topsy turvy up is down world I for once actually find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the EU commission because they finally said in so many words what so many of us have wanted from the start which is that we either get a bad deal, or preferably no deal. By which they mean a no deal where you can purchase non-EU goods like Australian wine, coffee, computers, Dysons and a half the Argos catalogue without it being subject to European import duty because it wasn't made in France. Want to buy a Tesla? Wait until it's £10k less because the German car industry isn't passing laws to discourage you from buying one.
Whilst the continent would dearly love to rename Ireland "West Flanders" it stands that this time next it will remain exactly as it currently it because nobody in either Dublin or London is proposing actually building a wall and, as with Mexico, nobody's willing to pay for one even if they wanted it. If that means there's different rules on each side of the land border then it would mean it's exactly the same as it is now currently, with wildly different levels of taxation, business rules, different currencies not to mention a sudden break between the metric system and miles per hour that does little to help anyone other than those wanting to give a misleading 0-60 time for their car, quoted in kilometers.
It seems that British companies might have to start trading with the EU without getting a say on the rules of the game, the same torturous position that companies such as Apple and Toyota have to live with. If you're buying an advent calendar this weekend, get 4 of them, because whilst it's 25 days until Christmas, it's just over 100 until Britain leaves the EU and by a combination of blind incompetence and parliamentary procedure that makes it impossible to legislate for a new referendum in time, nor rewrite a new deal, we're going to be going WTO, by which I mean either "World Trade Organisation" or "Without The Obstructionists"
This week we got to see Theresa May in action. Wait, hang on, there's no space in there, it's one word: inaction. This week we saw inaction from Theresa May, a lack of action or persuasion, the amount of productive work you'd normally more associate with a Mediterranean country on a hot afternoon. Even she knows the Brexit bill is terrible but her advisors think that promoting it alongside Jeremy Corbyn on a BBC televised debate might make it seem more palatable, like a prawn sandwich that's pas ......
2018 Nov 24 - Brexit deal "like the Titanic"
Theresa May has a couple of different residences: sometimes she lives in Number 10 Downing Street, sometimes Chequers but for the most part she's living in fear and denial.
She's also living in cloud-cuckoo-land as she flies off this weekend to get the EU to sign off on her deal, under the misapprehension that a majority of MPs will vote for it when it comes back to Westminster. When you see the prime minister talking about how great an idea her deal is, it very much reminds of a contestant on the Apprentice proposing some dreadful idea like baby toys made out of lead or a steak+kidney flavoured chocolate cake. I suppose the irony is that Sir Alan Sugar is actually in the House Of Lords.
The latest agreement in many ways has been designed to effectively keep Britain within the EU's framework of laws and regulations, whilst allowing Theresa May to claim that Brexit has apparently happened, I half imagine in a few months she might give a speech from the new Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier with a huge "mission accomplished" banner behind her, like George W Bush did, one year into that never-ending quagmire of deceit and murder.
There's also been an attempt by Downing Street to make Mrs May look professional by squaring down Spain after a spat about Gibraltar that was likely planned weeks in advanced. In truth a Spanish veto was never an issue due to majority voting, and any 'written assurance to work hard' is worth less than the paper it's printed on. Possibly less than the paper an verbal statement isn't printed on.
The only positive thing to come out of Mrs May's trip to Europe is that the local news is likely giving a lot of coverage to the fuel riots in Paris. Perhaps she'll get a sense of what might happen in the UK if she's not too careful. Though perhaps the French wouldn't have to worry about the cost of petrol if they weren't setting fire to so much of it in the streets.
Theresa May has a couple of different residences: sometimes she lives in Number 10 Downing Street, sometimes Chequers but for the most part she's living in fear and denial.
She's also living in cloud-cuckoo-land as she flies off this weekend to get the EU to sign off on her deal, under the misapprehension that a majority of MPs will vote for it when it comes back to Westminster. When you see the prime minister talking about how great an idea her deal is, it very much reminds of a contestant on ......
2018 Nov 17 - Theresa May Unveils her Brexit Plan
This week Theresa May finally unveiled the details of her Brexit plan and in doing so became about as popular as Peter Sutcliffe at a WI meeting. Troops were mobilised, ministers resigned, letters were written, pieces were given to camera and if a week's a long time in politics, this upcoming week will likely feel like the DFS sale.
If you're clicking the refresh internet news website, waiting for an announcement of a leadership election, it almost feels like the old days waiting for a Ceefax page to tick over and I imagine that the prime minister is currently frantically watching the clock tick by, like a football fan in the 89th minute, aware that the more time that passes, the greater the chance she'll have escaped once more time.
In the meantime, following resignations, there were new cabinet appointees because as they say, "as one door closes, another one opens" which is a great lesson in life but also highly annoying if you have an Ikea wardrobe. Those new ministers then: Stephen Barclay as new Brexit Secretary. It's a job which largely involves signing off dishonest press releases and claiming expenses, ironically the exact sort of European Parliamentary thing we're supposed to be leaving. Amber Rudd is the new DWP minister, the 6th in 3 years by the way, and Northern Ireland minister is Remain fanatic John Penrose. Fans of optical illusions will know that a "Penrose Triangle" is the formal name for that 3D impossible triangle illusion so perhaps it's all just a high-brow joke, placing him in Northern Ireland, the unsolvable part of the Brexit riddle.
Except I doubt anyone right now is in charge or sensibly in control of anything. On the plus side, it is perhaps only now, with Angela Merkel also leaving her job, that it's dawned on Brussels that the same incompetence to negotiate anything of substance, is the same incompetence that makes Mrs May unable to sell their backstop scam and that the UK now looks increasingly set to leave with no deal. The most annoying thing is that were that to happen then in 10 years from now almost certainly be subjected to Europhile careerists insisting that they were playing a long con from the start and they supported a no-deal Brexit the whole time.
This week Theresa May finally unveiled the details of her Brexit plan and in doing so became about as popular as Peter Sutcliffe at a WI meeting. Troops were mobilised, ministers resigned, letters were written, pieces were given to camera and if a week's a long time in politics, this upcoming week will likely feel like the DFS sale.
If you're clicking the refresh internet news website, waiting for an announcement of a leadership election, it almost feels like the old days waiting for a Ceefax p ......
2018 Oct 06 - Conservative Party Conference
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.
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 ......
2018 Sep 22 - Theresa May in Salzburg
Theresa May has had a fairly bad run of luck with her Brexit plans so when I heard that she was heading out to Austria, I half expected her to land in Melbourne after a miscommunication. Nonetheless, the plane touched down and she began a quick round of negotiations that turned out to be about as productive as a Venezuelan factory.
