I make no judgement; I merely report:

A friend of mine, who is one of the shrewdest observers of French politics, tells me that his hunch is that the polls are completely wrong, and have not taken proper account of how almost half the votes will be cast next Sunday. His prediction is that the poll will be topped by Bayrou, with Le Pen as runner up.

(2)

This is inspired.

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Oliver Kamm has a very good post on a piece by John Kampfner in this week's New Statesman about Nick Cohen's book. Do read the whole post.

I have one point to make. In his piece in the Statesman this week, John Kampfner (who is a friend) refers to a piece he wrote in 2003 "in which I sought to explain how a small group of British politicians and journalists, who counted themselves as still of the left, had more in common with the US neoconservatives than they cared to admit."

But, as Oliver Kamm points out:

Those Kampfner named were an eclectic group, of whom only two - John Lloyd and David Aaronovitch - clearly counted themselves as "still of the left". The others comprised two prominent figures in the Conservative Party (one was the MP Michael Gove, and the other was Daniel Finkelstein, former Director of Research for the party); Stephen Pollard, who does not count himself on the Left at all; and Melanie Phillips, whose views I would categorise as communitarian rather than left-wing or right-wing. Of these, and so far as I know, only Stephen is an identifying neoconservative.

Where things go even more awry is in John Kampfner's piece this week, in which he writes:

It matters that Cohen, like his fellow pro-war cheerleaders, comes from a far-left background. It was a part of the far left that brooked no dissent. They do not come from the mainstream left, which I would loosely define as social democratic or democratic socialist or liberal. They come from a tradition where politics is about black and white, and where opponents (even those who diverge slightly) are heretics. Polemic comes easily to them.

I am, of course, one of those pro-war cheerleaders. My political trajectory can be, and often is, criticised or pilloried. But in all the great variety of labels I have had attached to me (my favourite was when I was working for the Fabian Society, and Socialist Organiser awarded me their Prat of the Week title) never once have I been described as having had a "far-left" background.

Which is not surprising really, given that my political memberships have been :

1980-87 Young Conservatives

1987-2001 Labour Party

1989-92 researcher to Peter Shore

1992-95 Fabian Society

1995-97 Social Market Foundation

Then again, I was Chief Leader Writer on that hotbed of Trotskyism, the Daily Express. I guess that's the "far-left background".

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Should you be so inclined, you can read my chapter on sport in Living and Giving, the Jewish Contribution to Life in the UK, 1656-2006 here.

There are also chapters by Lord Janner QC, Lord Kalms, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, His Honour Israel Finestein QC, Prof Geoffrey Cantor, Prof David Katz, Gr Gerry Black, Alex Brummer, Norman Lebrecht and Henry Morris.

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I'll be the studio guest on Anita Anand's programme (presented tonight by Phil Williams) on Five Live tonight, between 22:00 and 01:00.

UPDATE: When I point out that it's tonight, I mean that it's...tonight! ie Thursday evening.

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If you've ever wondered why it is that the Independent is happy to publish a writer such as Robert Fisk, who distorts the truth so regularly, I can now provide an explanation. The Independent, as I now know from my own experience, is happy to distort quotes out of all context.

I've been away all this week. Mind you, even when I'm here I rarely see the Indie, and certainly not its diary column. So until I was rung on Tuesday by the Jewish Chronicle to be asked about it, I had no idea that on Monday this item appeared in the Indie's Pandora column (the link has to be paid for - don't waste your money):

Pollard pulling tips

When it comes to "pulling", Blunkett biographer Stephen Pollard seems to have learnt how not to do it from his subject's exotic liaisons.

One of Pandora's lonely hearts - a female member of JDate, the "leading Jewish singles network" - mentions she has been e-mailed by a Stephen Pollard.

She says: "He didn't have a picture on his profile," adding: "We didn't meet in the end. It was mutual." (She refuses to tell me the name of the MP who has similarly contacted her.)

Confirms Pollard: "It was me, yes. I was on it a while ago. I am Jewish - it goes with the territory! I haven't been on it for ages. I hopefully don't have to any more."

So it was a successful search? "No, not from JDate."

O, spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou!

Seems like a sweet enough story, you might think - albeit a story that's not a story. Since when is 'single man once didn't go on a date with someone he had never met' a story?

It happens to be true that I have been on JDate, the Jewish dating site. Indeed, as readers of this blog might know, I have written a play with a friend which will be performed next year about internet dating. Almost every single Jew in Britain seems to be on JDate.

As for the rest of the 'story'?

Here's what happened.

Last week I got a text from someone called Pandora from the Independent who wanted to know if I was the same Stephen Pollard who had written David Blunkett's biography.

I get lots of calls from random journalists asking me about Blunkett and I try whenever possible to be helpful to them, so I replied to 'Pandora' saying it was indeed me.

Was I the same Stephen Pollard who had been on JDate? A friend of Pandora's had once received an email from a Stephen Pollard and she (Pandora) wondered if I was the same Stephen Pollard.

I replied to say it was indeed me but that I hadn't been on the site for ages.

I then got another text about being on JDate and so I sent a curt response and had no further communication with 'Pandora'.

And that was all I knew until on Tuesday the Jewish Chronicle rang me, having seen the diary story above. They wanted, they said, to print it.

I wouldn't bother any of you with this deeply unimportant story but for the fact that it shows the journalistic standards of the newspaper which regards Robert Fisk as a reliable writer about the Middle East - and that this non-story about my non-date has now appeared in two national newspapers, since it's also in today's JC. With one important difference. The JC story adds this:

But an indignant Pollard tells us that the quote was made up. He has been on JDate, he does not mind admitting, but why, he asks, is that news?

The JC's version is accurate, because that newspaper comforms to basic standards of accuracy by speaking to people from whom it runs quotes; and it doesn't distort the context of text messages.

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Well, er, yes...

(4)

Do have a read of Daniel Finkelstein's Writer's choice. He's spot on in his judgement of Marquand's importance as a thinker and writer.