Mrs May had gone over to Salzburg in order to push her Chequers proposal again but whilst Salzaburg was once home to Mozart, this week it was more Like that John Cage piece where there's utter silence for 4 minutes and nothing meaningful happens. The EU's position, like a pretentious European art film is very black and white: you're either in the club or not and Theresa May can either leave with no deal or sign one in which the UK continues to benefit from all of the EU's "freedoms" such as freedom of moment, freedom for the EU's court in Luxembourg to overturn British legal cases, and of course freedom for the Labour party to not have to get round to deciding their position on any of the issues at stake. For Brussels who want ever closer union, Britain gaining special status would be seen as the start of something precipitous, the diplomatic equivalent of a tv show introducing celebrity cameos or major cast changes.
One other option on the table is the Brussels Backstop, where England Scotland and Wales get to go their own separate way but Northern Ireland becomes permanently annexed into being an EU protectorate in very much the same way that allegedly independent Kosovo has experienced over the past decade.
Just as there will only ever be two series of Fawlty Towers, in this political farce there will only be two options on the table: one of which breaks up the UK and one of which likely leads to the overall break up of the EU. In amidst all of it we might also even see the Labour party break up with the more moderate MPs departing to form a new anti-Brexit centrist party at Westminster. Let's hope not though because electoral charts and graphs are already too colourful and garish in my mind without a new pink or turquoise block having to be add to the mix, all for the sake of Tony Blair or Chuka Umunna's vanity.
Theresa May has had a fairly bad run of luck with her Brexit plans so when I heard that she was heading out to Austria, I half expected her to land in Melbourne after a miscommunication. Nonetheless, the plane touched down and she began a quick round of negotiations that turned out to be about as productive as a Venezuelan factory.
Mrs May had gone over to Salzburg in order to push her Chequers proposal again but whilst Salzaburg was once home to Mozart, this week it was more Like that John Cag ......
2018 Jul 29 - Fires
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.
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 an ......
2018 Jul 14 - Will Theresa May Survive?
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.
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 e ......
2018 Jul 08 - Theresa's Latest Brexit Plan
If you wanted a great visual analogy for Theresa May's premiership then you could do worse than watch a news report on those kids stuck in a cave in Thailand. They're trapped, in the dark and at risk of not making it to the end of the month, and that's just the Prime Minister. Mind you, because those kids have been living under a rock for the last week so they haven't had watch the round-the-clock build-up leading to a football match. Very similar to those other football matches you get most Saturdays. If you want to watch Harry Kane kick a ball around for 90 minutes in a game where half players aren't from England, the Premiership starts in a little over a month's time.
So, the Brexit deal though, what is it? Well you're best asking a civil servant in Brussels, they're the ones that appear to have written almost every page of it seeing as how Mrs May is apparently devoid of ideas. No doubt the interesting parts will be hidden in the appendixes, like when Gordon Brown managed to destroy all the final salary pension schemes by hiding extra taxes in the small print. Will there still be EU regulations for companies not trading with Europe? Will the UK still be majority voted into migration quotas? Will Guy Verhofstadt get majority voted into getting a new haircut? I doubt even the Germans could pull that off.
Right now, let's play a game: imagine that Theresa May has just handed you a wrapped up birthday present, you don't know what's inside but the wrapping paper has the same vague shape as a bottle of wine and it's the same sort of weight of a bottle of wine. Then you open it up and it's an empty bottle of wine but Theresa tells you that in spite of the critics, it's actually a fantastic gift because you can use it to decant wine into in case you need to store some.
Perhaps the idea is that this deal is purposely designed to fall apart so that we can get a no-deal Brexit, something that many want but which is broadly politically unsellable to the public at large. Except that unfortunately Theresa's not that sort of leader, remember that she spent the weekend at Chequers, not Chess.
If you wanted a great visual analogy for Theresa May's premiership then you could do worse than watch a news report on those kids stuck in a cave in Thailand. They're trapped, in the dark and at risk of not making it to the end of the month, and that's just the Prime Minister. Mind you, because those kids have been living under a rock for the last week so they haven't had watch the round-the-clock build-up leading to a football match. Very similar to those other football matches you get most Sat ......
2018 Jun 10 - G7 Summit
This weekend Canada hosted the G7 conference, a political get-together with a level of expectation and excitement akin to watching the numbers on a microwave ticking down before your substandard dinner. These meetings are supposedly meant to help the worlds biggest economies sort out ideas, which is no doubt why they don't invite China or India to the big economies get-together. To add insult to injury, Germany gets invited twice, once as itself and once as its puppet the EU.
President Trump was first out of the blocks to get on the headlines, raising the question of why Russia wasn't at the summit. That was one of those G7 "thing's you're not supposed to ask" questions, he may as well been asking if a waitress was single or quizzing Theresa May with a series of questions predicated with the expression "never have I ever" with Emmanuel Macron standing by to pour a line of Sambuka shots.
Frankly it's a sound point though, unless you invite Russia to the table, any discussion to do with Asia, the Middle East, Energy or banking is essentially null and void. As worthless mind as all the other platitudes that will no doubt be given out across an expensively laden Canadian banqueting table, all as part of the grand game of distraction from the news back home.
This week Theresa May would have probably travelled to anywhere to escape the mess back at Westminster. There were threatened resignations over her inability to act decisively on Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn even outplayed her at Prime Ministers Questions. I imagine he probably celebrated by buying himself a new hedgerow to drag himself through for next week's back-to-normal disheveled appearance.
Theresa claims or believes that she has enough supporters to get by as is. Except the Flat Earth society claims to have supporters all over the globe and you can probably see a logical contradiction in that one too...
This weekend Canada hosted the G7 conference, a political get-together with a level of expectation and excitement akin to watching the numbers on a microwave ticking down before your substandard dinner. These meetings are supposedly meant to help the worlds biggest economies sort out ideas, which is no doubt why they don't invite China or India to the big economies get-together. To add insult to injury, Germany gets invited twice, once as itself and once as its puppet the EU.
President Trump wa ......
2018 Jun 03 - World News Roundup
This week I thought I'd do a quick roundup of some of the various news stories from around the world. Like a Chinese buffet of news, except of course with less cat meat.
In America President Trump decided to implement a series of import tariffs on steel and aluminium which may or may not be illegal although I imagine that if it does go to court then the devil will be in the detail and the lawyers will probably spent most of the time arguing about whether the metal is spelled aluminium or aluminum. I said the devil would be in the detail, correction, the devil will be in a suit and be billing his client hundreds per hour.
In Korea, they're edging ever closer to that Peace Summit and I suppose that there's a fear/expectation that if they don't finally sort things out then President Trump might come down on them hard with an iron fist. Even if that iron fist would first have to likely pay a 20% export tariff thanks to the previous story.
Italy has new leadership this week after the Five Star Movement & the League (the winners in Italy’s recent general election) finally succeeded in their second attempt in putting together a coalition deal. To the losers I'd say don't worry, elections in Italy are like London busses. Or perhaps to use a more Italian analogy, they're like young ladies at Silvio Berlesconi's house, specifically there's an inappropriate number of them.
Spain also has a new ruler, there's was a change of leadership after King Felipe ousted the old prime minister following a corruption scandal and put Pedro Sanchez in charge of the country. I saw a picture of them in the newspaper with a caption underneath saying that Mr Sanchez was to the King's left, which kind of goes without saying really, he's a Spanish socialist he's probably to everyone's left.
In the UK the Daily Mail's celebrity sidebar has spilled over onto the news section with dozens of photographs from the Epsom Derby. In amongst the hats and the shoes, there's the Queen, celebrities like Liz Hurley and if you like both the queen AND celebrities, Helen Mirren's there too. I always feel it's a real shame that in spite of all the hats, the Queen never wears her big golden crown hat to the races. Mind you, maybe palace officials hide it in case she gets ideas about handing it over to a bookmaker.
This week I thought I'd do a quick roundup of some of the various news stories from around the world. Like a Chinese buffet of news, except of course with less cat meat.
In America President Trump decided to implement a series of import tariffs on steel and aluminium which may or may not be illegal although I imagine that if it does go to court then the devil will be in the detail and the lawyers will probably spent most of the time arguing about whether the metal is spelled aluminium or alumin ......
2018 May 06 - Trump Update + UK Local Elections
The US has spent the week watching the President Trump/James Comey/Stormy Daniels stories continuing to move along with the sort of pace normally more associated with a snail, or a car in London ever since they closed half the roads for bicycle use only. I think the plan is that if Robert Mueller's evidence doesn't turn out to be conclusive enough, Trump will have already been in office for 8 years so he'll have to legally vacate the White House anyway.
So let's talk about London though. There were local elections this week and Jeremy Corbyn had spent weeks planning his next moves and what to do after Labour managed to seize councils like Barnet and Wandsworth as well as all those towns and cities that the metropolitan types only hear about when they're watching Match Of The Day. Unfortunately, things didn't really go according to plan and it was a surprisingly good night for Theresa May, that's an expression you rarely hear about these days.
The Conservatives took control of Barnet council along with Plymouth and other decentish wins all over the place. Although the big story of the night was really the revival of the Lib Dems, Vince Cable was even sighted on television without his trademark hat on. It says a lot that if you've see a LibDem politician on television in the past 6 months, it was probably a BBC4 documentary about the Iraq War. Nonetheless, they made good gains in London and you can't fault them, at least they're honest about what they stand for. Compare and contrast with UKIP who depending on the time of day are either a protest vote, a Brexit lobbying group, a tax write-off for donors, a way for Henry Bolton to meet young ladies or in some cases actual politicians with local policies they want to pursue. Unfortunately UKIP is a lot like many other acronyms, in that you have to look it up on the internet to find out what they stand for. The problem with ideological parties generally is that for the most part they don't get enough numbers at the ballot box to win power, but the problem for parties with no ideology is that they end up with Theresa May, the political equivalent of that DVD player you keep meaning to stick in the spare room on give to charity.
The US has spent the week watching the President Trump/James Comey/Stormy Daniels stories continuing to move along with the sort of pace normally more associated with a snail, or a car in London ever since they closed half the roads for bicycle use only. I think the plan is that if Robert Mueller's evidence doesn't turn out to be conclusive enough, Trump will have already been in office for 8 years so he'll have to legally vacate the White House anyway.
So let's talk about London though. There ......
2018 Apr 15 - Syria
One of the problems with Syria is that we can either let President Assad remain in charge or we can force him out and let ISIS fill the power vacuum. It's like in the Star Wars prequels when Liam Neeson helped destroy that droid army but then he died and Jar-Jar Binks became a senator.
Maybe we could force Assad out and have an election in Syria, and the Russians definitely won't try to rig it with the hundreds of personal they have all over the country. If you've ever been to a carnival and watched a stallholder superglueing coconuts to the stands before opening for for business, that's basically an analogy for how Vladimir Putin would organize a free and fair Syrian election.
Nonetheless, this week saw the US, UK and France begin a bombing campaign, supposedly in retaliation to a chemical weapons attack but largely because there's lots of domestic problems at home and they all need a distraction. In the US former FBI director James Comes has been doing the rounds, with a primetime Sunday interview and presumably and appearance on an episode of Sesame Street brought to you by the letter "P"
In the UK, Theresa May always needs something new to keep people occupied when Brexit threatens to make its way onto the news agenda, and in France there'a a big walkout by the SNCF rail workers so they're distracting from a rail strike with a missile strike.
In reality the whole Syrian fight actually comes down to two rival plans to bring oil and gas into Europe via Syria, one American and one Russian. Unless you're a Momentum supporter in which case it's about Israel because of course ISIS are run by Mossad, Rupert Murdoch is personally in charge of dictating UK military policy and the Rothschilds were responsible for Ed Sheeran.
One of the problems with Syria is that we can either let President Assad remain in charge or we can force him out and let ISIS fill the power vacuum. It's like in the Star Wars prequels when Liam Neeson helped destroy that droid army but then he died and Jar-Jar Binks became a senator.
Maybe we could force Assad out and have an election in Syria, and the Russians definitely won't try to rig it with the hundreds of personal they have all over the country. If you've ever been to a carnival and wa ......
2018 Mar 03 - Snow and Brexit
It's snow joking matter, the UK's been so cold that pickpockets have been keeping their hands in their pockets and the counter-terrorism police have considered extending their remit to combat both ISIS as well as just regular Ice.
It's been a while since the UK last had a winter, nearly a year in fact and as usual their's the shots of slow moving motorways, roving reporters wandering deserted small town high streets and my favourite, the shot of hundreds of children sledging and hanging out at the park. It's never explained why the school run was was impassible, leading to the closure of schools, yet the road down to the nearest big snowy hill was apparently clear. In the mean time however, lots of trains have been cancelled although Southern Rail customers have been told that trains will run the usual timetable, by which I mean that you may as well roll a dice if you want to know whether your train will be there. And Scotland was forced to issue a red weather warning which is obviously worse than an orange weather warning but it's still probably preferable to a yellow ice warning.