It turns out that Tim Worstall, whose pithy blog I read regularly, also writes for a site dedicated to the differences between men and women, La Difference. And he's emailed me with some important observations:

[Y]es, it might be that Simon Baron-Cohen would disagree with your precis.

His research is really stating that there is such a thing as a male brain (systemizing, list making etc), the female brain (empathic) and a balanced type, and that yes, autism can be seen as an extreme form of the male brain.

However, while we might expect women to have female type brains and men male, that isn't actually the way it works out. Some 17% of either sex have the other (if that makes sense?).

Where this begins to make sense, actually become useful, is in looking at certain jobs and professions and seeing what the sexual mix is in them. If women are more likely to have female type brains, we would expect to see more of them in a highly empathic occupation like nusrsing, which indeed we do. If there are certain jobs which appeal a great deal more to systemizing traits, then we'd expect to see many more men in it. But not all one sex or the other, as a significant portion of men are empathic etc etc.

This gives an idea:

If it is true that economic models are very like maps (which Chris Dillow thinks they are) and that understanding them requires the spatial skills known to be associated with the male type brain, then we would expect to see many more male economists than female. Further, we would expect those economists who are female to display attributes of the male type brain, which in the instance of Lynne Kiesling, we do: her map reading skills are much higher than the average man's let alone woman's.

Note that a female's possession of a male type brain is nothing to do with any other male attributes. Ms.Kiesling is quite the hottie (as is Virgina Postrel, another possible data point).

If you're so minded, you can take Prof Baron-Cohen's two tests to discover if you've got a "male" or "female" or "balanced" type brain.

This piece of mine appears in today's Times:

Do the names Adrian Slade, Hugo Rodallega or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Piano Quintet in C mean anything to you? If even one of them registers, then I have news for you. Whether it is good or bad news is, I suppose, a moot point: you are a friend of mine for life.

If you know about all three, then something truly weird has happened. Someone must have been cloning embryos more than 40 years ago, when I was born.

I tell you this not because I wish to use The Times to find new friends, but because this week I realised something that many people have known for ages. I am really quite weird.

What I am about to reveal next is obvious, if not from my name then at least from the accompanying mugshot. I am a man. And when I say I am weird, what I really mean is that I am a man.

A few months ago I read a fascinating book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge. He will no doubt recoil in horror at my caricature of his book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, but the basic message I took from it is that men have more “systematic” personalities and women have more “empathic” personalities. The book concentrates on autism as an extreme example of this in men.

Yes, I thought, this all makes sense. After all, Nick Hornby wrote a bestseller, High Fidelity, based on men’s penchant for making lists. I’m sure most men recognised themselves in the book’s theme. But it was only when I spotted Adrian Slade in Bloomsbury on Monday that I realised just how true it is.

Along with a couple of friends, I have a rather sad interest in long-forgotten political figures. A few years ago, for instance, I met the Mayor of Oakland, California. I cannot come close to conveying to you the sheer excitement I felt. The reason? In a former incarnation, he was Governor of California — Jerry Brown, or Governor Moonbeam as he was then known.

Mr Slade, as if you didn’t know, was the last president of the Liberal Party, from 1987 to 1988. Sitting on a bus and spying him out of the window hardly compares, but it nonetheless merited an immediate email to my friends, both of whom understood the frisson I felt.

I know. I did say I was weird.

The Piano Quintet in C is a different matter. It may be part of another obsession — obscure recordings of classical music — but it is at least culturally respectable. Wilhelm Furtwängler is, I would argue, the greatest conductor ever. He also composed, but his pieces were rarely performed, let alone recorded. So when I discovered last week that there is a new CD of his chamber music, I was ecstatic. Most normal classical music obsessives would not even be aware of its existence, let alone care.

As for Hugo Rodallega, he is a Colombian footballer who plays for Club de Futbol Atlas in Mexico. But that’s not how he fits in. This week I was having lunch, and my companion and I discovered halfway through that we have both wasted innumerable hours playing a computer game, Football Manager. In the game, I manage Spurs and Hugo Rodallega is my top scorer. My companion is a Manchester United fan, and so much does he care about his team, and the computer game, that he refuses to pretend to be that club’s manager, lest he be sacked. By a computer programme. In a completely made-up game.

I may have such weird obsessions, but I like to think I am at least relatively normal. Other men have different obsessions, but obsessions they most certainly have. Can you, however, imagine any normal woman behaving like this? Caring — really, really caring — about being sacked in a computer game? Men. Weird.

***************************************

A month ago, the road outside my flat was closed for a week. It was inconvenient but worth it. The surface was relaid and we, and all the environs, ended up with a lovely smooth new road.

Yesterday I got a letter from Thames Water, informing me that it is replacing the Victorian water tunnels where I live. It will take months and cause disruption, but everyone knows it has to be done.

And so it has begun. By digging up the bright, smooth, shiny road, laid no doubt at great expense, a month ago. Isn’t Britain wonderful?

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One of the regular commenters on this site, James, has taken the plunge and started his own blog. You can find it here. Good luck, James, and enjoy the ride.

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Two Arabs boarded a flight out of London. One took a window seat and the other sat next to him in the middle seat.

Just before takeoff, an American sat down in the aisle seat. After takeoff, the American kicked his shoes off, wiggled his toes and was settling in when the Arab in the window seat said, "I need to get up and get a coke."

"Don't get up," said the American, "I'm in the aisle seat, I'll get it for you."

As soon as he left, one of the Arabs picked up the American's shoe and spat in it.

When the American returned with the coke, the other Arab said, "That looks good, I'd really like one, too."

Again, the American obligingly went to fetch it.

While he was gone the other Arab picked up the American's other shoe and spat in it.

When the American returned, they all sat back and enjoyed the flight.

As the plane was landing, the American slipped his feet into his shoes and knew immediately what had happened.

"Why does it have to be this way?" he asked. "How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes and pissing in cokes."

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Blimey.

This NPR chat about Yiddish is great fun. Especially the discussion on the difference between a Putz and a Schmuck

(via Norm.)

Yes, I know the comments aren't working. Sorry. I am hoping it will right itself since I don't have a clue what's wrong. Given that I was thinking of disabling them anyway to get rid of the spam, maybe it's for the best.

Posting will be very light for the rest of the week.

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A friend has just emailed this genius site:

Cats that look like Hitler.

[Oops. I write Hilter when originally posting this, as the comments make clear.]

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Time for a bit of mutual back scratching. Iain Dale has generously included this site in his top ten journalist blogs. Were I to compile a list, Iain's site would definitely be one of the top three. I look at it regularly, and am amazed how he has the time to update it so often.

Iain's Number One is Paul Linford's site, and I would also endorse the fact it's well worth a look. When I get round to updating my blogroll Paul's site will definitely be there.

Mutual back scratching over.

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If you didn't catch my friend Peter Oborne's remarkable Channel Four documentary on Friday on Sudan and Chad, do read his piece in the Spectator.

Peter has carved out an incredibly brave niche, putting armchair commentators such as myself to shame, travelling to some the most dangerous hotspots in the world, and genuinely risking his life to report what is happening. Prior to visiting Sudan and Chad to look at the Janjawiid's brutality and the battle with the Sudanese Liberation Army, he reported from Basra and Zimbabwe.

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A lovely line from the great Armando Iannucci yesterday:

Asylums are now called care homes. It's madness gone politically correct.

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Does anyone have any suggestions? This site is now being bombarded with spam. Over 80 went up today. I don't want to have to close comments again, but the time taken deleting them is too great for me to continue unless I can find a way of dealing with the problem.

I have a Turing code at the moment but that seems now to be ineffective. What else can I do?

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Just back from seeing The Da Vinci Code. Not having read the book, I wanted to see what the fuss is all about. I shouldn't have bothered. It's an absolute pile of crap. Save two and a half hours of your life and give it a miss.

It did however serve one useful function, revealing a hitherto hidden aspect to the sale of honours scandal. I suggest that Plod goes and sees the film forthwith.

Whatever Lord Levy's alleged involvement in the sale of honours, it pales into insignificance when compared with what the film shows he has been up to.

One of these men is Lord Levy. And one is The Prefect, one of the Opus Dei honchos behind the crimes covering up the existence of descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Have they ever been seen in the same toom together? Get on the case now, Mr Policeman.

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Peter Briffa is peerless. When he does one of his pastiches of the commentariat, one must stop everything and read it. So do that, now!

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Apologies for not posting this week. I've been snowed under with other things, and - to be honest - in a state of total depression about anything political.

We have a Labour government that is a bizarre mixture of incompetent, wrong-headed, lying and grasping. The Conservatives are now a sort of SDP Mark II, pathetically pandering to the green lobby and actually contemplating increasing our already record tax burden. And the Libs are, well, the Libs.

And as if Charles Clarke letting murderers, rapists and paedos roam the streets wasn't enough, now the judiciary has got in on the act, hanging out the bunting and welcoming gun-wielding hijackers into their new home in Britain.

Anti-Semites are given platforms to push their anti-Israeli filth across the maintream media. Islamists are on the march. Violent crime is on the increase. And yobs terrify ordinary decent citizens.

No doubt tomorrow I'll wake up and determine to keep up the fight, but at the moment I'm in one of those 'the game is up' moods.

Talking of which...

The one thing which has put a smile on my face is seeing the look of desolation on the faces of those West Ham fans. All the way to Cardiff for nothing. Glorious.

And how sweet that Anton Ferdinand, who scored against Spurs in the last minute at White Hart Lane, should be the man to gift the FA Cup to Liverpool.

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If you like watching freak shows, I will be on the Daily Politics programme on BBC2 tomorrow at around 12.10, talking about the Home Office.

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My letter in today's New Statesman (in response to this):

It is always flattering when someone notices one’s witterings, let alone when so distinguished a commentator as Peter Wilby thinks they have some meaning. But his amusing piece last week about my political leanings contained a couple of howlers.

I am supposedly a hypocrite for writing last week that the Prime Minister is up to his neck in sleaze, yet having stopped contributing to the Statesman because it ran a piece comparing him with Stalin.

I didn’t. If Peter checks the email to which he refers, he will see that I stopped because a review of mine was published next to a piece by a psychiatrist which argued that Tony Blair could be clinically diagnosed as a psychopath.

Even Peter can surely see there is a difference between pointing out that the Prime Minister’s abuse of the honours system is sleazy, and arguing that he is a psychopath.

As for the idea that I “claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views”; I make no such claim. When it became clear that the mainstream left opposed the overthrow of Saddam’s tyranny and believed that America had 9/11 coming, I realised that I did indeed have no discernible left-wing views.

If wanting to promote freedom and defend the values of Western civilisation is right wing, I happily accept that label.

Stephen Pollard
London W9

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No posts until Wedneday, I'm afraid.

(BTW, I haven't had to delete a single comment so far. It's looking good.)

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This week's New Statesman has a little piece about me by Peter Wilby. I like him a lot and was once interviewed by him for the job of political editor of the magazine, only to be beaten by John Kampfner, who was in every respect better suited to it than I would have been.

I think what he says is perfectly fair, but there are two howlers.

First of all, he says I stopped writing for the NS because of a piece by Robert Service. I didn't. As I wrote at the time here (as well as to Peter Wilby), it was because of a piece by a psychiatrist, which purported to prove that Blair was a psychopath ("technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath").

And as for the idea that I define myself as being on the Left: dear me, no. I certainly used to, because I had a strange idea that the Left believed in tackling oppression. But I have bored on and on and on about how I woke up after 9/11, and Iraq, and realised otherwise.

If believing in defending Western civilisation, overcoming oppression, promoting properity and giving the poor the power to excercise the same choice as the wealthy over health and education means being on the Right, that's where I sit. Proudly. As I have already said far too often.

UPDATE: Oliver Kamm has more on Wilbygate and my non-left leanings.