The snow has also given the news agencies something to talk about other than Brexit. There were a series of speeches this week with very little in the way of new information and it's telling that most people were less interested in Jeremy Corbyn's opinion on the customs union than they were in a few inches of snow landing in his North Islington constituency. Northern Ireland remains a point of contention with the EU attempting to force a situation where a no-deal outcome would involve North Ireland somehow retaining all EU rules and oversight, effectively coming under the sovereignty of Brussels rather than London. A policy presumably borrowed from Nicola Sturgeon. Theresa May decided to borrow an idea too, suggesting "5 tests" purposely designed to fail - an idea borrowed from Gordon Brown and the Euro debate. That's where we are, British leadership relying on borrowed ideas from one of the worst prime ministers in the past half a century.
It's snow joking matter, the UK's been so cold that pickpockets have been keeping their hands in their pockets and the counter-terrorism police have considered extending their remit to combat both ISIS as well as just regular Ice.
It's been a while since the UK last had a winter, nearly a year in fact and as usual their's the shots of slow moving motorways, roving reporters wandering deserted small town high streets and my favourite, the shot of hundreds of children sledging and hanging out at ......
2018 Jan 27 - Davos
It was the Davos summit this week. That means the great and good of the world... stayed at home and watched the scumbags of the world turn up in Switzerland to talk to one another. There were the usual elected officials like Theresa May President Trump, or Emmanuel Macron. There were also lots of unelected folk there too like Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros not to mention John McDonnell who stayed at a hotel so expensive that he made Emily Thornberry look like a Cava Socialist.
At the conference itself, there were lots of dubiously, ominously titled discussions like "Shaping the agile governance of technology" which should really have been retitled "Let's clamp down on free speech" On the plus side, all that doublespeak probably gave Phillip Hammond lots of ideas for how to express his ever-ambiguous position on Brexit. I've seen a shooting gallery at a funfair that was more straight than he is.
President Trump of course was there, he decided to use the summit to push his message of "America First" which refers to both his economic strategy as well as the answer to the question "Where did Tony Blair go to reduce his tax bill"
Anyway, to sum up, millions of dollars were spent, thousands of tons worth of carbon was spewed out (if that's the sort of thing that bothers you) and I guess that Europe must now be running dangerously low on canapés, but not much has changed apart from the waistline of a few corporate executives and the bottom line of some local wine merchants. I'm sure a good time was had by all, although a quick search on Google Images will very quickly tell you that the best place to be partying at this year was still probably had by Ed Balls dancing at Mar-a-Lago. Seriously, go look that up. That's a man who until 3 years ago had serious ambitions to be in charge of Britain's nuclear arsenal.
It was the Davos summit this week. That means the great and good of the world... stayed at home and watched the scumbags of the world turn up in Switzerland to talk to one another. There were the usual elected officials like Theresa May President Trump, or Emmanuel Macron. There were also lots of unelected folk there too like Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros not to mention John McDonnell who stayed at a hotel so expensive that he made Emily Thornberry look like a Cava Socialist.
At the conf ......
2018 Jan 13 - Trump and S***hole Countries
This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation arise, and there was rumours that he brought the saxophone to the Northern Ireland peace process after someone said that he was going there to support the Corrs. Geddit, support the Corrs? (That Irish band)
Ok, so back to President Trump. The Washington Post this week reported that he'd supposedly referred to the 3rd world using a word beginning with 'S' that was (to use the letter S) a synonym for stool, more severe than the word 'suspicious' and a simply silly suggestion to spout to the scribes. As with many of Trump's proclamations though, even if you do agree with his America First policy, he comes across as a hypocrite as quite lot of his staff at Mar A Lago in Florida happen to be migrants from impoverished parts of Latin America; perhaps he'd have had more success if he'd accompanied the gaffe with an announcement that the Trump organization would cease employing migrant labour and start paying $15/hour for long-term US residents. On the other hand, he did suggest that he wanted people from Norway, a fairly left wing place, to move to the US so that's perhaps as close an olive branch towards centrist politics as we're going to get.
Also, one take away is that if you find yourself living in an economically depressed post-industrial part of the UK, or France, Germany or well anywhere north of the Mediterranean then congratulations, according to president Trump, you're not living in a cesspool after all. It turns out that even if your shopping precinct was recently filmed as part of a video montage for a news report about urban decay, just be glad that you're lucky enough to not be beset by the sort of problems they have in Southern Asia with it's sun and its cheap lifestyle and it's 7% annual growth rates.
Anyway, a day later as part of an encore there was an announcement that the president will no longer be visiting London when the new US Embassy opens up in Battersea. In all honesty though and speaking as someone who used to live near Kings Cross, a lot of Londoners would probably agree with his decision to not venture south of the river.
This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation aris ......
2017 Dec 23 - Christmas
It's nearly Christmas so I thought this week I'd retell a classic Christmas joke. One day in the run up to Christmas, a newspaper posts a question to Downing Street asking what Theresa May has asked Father Christmas for. There's a long a protracted debate in number 10 about the ethics of the question - it can't be anything too fancy after all - and in the end Theresa May lets the journalist know that she's wanting some chocolates and a nice bottle of English sparkling wine, to sit down with while she watches the Queen's Speech on Christmas Day. Anyway, the next morning the newspapers are a bloodbath and she turns on the radio to hear a Labour Party spokesman calling for her head after a Guardian exclusive about how the Prime Minister was wanting to spend Christmas get sloshed, whereas Jeremy Corbyn and the other party leaders said that for Christmas they were all praying for global peace along with nuclear disarmament and goodwill to all men.
Anyway, so to the real news world. What are the actual leaders around the world wanting for Christmas? Catalonia's ousted leader has asked for fresh talks with Madrid after the separatist parties won a slim majority in the recent regional election. The SNP are calling for fresh talks with London because why not, it's been a while and the clue's in their name. I imagine that Theresa May's asked Santa to speed up time so that March 2019 can roll round and she can finally resign having seen Brexit through to completion. President Trump has declared that the recent tax cut bill proves that actually he IS Santa so the question is irrelevant. And his opponents agree, they want him to vacate the White House and disappear to the North Pole, for at least a year. The Chinese President, welcoming the economic boost in toy exports has asked for the rampant commercialisation of more western holidays. And finally, Dianne Abbott is asking for someone to explain the Advent Calendar to her again because she's still struggling to find door number twelfty on it.
Well that's it for this week, I'm off to open a nice bottle of red and see if I can find a film with Roger Moore, Alec Guiness or maybe Michael Caine in it. Have a Merry Christmas everyone.
It's nearly Christmas so I thought this week I'd retell a classic Christmas joke. One day in the run up to Christmas, a newspaper posts a question to Downing Street asking what Theresa May has asked Father Christmas for. There's a long a protracted debate in number 10 about the ethics of the question - it can't be anything too fancy after all - and in the end Theresa May lets the journalist know that she's wanting some chocolates and a nice bottle of English sparkling wine, to sit down with whil ......