And I love the idea of one of my commenters to this post that, when I joined the Labour Party in 1986, when I spent the years before Blair was anywhwere near the leadership arguing that Labour should embrace competition, markets and profit, when I was spat on by Labour members for advocating the abolition of the NHS, when I left the Fabian Society because of my advocacy of academic selection, when I continue to advocate the abolition of the NHS at a time when even the Leader of the Conservative Party is signed up to 100% tax funding, and when I remain fully in support of the Iraq War, I have been trend surfing. I wish!

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Get a grip, man. Buck your ideas up.

Not everyone, it seems, turns to my Daily Mail pieces for stylistic guidance.

Well, I guess it's a matter of different strokes...to me, this sounds like hell on earth.

Cliff Richard, Lulu, Tom Jones, Denise van Outen.

HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE!

I might not be posting for quite a while; thanks to War of Attrition winning the Gold Cup at an ante post 12/1, I won't have to work for about another 20 years.

See you in 2026.

PS I'll expect a regular supply of free drinks from everyone to whom I mentioned him!

PPS Desert Quest in the County Hurdle at 5.20 if you want to pick up some loose change. And Tysou in 4.40.

UPDATE: I hope you all took my advice and plunged on Desert Quest, the biggest certainty of the meeting! Even at 4/1, his SP, the bookied were handing out free money. I sat smugly by with my 12/1 ante post.

One thing I've learned since writing for a living is never to surprised by the reaction some pieces engender. The biggest postbag I have ever received, by quite a long margin, was when I was on the Express and I wrote a couple of sentences after Britain had lost in the Davis Cup to the US. My piece was, almost in its entirety:

Who cares? It's only tennis.

The angry letters flooded in. The best was from someone who had clearly gone to a lot of trouble. Using letters that had been cut from newspapers and mags, blackmail style, it simply said:

You hate tennis because you are a fat bastard.

Whilst the latter point was 50 per cent correct, it was of course a non sequitur to associate this with the fact that I consider tennis to be mind-numbingly tedious: the sport for people who don't like sport.

Anyway, the 'don't be surprised' motto is still true. I made a throwaway remark yesterday about the fact I can't stand the sight - and, still worse, the sound - of Rachel Weisz. As of lunchtime today, I have had 63 emails from readers who have the same reaction to Ms Weisz (who may well be the most delightful woman on the planet, a fact which is utterly irrelevant to my loathing of her).

Weird, isn't it, what stirs people!?

One of the joys of moving is finding things you had forgotten even existed.

Unpacking my books yesterday, I came across a book about the 1945 election which we published to mark the 50th anniversary, when I was at the Fabian Society.

I had forgotten I even had the book, let alone that at the dinner that we put on on the night of the anniversary, I got it signed by Roy Jenkins, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan and Michael Young.

I wonder what other treats await as I open up the boxes,

Sorry about the lack of posts. Normal service will be resumed next week.

I'm back in the land of the living - well, the internet connected, and to celebrate my return I bring news which will, as I know from correspondence, thrill many of you as much as it does me. Metropolitan is, at last, out on DVD, with a full commentary from the cast and Whit Stillman. You can buy it here.

I'm not sure when I'll next be able to post. I'm moving tomorrow, so my internet connection is dependent upon BT's efficiency, not something for which past experience provides any encouragement.

As Captain Oates put it, I may be some time...

Gerard Baker, whose Times columns are essential reading, has joined the ranks of bloggers. His blog has only just started, but I can't imagine anyone more likely to produce a must-read blog, so I'd definitely recommend reading it.

His first posting has a quote from Mo Udall:

You might be tempted to greet the arrival of yet another blog on your computer screen by concurring mournfully with the wisdom of one of the most underrated of American politicians, the late Morris Udall.

"Everything that can possibly be said has already been said," the peerless member of congress from Arizona once opined in the middle of a seemingly interminable debate. "The problem is, not everyone has said it yet."

Udall was a sort of political Yogi Berra. My favourite Udall remark was after the 1976 Wisconsin Democratic primary. The exit polls had projected him as winner, and late at night he made a rousing speech to his supporters. When he woke up the next morning he discovered that the polls were wrong and he had lost. He told reporters at a press conference:

You know all the times I said 'win' last night? Well, I want you to insert the word 'lose.'

There is another quote which used to be attributed to Udall but which, it turns out, comes from Dick Tuck, the Democratic fixer. After losing his bid for a California state Senate seat in 1964 he said:

The people have spoken - the bastards.

How's this for good service:

I was due to go to a couple of concerts this weekend by the Concergebouw orchestra, in my view the finest in the world. For various reasons I had to miss them but, because I knew well in advance, I was able to post the tickets back in plenty of time for a credit voucher.

This morning I got a call from the Barbican Centre, saying they were very sorry but because the tickets only arrived this morning - over 10 days since I posted them - they could not give me credit.

Fair enough from their point of view. The fault lies not with the Barbican, who cannot be expected to give credit for returns which arrive after the event, but with the wretched Royal Mail, incapable of doing the job for which it is paid.

I did not complain - I had nothing to complain about to the Barbican. I simply said how I understood the Barbican could not be expected to give me credit, and then how annoying it was that the post was so ineffecient. 'Can you hold for a second?', the chap replied.

When he came back, he said his manager had decided it was only fair to give me the credit vouchers anyway.

Astonishing. The concerts were sold out with, I gather, large queues for returns. So it's real money they're offering me, not a return on a hall which was half empty.

It's easy enought to moan about bad service, but good service deserves to be praised.

I'm not going to be able to most much, if at all over the next week. So chances are the next post will be next Friday.

But then again, you never know...

You might notice that a posting from yesterday on Interpal is no longer up. I removed it after a few minutes (although I understand that it remained visible for a little while afterwards). It concerned its nomination by George Galloway in the Big Brother programme.

I want to make clear that the charity operates as an entirely legitimate organisation for the relief of suffering and no evidence has ever been produced to suggest otherwise.

Yup. This test pretty much nails me...