2017 Dec 16 - Brexit & Alabama
Big political moves in Westminster and Alabama this week; two places that don’t often have much in common although if you’re a politician from the West Midlands and fancy a holiday to America, why not spend a week at the Hilton in Birmingham - Birmingham Alabama that is - and try submitting the 1st class airline ticket as an “honest mistake” ?
But first let’s discuss the Brexit vote in Westminster. Essentially the parliament will now get to vote on whether they like Theresa May’s deal or not. It’s like the end of a dinner party when the host asks the guests what they thought of it but still refuses to disclose what type of meat was in that stew. But the powers in Brussels are certainly happy enough to move onto the next stage of the talks. They eat frogs legs and raw chicken though so who knows how the second stage will go.
That vote though, according to the press it was the result of a betrayal by capricious tory rebels akin to something out of a John le Carré novel, and now the Labour Party will get the chance to race in on horseback as saviours at the end of the process to vote down the deal and prevent Brexit. Or at least they would be, had the date not already been placed in law and were the EU not already moved onto planning a more federal post-UK Europe. It’s a fact that in around 18 months the UK will now either drop out with Theresa May’s deal, or the likes of the LibDems and the more metropolitan wing of the Labour Party will win their vote and thus deliver a WTO rules Hard Brexit. And a few days later, event at that stage, the Labour Party will no doubt put out a serious of contradictory statements about the future of the customs union with about as much coherence as a Diane Abbott attempting to read the football scores.
So now to the US. This week saw Roy Moore loose his run for the US senate seat in Alabama and the deeply conservative stage chose their choice of spokesperson from the same party as Hilary and Nancy Pelosi. That’s the kind of End-Of-Days black swan event you might imagine featuring in a montage in a disaster movie. But we live in odd times, Scotland has several Conservative MPs after all. But this was more a condemnation of the system. Moore shouldn’t have been the candidate in the first place but not enough people cared during the primaries to kick him off the ballot and once his name was there, they were stuck with it, like a badly installed bathroom. In all honesty I think in the longer term it was probably a good result for the Republican party. If he’d won, the Democrats would have used him as the mascot for their campaigning next year to destroy what was left of Trump’s powerbase. It’s a bit like how in 1992 the Conservatives won a narrow victory but the resulting 5 years destroyed what was left of the Party’s soul and public credibility. They ultimately paid the price for that win. Perhaps if the likes of Jonathan Aitken had lost their seat in ’92 then things would have been very different in ’97.
Big political moves in Westminster and Alabama this week; two places that don’t often have much in common although if you’re a politician from the West Midlands and fancy a holiday to America, why not spend a week at the Hilton in Birmingham - Birmingham Alabama that is - and try submitting the 1st class airline ticket as an “honest mistake” ?
But first let’s discuss the Brexit vote in Westminster. Essentially the parliament will now get to vote on whether they like Theresa May’s de ......
2017 Dec 10 - Brexit + Trump Names Jerusalem Israeli Capital
Brexit news: don't look now but apparently it's going pretty well, for now at least, supposedly. People talk about politicians being out of touch but I always think that for those ministers involved in the Brexit process, getting stuff to happen must be a good analogy for us regular folks trying to get an old car to scrape through an MOT for one last time.
This past week actually started out looking quite bleak on the Brexit front, I'm sure Theresa May was imagining the upcoming news headlines in the way that I used to look forward to an upcoming Shakespeare essay at school: you know how it is, it's Sunday night and you know it's due on Thursday and you know that your claims on what you know are further away from the mark than when when Michael Bay made Peal Harbour. But for now things seem to be vaguely on track; sure the Remainers in the cabinet are still trying to haggle the EU upwards on the fee side of things but on the other hand, the EU federalists seem to be increasingly keen to get rid of Britain and get on with the task of subjugating the continental Europeans without pesky nationalism getting in the way.
But if we want to look for a real dispute, proper gnashing of teeth and wailing, let's look to the wailing wail itself in Jerusalem. This week President Trump decided to say that Jerusalem was the Israeli capital. That went down about as well as a visit by Martin Shulz to Alene Foster's house. This annoyed a lot of people: the Palestinians, the Arab world and don't forget the regular pub quiz enthusiasts like myself who was relied on the knowledge that Tel Aviv was the capital to earn themselves an extra point or two every few months. Bizarrely I saw some Scottish Nationalists getting angry on the internet about it, you'd think they'd sort out the Edinburgh vs London capital city debate first really. But who knows, one day the Middle East might reach a peaceful settlement and send an envoy to head to Glasgow and sort out the ancient Rangers vs Celtic football conflict.
Brexit news: don't look now but apparently it's going pretty well, for now at least, supposedly. People talk about politicians being out of touch but I always think that for those ministers involved in the Brexit process, getting stuff to happen must be a good analogy for us regular folks trying to get an old car to scrape through an MOT for one last time.
This past week actually started out looking quite bleak on the Brexit front, I'm sure Theresa May was imagining the upcoming news headlines ......
2017 Nov 24 - Black Friday Brexit
If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and flies off to Europe once again to meet with the leaders of Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark as well as Donald Tusk.
I was going to make some kind of analogy here involving whatever the hot toy is this year that all the kids are after but that would of course imply that the Theresa’s cabinet had a united position on what they were after; right now the demands are something like a train set that comes with hair accessories and plays Nintendo games and costs somewhere between free and £40 billion at John Lewis. Still, it’s probably better than having negotiate the visa conditions for Tracy Island following Brexit or persuading Anthea Turner to come and show Theresa how to construct a Brexit agreement at home with stuff that’s just lying around.
In the mean time though, Angela Merkel won’t be taking part in any of this, she has her own problems at home following the failure to reach a coalition deal and elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s government faces the similar threat of fresh new elections and the Spanish haven’t agreed on what Spain actually consists of. Perhaps the Christmas toy analogy I should have gone for would be a Rubik’s Cube, except it’s some kind of bizarre unsolvable a cube with 7 sides and Germany’s far right AfD party don’t 6 of the 7 sides. And I just remembered that St Nicolas was actually from Southern Turkey and I try to keep things short and succinct so let’s just leave this metaphor at least for now and we’ll wait and see what President Erdogan gets up to in the next few weeks.
If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and fli ......
2017 Oct 05 - Theresa May's Speech & Catalonia
The big story of the week was supposed to be Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech which, let’s say “didn’t go according to plan” unless that plan was “let’s make a pilot for a political comedy show in the style of Frank Spencer” There was a coughing fit, a prankster, the sign behind her literally fell apart and by the end I was looking around the stage to see if anyone had put a bucket of wallpaper paste at the top of a strategically placed ladder.