You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (81% permissive) You are best described as a: Capitalist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

I saw a truly hilarious show last night, Gutenberg! The Musical!, a send up of West End musicals and a lot more besides. It's already had a series of rave reviews, such as this from the inestimable Clive Davis in The Times:

Gutenberg! The Musical! — receiving its world premiere in London — contains more wit and intelligence than three decades of megashows.

I should declare an interest. The producer, Trevor Brown, is a friend, and he will be producing my new play at the same venue in the hopefully not too distant future. Meanwhile, ring the box office on 020 7287 2875 before the whole run sells out. It's on until the end of the month.

David Aaronovitch has a blog. If it's as good as his print writing, it will be a must-read.

Things are back to normal from today. Hurrah - didn't the holiday period just drag?

Which means, I hope, that I will be posting more regularly than in recent months. That's my intention, anyway...

Shameless, moi? A few people have noticed that I have written yet again about my loathing of New Year's Eve.

I wouldn't want to be so rude as turn down editors' requests for it every year. Nor would I want to break my own promise.

And I have a mortgage to pay.

Here's an early Channukah present:

Two beggars are sitting side by side on a street in Dublin. One has a cross in front of him, the other one the Star of David.

Many people go by and look at both beggars, but only put money into the hat of the beggar sitting behind the cross. A priest comes by, stops and watches throngs of people giving money to the beggar behind the cross, but none to the beggar behind the Star of David.

Finally the priest goes over to the beggar behind the Star of David and says: "My poor fellow, don't you understand? This is a Catholic country. People aren't going to give you money if you sit there with a Star of David in front of you, especially when you're sitting beside a beggar who has a cross. In fact, they would probably give to him just out of spite."

The beggar behind the Star of David turns to the beggar with the cross and says: "Moishe, look who's here to teach the Levine Brothers about marketing!"

As you'll have noticed from the paucity of posts recently, I haven't had time for much blogging. I think things are looking up now, so fingers crossed there should be more posts.

But so much has happened about which I've not been able to comment that I thought I should provide a brief summary of my views, so that this site is now bang up-to-date:

Brown's Pre-Budget Report: the game's up

Brown: unelectable

David Cameron: good

Flying terror suspects to other counties to be interrogated/held: fine

Flying them to to be tortured: not fine at all

Harold Pinter plays: good

Harold Pinter: twat

Montreal agreement: much ado about nothing

Blair EU budget proposals: too much ado about a lot

Paraguay, Trinidad and Sweden: lucky

Turner Prize: yawn

John Lennon anniversary: even bigger yawn

End of the Routemaster: bad

Bendy buses: bloody awful

No, I'm not on commission:

Jon Stewart, the wonderful host of The Daily Show (which, praise be, is now on More4 at 8.30 everynight) is appearing on 11 December at the Prince Edward Theatre. It took me forever to track down this website on which I could book tickets.

Public Service Announcement over.

Very good point in Niall Ferguson's column today:

As far as I can see, the only significant differences between the 50 states are climatic. And even then, the range is relatively narrow by global standards. To prove my point, ask yourself where you would end up if you flew the same distance - around 2,500 miles - eastwards from London. The answer is Baku. How about flying the same distance from Zurich? You'd be in Khartoum.

If an Australian flew 2,500 miles north from Perth, he'd be just short of Kuala Lumpur. Consider the immense cultural differences that separate these places and you realise that the most amazing thing of all about the United States is not its polarisation, but its homogeneity.

That's also borne out by serious scrutiny of American public opinion. In their fascinating new book, Culture War: The Myth of a Polarised America, Morris Fiorina, Sam Abrams and Jeremy Pope comprehensively debunk the notion that American society is deeply divided. On a whole range of issues, which don't get debated because consensus is taken for granted, Americans have strikingly similar views. Even on the issues about which the political class gets excited - abortion, homosexuality and religion - it's remarkable how much common ground there is.

"On the whole," the authors conclude, "the views of the American citizenry look moderate, centrist, nuanced, ambivalent… rather than extreme, polarised, unconditional [and] dogmatic."

Should you so wish, you can hear Any Questions here.

I'm on Any Questions tomorrow night (8pm, Radio 4, repeated Saturday at 1pm). The other panellists are Baroness Tonge, Alun Michael MP and some Conservative chap called David Cameron.

If you're bored witless on Friday night, your stupor will be made worse if you tune in to Radio 4 at 8pm.

Oh no! I've been excommunicated!

It's a debate that's run and run, but I've finally decided to take Stephen off our list of Labour-supporting bloggers. As with anyone else who might be taken off the list, it's not a punishment, and it doesn't even necessarily mean I think the person is wrong, merely a recognition that people have to broadly back the party, or it defeats the object. I suppose this article was the clincher.

I would still encourage you to look out for his articles, at least for variety, and a link can be found in our sidebar.

I had no idea I was even on the site. And I'm as amazed as some of the commenters that I was. Bloggers for Blair, yes. But for Labour? I gave that up when I realised that New Labour - as good as Labour is ever going to get - is just tax and spend with a modern gloss.

As I love telling mainstream Labour members when I see them: I've remained loyal to Blair because of the war, not in spite of it. The look on their faces when the realisation dawns that I am 100% serious is simply priceless.

I've stolen this joke from the comments section on Harry's Place:

A Jelly Baby walks into a bar and starts talking to a Smartie.

After a few beers the Smartie says "Ere, a bunch of us are heading to that new club, fancy tagging along?"

The Jelly Baby says "No mate, I'm a soft centre, I always end up getting my head kicked in."

"So", Smartie says. "Don't worry about it, I'm a bit of a hard case, I'll look after you."

Jelly Baby thinks about it for a minute and says "Fair enough, as long as you'll look after me", and off they go.

After a few more beers in the club, three Lockets walk in.

As soon as he sees them, Smartie hides under the table.

The Lockets take one look at jelly Baby and start kicking him, breaking cola bottles over his little jelly head, lamping him with little sugary chairs, and generally having a laugh.

After a while they get bored and walk out.

Jelly Baby pulls his battered Jelly Baby body over to the table and wipes up his Jelly Baby blood.

He turns to Smartie and says, "I thought you were going to look after me."

"I was!" says Smartie, "But those Lockets are menthol!".

Sorry for the absence of posts. They'll be sporadic for a while, as almost all my time is taken up at the moment writing a play I've been commissioned to write. It's all very exciting - there'll be more details of it appearing in the new year. Watch this space!

From an interview with Gordon Ramsay about his forthcoming C4 show, The F Word:

You say you'll be tackling other topical issues - like what?

Well I don't know yet, because if I did, they wouldn't be topical, would they?

UPDATE: Blimey - a bit of a slip there. I had originally written Gordon Brown above. Mind you, that would be a show I'd watch...

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on why he worked on Rosh Hashannah:

It was also the first day of Ramadan. I figured they cancelled each other out.

Returning to the theme of great headlines, a friend told me one last night which surely wins.

A local newspaper report of a library closure carried this headline:

Book Lack In Ongar

Shana Tovah. Watch this; it's brilliant.

A correspondent has pointed out that there is one all-time winner of the Best Headline Ever contest (which beats even the NY Post's Headless Corpse in Topless Bar).

Since I've cited it myself on this site, I shouldn't have omitted it. Here it is:

WARNING: Don't click on the link if you're offended by swearing...

This is perhaps the best (or worst) headline ever.

No posts until Saturday, I'm afraid.

Sorry that postings have been so limited of late. A combination of work and having to concentrate on domestic matters (I'm moving) has meant I've been neglecting the site. Fingers crossed things are back to normal now.

There are two new sites which I'd like to recommend. First, Adloyada has been started by one of the most indefatigable campaigners for the right of Israel to exist and defend itself from terror, and is well worth a look. Today she's highlighting the stupidity of Richard Harries' crowd of bishops and their latest witterings on Iraq. I will be posting more on this myself later on today.

Do also have a look at Democratiya, which describes itself as

a free bi-monthly online review of books. Our interests will range over war, peace, just war, and humanitarian interventionism; human rights, genocide, crimes against humanity and the responsibility to protect and rescue; the United Nations, international law and the doctrine of the international community; as well as democratisation, social and labour movements, 'global civil society', 'global social democracy', and Sennian development-as-freedom.

Its first issue is full of interesting things, not least a typically insightful piece by Harry (of Harry's Place) on 'The Pro-Liberation Left'.

If you haven't already, do have a look at The First Post - the UK's first internet magazine.

I'm going to be writing regularly for it, and will link to my pieces on this site. My first, on the Aspen Music Festival, is here.

Libby Purves is clearly a woman of rare insight and perception:

THE FIRST THING to say is that Stephen Pollard (Thunderer, yesterday) is right. The EU Trade Commission is being hypocritical and stupid over Chinese clothing imports, slapping on violently protectionist quotas and impounding millions of innocent trousers. His indignation was expressed largely on behalf of the developing world, a concern which I endorse...

I'll be on the Today Programme at 6.50 this morning talking about my new pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies (on how the Conservatives could become an acceptable home for Blairites)...of which more later.

UPDATE: You can hear the interview here (scroll down to 06.41).

So I go away to this.

And I come back to this and this.

I disappear for two weeks and the world turns on its axis. They'll be deporting Islamofascists next.

Thanks so much to everyone who asked for a t-shirt. I seriously underestimated the number of people who realised that there was indeed such a thing as a free lunch (well, t-shirt) and so I have ended up disappointing over a hundred people. Apologies.

Meanwhile, I'm taking a rest from this site for the next fortnight. I'll be posting again from Wednesday 17th August.

We've heard a lot from G8 leaders this week about how they intend to link dealing with corruption to aid. One Nigerian politician has a plan.

Norm can. But I can't.

I'm back. The electricity is back on, for the moment at least.

Here's a trite observation, which reminds me of the Basil Fawlty insult: special subject - the beeding obvious. To wit: don't live without electricity. It's not fun. And it has nothing to commend it.

Sorry for the absence of posts. I came back last week from a spell in Istanbul to discover that the power in my flat was dead. A circuit had blown, taking everything with it.

It's going to a while before I get electricity back. I'll be back here ASAP.

Apologies for the sporadic posting of late. I'm afarid it'll continue to be rather threadbare for the next week or so.

Frank Johnson's column today is a joy.

WARNING: Not for children.

(via Norm.)

Sorry posting has been a bit light of late, but I am on a series of deadlines on work for which someone actually pays me. Back to normal soon I hope.

Yes, my arm pits have been shaved.

Clive Davis, whose site is one of my daily must-reads, has moved. You can find his all-improved new site here.

Oh dear. I've just had my first ever experience of how some sites/undetected virus can cause huge embarrassment. I've been happily scribbling away on my pc, whilst - as I now discover - some bizarre website, which appears to be a commercial operation (and whose name I will not reveal) has somehow attacked my computer, got into my address book and sent out invitations to 'join me' and register with the site so 'we can keep track of each other's movements'.

I'm hoping some of the emails will have been blocked as spam, but I already know of many which haven't and which have landed in the inboxes of people I barely know, apparently coming from me.

I've contacted the company concerned, but if I hear back from them I'll eat my proverbial hat.

Bloody computers!

Pope Benedict

Matthew Norman:

If this sounds like the opening to a northern club comic's gag, few are laughing at the punchline. There were these three cardinals running for Pope, see (or rather Holy See) - a Jew, a black man and a Hitler Youth ... and the Vatican took about five minutes to choose the Hitler Youth!

This, by Mary Kenny in the Daily Mail today, must be the best opening to a piece I've read for quite some time:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would not have been my personal choice for Pope. I was hoping for a Jewish Pope...

She then goes on to explain that she is referring to Cardinal Lustiger, who was born Jewish.

No more posts until Friday 15th, I'm afraid.

My guess is that 'Lexi' is the only Italian lesbian neocon blogger.

Well, it's one way of looking at things, I suppose:

The first openly gay Anglican bishop has sparked outrage for suggesting that Jesus might have been homosexual.