On the other hand, it’s been a busy week elsewhere: there was the massacre in Las Vegas followed by the ongoing political situation in Catalonia, which (depending on who you speak to) is either “a constitutional disaster” or “a damn good distraction from events at home!” Personally I’m just looking forward to when Spain vetoes Catelonia from being allowed into the EU and Brussels is forced to decide whether it wants to A) side with the Catelans and therefore support the implicit concept of nationalism or B) support Madrid but in the process let the world see that Catalonia didn’t crumble without the benevolent overreach of Brussels.
As someone from Scotland though it’s pretty incredible seeing how things are playing out in Barcelona. I suppose a Scottish equivalent would have been for David Cameron to have sent the the army into Glasgow 2 years ago with Union Jacks flying, and of course hope that Celtic fans didn’t mistake it for an overzealous troop of Rangers fans. The British army has some of the best troops in the world but I’d question their chances against 500 east-end football fans who’ve spent all lunchtime getting lager’d up and singing support for the IRA. Certainly on the topic of football I do find it amazing that Nicola Sturgeon is so keen to support Catalan independence, it’s hard enough for Scotland to qualify for a major tournament these days without there essentially being a 2nd Spanish team to contend with.
It’s going to happen though, it’s more a question of how long it will take, what the rest of Europe will do to suppress similar secessionist movements and of course how Texas will react. It required someone like Abraham Lincoln to hold the US together last time anyone left the union, but Donald Trump turning out in the end to be remembered as a unifying figure, a new Lincoln or George Washington? It seems about as likely as Theresa May doing something really brilliantly well, whether it be winning an election or just giving a well delivered popular speech.
The big story of the week was supposed to be Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech which, let’s say “didn’t go according to plan” unless that plan was “let’s make a pilot for a political comedy show in the style of Frank Spencer” There was a coughing fit, a prankster, the sign behind her literally fell apart and by the end I was looking around the stage to see if anyone had put a bucket of wallpaper paste at the top of a strategically placed ladder.
On the other ha ......
2017 Sep 30 - Labour & Conservative Party Conferences
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.
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 nee ......
2017 Sep 21 - Florence and Boris
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.
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 dinos ......
2017 Aug 24 - GCSE Results
In the UK, Parliament it still on recess and across the pond, it’s been nearly a week since Donald Trump sacked anyone. Indeed, the main story for quite a few days was the furore about silencing Big Ben for a few years so they can repair some of the stonework. It was getting pretty tense until the clock finally struck 11 o’clock and the pubs opened so journalists and MPs alike had someone else to go
Luckily enough for the news starved newspapers, exams results came out this week. One great thing with school results is that if they’ve gone down you can fill copy by criticising teaching standards but if they go up then you can spend days complaining about exams becoming easier. But the best thing, for newspapers (and websites alike) is that they can fill acres of space with photographs of people opening their results. Teenage girls opening up their results, ethnic minority students celebrating, lots of attractive young women hugging each other, attractive ethnic minority girls leaping in their air, possibly cuddling each other. All sorts of photos just as long as they’re vaguely suggestive and there aren’t any boys or unattractive people in shot.
Of course, in the real world the only result that’ll count for much soon is your credit score, what with University costing more than one of Charles Kennedy’s old bar tabs. And in the real world successful GCSE results don’t necessarily transfer to success in life. I can’t find anywhere saying what the Prime Minister got when she was at school but Jeremy Corbyn got 2 A-Levels, both Es, but Ed Miliband got 4 A-Levels and see how that worked out for him in the real world.
Anyway, see you next with news of whatever madness has gone on in Washington while I was away.
In the UK, Parliament it still on recess and across the pond, it’s been nearly a week since Donald Trump sacked anyone. Indeed, the main story for quite a few days was the furore about silencing Big Ben for a few years so they can repair some of the stonework. It was getting pretty tense until the clock finally struck 11 o’clock and the pubs opened so journalists and MPs alike had someone else to go
Luckily enough for the news starved newspapers, exams results came out this week. One great ......
2017 Jul 14 - Three Types of News
The talk of a leadership challenge against Theresa May seems to have quietened off a bit, at least for this week, as the government made another move with a big piece of Brexit legislation. In response a senior civil servant tried to get your average lager drinking, white van driving bloke on the street onside by making a Brexit analogy involving a cricket ball and went on to say that Brexit was falling apart like “a chocolate orange” which seemed odd given that if you’re already doing the cricket thing, at least follow through and say things will fall apart like an England test match innings, or use the chocolate metaphor from the start as another meaningless nonsense term to describe the supposed ‘softness’ of the perceived Brexit.
Elsewhere, across the Atlantic, there’s been more Russia allegations, this time involving Donald Trump’s eldest son meeting with a lawyer from Moscow. A lawyer who was actually barred from entering the US until Attorney General - and friend of the Clintons - Loretta Lynch personally stepped in to allow him to enter the US in a sign that the top echelon of all the political world there is on a dodginess rating that places it somewhere between a used car salesman on a stag do and a newspaper editor who’s discovered that both his mistress and mortgage payments are late.
And in North Korea, they’ve been very keen to show off their new ICBM. It’s very difficult to get Visa entry into the country but they’ve advised journalists that they should visit the West Coast of America if they want a close up look. Not that I’m questioning their technical skills but I’m guessing it’s so that the journalists can get to Los Angeles in order to board a cruise ship bound for the sea of Japan were the rocket is scheduled to land, several seconds after it takes off.
The talk of a leadership challenge against Theresa May seems to have quietened off a bit, at least for this week, as the government made another move with a big piece of Brexit legislation. In response a senior civil servant tried to get your average lager drinking, white van driving bloke on the street onside by making a Brexit analogy involving a cricket ball and went on to say that Brexit was falling apart like “a chocolate orange” which seemed odd given that if you’re already doing the ......
2017 Jun 21 - Bad Week for Theresa May
The last week or so has shambles of bad press management from the government. Not reallya good time to be a spin doctor at Downing Street: it must feel like you’ve taken controls of a burning plane and successfully landed it on an aircraft carrier that’s just been struck by a torpedo.
The Grenfell Tower fire was a genuine tragedy but in the days since Theresa May managed to come across as detached and unemotional, she was probably depicted worse in the press than the owner of the company that had illegally installed the highly flammable cladding in the first place. It’s a bit like if you watched a James Bond film where Bloefeld had come across as an entrepreneur and 007 was just a jerk who shot people and forgot to pay his bar tab
Jeremy Corbyn of course doesn’t have to follow through with anything he says now that the election’s over so he’s been suggesting all sorts of policy ideas on inequality and social housing and told everyone that under his watch we’d build a gazillion new council homes all made out of gold and everyone affected by the fire would get a free unicorn. And actually now I think about it gold has quite a low melting point so maybe make the houses out of gingerbread [?] because at this point it’s all academic anyway.
Then flash forward a few days and a nutter decided to drive a van into a crowd of muslims leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque as part of some insane revenge for the London Bridge attacks a few weeks ago. One of those attackers was wearing an arsenal shirt so perhaps when the trial starts he’ll claim that he’s not a racist, just a Tottenham supporter.
For now, if you see Theresa May’s eyes turning orange, don’t worry. Just give her a tap on the shoulder, then those eyes will turn to a flashing orange, then a flashing green, then solid green, and [boom!] the government will have restarted and gone back to normal.
The last week or so has shambles of bad press management from the government. Not reallya good time to be a spin doctor at Downing Street: it must feel like you’ve taken controls of a burning plane and successfully landed it on an aircraft carrier that’s just been struck by a torpedo.
The Grenfell Tower fire was a genuine tragedy but in the days since Theresa May managed to come across as detached and unemotional, she was probably depicted worse in the press than the owner of the company th ......
2017 Jun 16 - Theresa May make a deal with the DUP
So the dust has finally settled, David Dimbleby has been put back into cryogenic stasis and so begins 5 years of fierce and intense debate inside both Westminster but also inside the polling organisations about how to be less rubbish at forecasting next time
Thesesa is still living at number 10, although a lot of people are questioning whether she's the right person for the job. I watched her on the news as she returned home from visiting the queen and as a police officer opened the door for her I had to wonder whether she can be trusted to run the country when she apparently can't even be trusted to remember to remember her house keys.
In the mean time she'll be paying Northern Ireland some more money for DUP support. On a day to day basis, life will go on, it'll just mean a lot more work and negotiating and obviously more time like a lots of other tough things in life. The inventor Joseph Swan took years to perfect the lightbulb, although presumably he was working in the pitch black.
For now, people are saying that Brexit might not happen. Correction, the BBC and people on Twitter are saying that Brexit might not happen. Well back in February Parliament had a vote on whether to trigger Article 50 or not. The Labour party voted too and it was still a landslide Yes vote because for every trendy europhile Labour MP, there's quite a few of others outside of London who do mad stuff like drink on a school night or still listen to their voters. The media seem to forget it was the Labour party that used to be against Europe, many senior members still are, and there's a good chance you could see a huge internal battle and the party ending up looking worse than Emily Thornberry squeezed into her bikini for summer.
So the dust has finally settled, David Dimbleby has been put back into cryogenic stasis and so begins 5 years of fierce and intense debate inside both Westminster but also inside the polling organisations about how to be less rubbish at forecasting next time
Thesesa is still living at number 10, although a lot of people are questioning whether she's the right person for the job. I watched her on the news as she returned home from visiting the queen and as a police officer opened the door for he ......
2017 Jun 09 - Shock Election Result!
So it's the morning after the night before and we got a shock result. Theresa May thought it would be a rubber stamping exercise, like getting your passport renewed except it was more like one of those awful bank applications where you have to supply 2 utility bills and then you're declined because due to a typo
Hats off to Jeremy Corbyn though, he didn't actually win a majority but he sure as heck managed to defeat the Blairites in the Labour party and that might mean we've finally seen the last of Tony Blair, until he eventually ends up on trial at the Hague. Corbyn got the youth vote out against the odds and especially in spite of Dianne Abbott who spent the last 6 weeks making Corbyn and Abbott look more like Abbott and Costello. Noticeably, Labour's uptick in the last few days directly coincided with her putting an end to her endless series of car crash tv appearances. I saw a programme the other night and I wasn't sure whether it was an interview with her or a documentary about Ayrton Senna.
The Lib Dems having lost most of their target new voters to Labour are pretty much exactly where they started but with Vince Cable back, the political equivalent of firing up that old computer in the spare room and upgrading it from Windows 95 to Windows 98. In Scotland, the SNP also got bumped back to reality with Angus Robertson and the big fish himself Alex Salmon losing their supposedly safe seats.
UKIP and the Greens as usual got hundreds of thousands of votes but next to nothing to show for it, yet more proof that we need proportional representation: it's about the one thing that Caroline Lucas and her greens actually agree with Paul Nuttall on asides from not shaving. We'd probably have proportional representation already were it not for Nick Clegg backing it a few years ago, fulfilling his roll as Harbinger of political disaster.
And so that just leaves us with the madness of a minority administration in Downing Street. I'm posting this on Friday morning and four questions remain that I suppose may be answered by the time you're watching this. 1) Will Theresa Resign? 2) What happens with Brexit now? 3) Will Boris finally make a proper grab for the leadership? 4) Will anyone ever be able to afford a holiday abroad now that the pound is falling faster than the odds of a 2nd election in the next 12 months.
So it's the morning after the night before and we got a shock result. Theresa May thought it would be a rubber stamping exercise, like getting your passport renewed except it was more like one of those awful bank applications where you have to supply 2 utility bills and then you're declined because due to a typo
Hats off to Jeremy Corbyn though, he didn't actually win a majority but he sure as heck managed to defeat the Blairites in the Labour party and that might mean we've finally seen the l ......
2017 May 30 - Election: 1 week to go
If you live in the UK, then there’s just one week to go until the election. That means 7 more sleepless nights until we find out whether Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott will be in charge of the UK’s anti-terrorism policy. It’s a scary thought and in all honesty, I’d place more trust in that tiger that ate a zookeeper over the weekend in Cambridgeshire. In an odd twist of events this weekend also saw police in Florida arrested Tiger Woods for drink-driving and for a while I briefly misunderstood what had happened.
But to clarify, Tiger Woods didn’t kill and eat anyone, although Jeremy Paxman did have a go at chewing over the party leaders in a series of interviews that frankly didn’t reveal a whole lot. Theresa May muddied the waters around about the so-called Dementia Tax and the Labour team continued to be vague about the IRA and whether Osama Bin Laden was a goodie or a baddie. Frankly, I wish Michael Howard was somehow involved in the campaign just so that Paxman could finally get to the bottom of whether he’d threatened to overrule Derek Lewis back in the mid-90s.
There are of course other parties though, the LibDems, UKIP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens and in Scotland, there’s also the SNP or as it’s more formally known, Her Majesty’s Nicola Sturgeon. So for now, keep your political wits about you because on June the 8th the nation decides. And as Vladimir Putin might add “and zat nation ees Russia!” Only joking of course, even he couldn’t make much of a dent in those poll numbers.
If you live in the UK, then there’s just one week to go until the election. That means 7 more sleepless nights until we find out whether Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott will be in charge of the UK’s anti-terrorism policy. It’s a scary thought and in all honesty, I’d place more trust in that tiger that ate a zookeeper over the weekend in Cambridgeshire. In an odd twist of events this weekend also saw police in Florida arrested Tiger Woods for drink-driving and for a while I briefly misun ......