The Rt Rev Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church of the United States, said that Jesus was an unmarried, "non-traditional man" who did not uphold family values, "travelled with a bunch of men" and enjoyed an especially close relationship with one of his disciples.

A housekeeping point: I've been told that some people find the colour scheme of my blog off-putting; and also that it's impossible to copy text from this site.

There's a solution to both issues. On the left hand side, just under the blurb 'This is my weblog' is a button saying 'print version'. Click on it, and you'll get the site in black and white, and be able to copy text.

Sorry for the lack of posts. I'll be back, posting normally, on 1st April. See you then.

Hmmm.

This appeals to my rather odd sense of humour.

I've just heard an unintentionally hilarious interview with the ever more preposterous Harold Pinter on Today. As soon as it's up on the BBC's site, I'll link to it.

Mr Pinter is to receive the Wilfred Owen award tonight for his poetry.

That gives me the perfect opportunity to elevate this site with three of Mr P's masterpieces:

There’s no escape.

The big pricks are out.

They’ll fuck everything in sight.

Watch your back.

If that's not to your taste, how about this:

Bush.

He is not evil.

Evil is as evil does.

He is not a tyrant.

Tyranny is evil.

But what is he?

Or this:

Here they go again,

The Yanks in their armoured parade

Chanting their ballads of joy

As they gallop across the big world

Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead

The ones who couldn't join in

The others refusing to sing

The ones who are losing their voice

The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.

Your head rolls onto the sand

Your head is a pool in the dirt

Your head is a stain in the dust

Your eyes have gone out and your nose

Sniffs only the pong of the dead

And all the dead air is alive

With the smell of America's God.

You know what's coming next; I made one of those up. Not that it matters which: they're all, to use the technical term, crap.

In which vein, do read a wonderful piece by Daniel Finkelstein, here.

I like this.

(via Norm.)

A correspondent has sent me this Jewish elaboration of my earlier posting:

Orthodox Judaism: Shit happens. Why, asks Rashi? Rabbi Akiva, speaking in the name of Judah the Prince (Bava Batra 125b), cites the description of the proportions of the bier for carrying the Tabernacle in Vayikra...

Conservative Judaism: Shit happens to us, and we need to understand this shit through the prism of tradition without losing touch with contemporary reality.

Reform Judaism: Shit happens not only to us, but to everyone, and may be due to Bush's anti-environmental policies. Fetch my guitar.

Reconstructionist Judaism: Shit does not happen as an event but as a non-supernatural process.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism: Shit happens because your bathroom isn't kosher. And your hat's too small.

I suppose this sort of thing (via Norm) will be illegal soon:

Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.

Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to us?

Calvinism: Shit happens because you don't work.

Secular Humanism: Shit evolves.

Christian Science: When shit happens, don't call a doctor - pray!

Capitalism: That's MY shit.

Communism: It's everybody's shit.

Feminism: Men are shit.

Jehovah's Witnesses #2: May we have a moment of your time to show you some of our shit?

Oliver Kamm is back with some typically woolly thinking.

I'm afraid I have had to disable all comments from now on. I do not have the time to monitor the site for the abusive, defamatory, racist and anti-Semitic remarks which some people seem to think are fine to write in the comments section. Even though the overwhelming majority are sensible, as always it is the minority who cause sufficient trouble to end up penalising everyone.

I'm sorry to have had to scrap comments. I might reconsider, but don't hold your breath. Life is too short to spend hours scrutinising the rantings of morons.

I don't usually respond to individual comments, since I disagree with so many of them that I'd end up doing nothing else all day. And I also believe that if you can't take it, you shouldn't dish it out.

But since I've been told by a few commenters and emailers that I'm a hypocrite for writing that Baroness T saved the country, yet also (the accusations vary) supporting Tony Blair, working at the time she was in office for a number of Labour MPs, attacking a Conservative leader, refusing to 'admit' that I am a Tory, supporting Michael Foot, etc., I'd simply like to point out that the accusation is, like so many of the assertions which I usually let pass, baseless.

For one thing, I was still at school when Worzel Gummidge was Labour leader, so I'd have had to be as precocious as Mr Hague himself - or perhaps Peter Cuthbertson.
And for another, I was a member of the Young Conservatives - 'tis true - until 1986. I made my switch when I was at university, when I was sickened - as I still am - by, amongst other things, the strain of homophobia which ran through Conservatism in the 1980s, and which was manifested in the infamous 'Clause 28'.

Why on earth should that alter my belief that Mrs T did a host of necessary things, and deserves huge respect? And I fail to see why it is inconsistent to believe both that Margaret Thatcher did immense good and that Tony Blair also deserves support, and makes a far better Prime Minister than any of the alternatives.

(And, btw, I've only ever worked for one Labour MP - Peter Shore (as he then was), with whom I will always be proud to have been associated.)

(2)

Overheard tonight in a restaurant:

I only have two words for you: I love you.

Dump him, love.

(2)

Private Eye's regular correspondent, Ena B Price, has also spotted the similarity.

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There'll be no more posts until 26th January, I'm afraid. I'm in the land of the free, and I won't be blogging.

(3)

Harry says that

I can't see him doing a Pollard on the serialisation rights for that one can you?

'That one' is this:

"I have agreement for full, exclusive and unfettered access to all archive pictures in Cuba," he [George Galloway] said. "I will write narratives to go with each picture, based on a series of several interviews with Fidel Castro. It could, though, just turn out to be one meeting as I have met him several times and one hour meetings can turn into four or five hours.

Galloway added that Castro was a respected figure who had survived numerous attempts on his life. "He is the most impressive person I have ever met," he said. "A most charismatic man at 78 years of age. A total of 11 American presidents have tried to kill him and use their power to try and destroy his revolution."

.....It will consist of photographs from Castro’s rise to power to the present day including access to Cuba’s own picture library with the MP penning Castro’s comments and recollections on each photograph. The book is due to be published in May next year.

I guess since one vile repressive dictator is now no longer available for arse-licking, Gorgeous George has had to make do with another.