2017 May 19 - Election Catchup
We’re halfway through the election campaign so I thought we’d take a look at what the various parties stand for, seeing as how we’ve not had have Ed Milliband chiseling anything onto a demented novelty gravestone this year.
The Conservatives are frankly miles in the lead following Theresa May’s media strategy of keeping Boris and all other the Gaffe prone MPs away from a microphone. She’s also promising to deliver on Brexit in order to finally put and end to Nick Clegg who increasingly resembles one of those Japanese soldiers that were still up in the mountains decades after the war had ended.
Labour wants to pile money into schools and hospitals but the biggest spending commitment is probably the suggestion of bringing both the post office and the railways back into public ownership, although that might actually be doable seeing as how Corbyn winning would trigger the mother of all stock market crashes and all those Royal Mail shares would then be very cheap for the government to buy, and I doubt Corbyn could do worse than Southern Rail
The Green Party manifesto is mostly made up of all the things that Jeremy Corbyn thought were a bit too left wing for Labour but say what you will I suppose the Greens do have an honest view on where they stand with regards to Europe. It seems a bit inconsistent though, seeing as all the European stuff people enjoy like sports cars, chorizo and cheap flights to Spain are the same things the green party wants to ban.
Also in the pro-EU court are the Liberal Democrats who don’t like Theresa May’s decision to trigger Article 50 and think that the public should keep getting a say in it at every opportunity until they get it right. Not to be outdone, the SNP also want a second Brexit referendum and a second Independence referendum too. Both of them also promise more money for schools, presumably because with all that extra voting, local primary schools will need to spend money upgrading their parking facilities.
That just leaves UKIP who want to make sure the Conservatives don’t go soft on Brussels. And for those like me in a boring safe seat looking to waste your vote, the Monster Raving Looney Party have quite a good manifesto this year; they think that the UK should exit Europe but go further and join the Duchy of Cornwall to benefit from tax exemptions.
We’re halfway through the election campaign so I thought we’d take a look at what the various parties stand for, seeing as how we’ve not had have Ed Milliband chiseling anything onto a demented novelty gravestone this year.
The Conservatives are frankly miles in the lead following Theresa May’s media strategy of keeping Boris and all other the Gaffe prone MPs away from a microphone. She’s also promising to deliver on Brexit in order to finally put and end to Nick Clegg who increasingl ......
2017 Apr 19 - Election 2017 Announced
So it’s 5 week to go until the next general election after Theresa May decided take everyone by surprise, very much like a school teacher posting a surprise test on the first day back. If it was a surprise maths test, it really wouldn’t be looking good for a lot of people in the Labour Party although the they do know a lot about “Division” and Dianne Abbott knows about “pi” and, oh dear, Ken Livingston just read the word “Axis” and he’s off on another rant about the war…
Back to the election, it’s likely to be a scene of unmitigated disaster in some constituencies. For a good metaphor, look at those very same Labour constituencies on a Friday night when Weatherspoons closes. The kebab shop represents Labour’s manifesto, in so much as nobody knows what’s in it. That the bloke peeing into a phone box represents most people’s reaction to the establishment. The guy not being let into a nightclub is Tim Farron because neither the bouncer nor the electorate recognise him. The girl getting undressed in a back alley is actually not part of the metaphor, she’s just someone that Boris Johnson bumped into when he was up north campaigning.
Long story short though, we can all look forward to June the 8th as election day, unless you’re the SNP in which case the replay is scheduled for August, November and possibly next January if they can get the high court to back their demands for a rerun.
So it’s 5 week to go until the next general election after Theresa May decided take everyone by surprise, very much like a school teacher posting a surprise test on the first day back. If it was a surprise maths test, it really wouldn’t be looking good for a lot of people in the Labour Party although the they do know a lot about “Division” and Dianne Abbott knows about “pi” and, oh dear, Ken Livingston just read the word “Axis” and he’s off on another rant about the war…
Bac ......
2017 Jan 28 - Brexit + Trump's Wall
Following a High Court Ruling, Brexit was the main topic of conversation at Westminster this week and the opposition benches are in in a confused mess over the whole thing. Labour MPs have really still not come to terms with last year’s vote. Most of them still haven’t managed to wrap their heads around how the public were stupid enough to vote “Yes” – when they were asked whether Jeremy Corbyn should remain party leader. The Conservative side’s not too much better mind, although at least you can rely on people like Osbourne or Cameron to dramatically change their stance to whatever the new PM wants, as long as there’s an all expenses paid speaking tour thrown in. I reckon Kenneth Clarke might even vote yes to Article 50 if you offered him a grotesquely large slap up dinner and threw in some tickets to see Wynton Marsalis playing at Ronnie Scotts.
However the big news was across the pond with Mr Trump, reiterating that he thinks he can get Mexico to pay for a border wall. If he can pull that off and convince Mexico to drop $20 billion on it that then fair play to the guy but I expect it’s going to be a bit like politely asking the BBC to appoint Jeremy Clarkson as Director General. In the mean time Theresa May’s popped in to say hello at the White House this weekend and I imagine there was a lot to discuss, like why it takes about 4 hours to pass through US border control or why he spends more time on his hair than she does.
And finally in entertainment news, Michael Jackson’s daughter came out this week and claimed her father was murdered. New evidence suggests that the finger of blame should be pointed at “The Boogie”
Following a High Court Ruling, Brexit was the main topic of conversation at Westminster this week and the opposition benches are in in a confused mess over the whole thing. Labour MPs have really still not come to terms with last year’s vote. Most of them still haven’t managed to wrap their heads around how the public were stupid enough to vote “Yes” – when they were asked whether Jeremy Corbyn should remain party leader. The Conservative side’s not too much better mind, although at ......
2017 Jan 08 - Brexit
Hello everyone. A long time ago I used to do a lot of cartooning but I’ve not done anything in a few years and I wanted to get back into it. Anyway, as it’s the new year I thought I’d start recording what’s going on in the world with a new cartoon each week.
It’s the end of 2016 so if you’re a celebrity it’s safe to come out from behind the sofa. Probably. In the mean time, here’s Theresa May up on a government building working on the government’s secret 6-part Brexit plan.
Hello everyone. A long time ago I used to do a lot of cartooning but I’ve not done anything in a few years and I wanted to get back into it. Anyway, as it’s the new year I thought I’d start recording what’s going on in the world with a new cartoon each week.
It’s the end of 2016 so if you’re a celebrity it’s safe to come out from behind the sofa. Probably. In the mean time, here’s Theresa May up on a government building working on the government’s secret 6-part Brexit plan. ......