They're welcome to each other.

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Norm links to a profile of Germaine Greer with an anecdote which has the feel of being abolute bo**oc**, but is nonetheless wonderful:

Once she gave a lecture at Oxford, arguing that the female orgasm was not only a facet of gender tyranny but was also vastly overrated. A male student raised his hand. "About that overrated orgasm," he drawled. "Won't you give a Southern boy another chance?" The speaker was a young Rhodes scholar called Bill Clinton.

Thinking of Ms Greer prompts a very silly thought. Have you ever played the parlour game where you put together unlikely spouses based on a shared surname? Iris and Rupert Murdoch, Gwen and Elton John, Margaret and Ben Thatcher, etc.

I realise this doesn't work (both because it's Christian names and they are different names in any case) but I do like the idea of Germaine Greer and Jermain Defoe.

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Sorry for the lack of posts. Bed ridden with flu. I'll be back ASAP.

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One of my commenters attempts to prove my dark Vicky Pollard secret with this picture.

I must point out, however, that, true as the image may be, it is not of me in my Vicky Pollard guise, but as one of the other Little Britain characters, Andy. Tthat means, of course, that a fiurther secret of mine is now exposed.

(3)

For those of you who have nothing better to do, I'll be on the Today programme tomorrow at some time between 8.30 and 9, talking with Chris Bryant MP about whether or not politicians can or should be friends with journalists.

(3)

Ephraim Hardcastle in today's Daily Mail reveals my dark secret:

Isn't Vicky 'Yeah but, no' Pollard, the foul-mouthed single mother played by Matt Lucas in BBC TV's Little Britain comedy series, a dead ringer for Stephen Pollard, biographer of David Blunkett?

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I think of myself as a baroque composer. If you have composed a theme which is popular, it is your duty to the public to rework it in different variations. It'll be back on 31st December 2005.

More from the Guardian Diary on my holiday activities:

Shock news in the Leslie Welsh Plate for Feats of Memory that seemed certain to be won by David Blunkett. The former home secretary was leading comfortably as we approached the home straight, but his challenge faded after judge Ali Campbell returned from making a few phone calls and successfully persuaded Stephen Pollard that Denise van Outen should get the nod. Denise told a Sunday supplement in March that her most embarrassing memory was diving into a swimming pool aged eight and losing her bikini top, forgetting that she once flashed 100,000 people at Party in the Park and presented the excruciating Something for the Weekend. A shock winner, then, although it later emerged that the online betting exchanges had taken huge sums on a Denise victory from a user going under the moniker rivieragigolo97. Ali immediately appointed Lord Hutton to investigate.

...After lucid arguments from judge Stephen Pollard, the David Blair Silver Horseshoe for Propitious Timing went to comedian Peter Kay, for his John Smith's "I'm Not Your Daddy" ad campaign.

I don't want to be a killjoy, but am I the only person who thinks that, much as I'd like it to be scathing and witty, none of this is actually funny?

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Damn! My Christmas secret is out. The Guardian Diary revealed today where I've been for the past few days:

A ground-breaking start to this year's Diary Annual Awards luncheon. After years meeting in a salon privé at the Savoy, a change of venue. Thanks to the Barclay brothers for allowing us access to their castle hideaway on Brecqhou where, after arriving by stealth boat and having removed the blindfolds, the Diary, and its judging panel of Lord Deedes, stalwart Clare "Bomber" Short, David Blunkett biographer Stephen Pollard and Ali Campbell, were treated to quite magnificent hospitality. The twins, resplendent in his and hers matching blue-and-white striped aprons and white chef hats, served a traditional roast goose with all the trimmings, even leaving their most treasured staff at the panel's disposal. Andrew Neil was an outstandingly sniffy sommelier du jour and Kimberly Fortier-Quinn an attentive head waiter, while Telegraph editor Martin Newland played a blinder once promoted to sous-chef.

The Jayson Blair Scoop of the Year Award saw the first row of the afternoon, before Pollard had even consumed his 10th amuse-bouche.

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I'm disappearing for a few days - will be back on 27th December with my normal non-Blunkett service.

Sorry posting has been so sporadic of late, but I'm sure you can understand that I've been somewhat distracted with other things. Life is getting back to normal now.

Have a good holiday. And I'm sure I don't need to specify the name of a book you could give if you're looking for a last-minute present.

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Since I am, to quote one correspondent, a "pathetic sad little ego-maniac with nothing to offer the word", I feel I ought to flag up a fun post at Harry's Place, a
"sneak preview of some of the 'seasonal specials' being planned by some of our favourite columnists":

Stephen Pollard - Blunkett’s Christmas Hell. In my new book I reveal David Blunkett’s intense anguish over whether or not to send a Christmas card to his lover. Also in my new book, available at all good book shops, Blunkett revealed to me how he snubbed an invite to John Prescott’s Christmas party because he feared it would be “boring”. That’s in my new book by the way…the one by me.

One the commenters has rumbled me, too:

Stephen Pollard will also write a short why-oh-why for The Times on the same lines as his Glastonbury old faithful, to wit: the only people who really look forward to Christmas are ageing middle class snobs who want to recapture their pathetic pasts as hippies-- sorry, make that children-- and can't resist showing off by spending more money on it than when they only had a student grant-- sorry, I mean pocket money. It's the worst day of year because there's no racing.

Have a read of the whole thing. It's very good.

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Aplogies for the lack of posts in the past few days. As you've probably guessed, I've been rather busy...

I will try to post some catch ups in the next 2 or 3 days, but for normal service to resume you'll have to wait until Monday. And by normal service, yes, I mean some non-Blunkett related posts, too.

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After his death, Osama bin Laden went to heaven. (Yes, I know it's implausible, but read on...)

There he was greeted by George Washington, who proceeded to slap him across the face and yell at him, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!"

Patrick Henry approached and punched Osama in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed."

James Madison entered, kicked Osama in the groin and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!"

Thomas Jefferson came in and proceeded to beat Osama many times with a long cane and said, "It was evil men like you that provided me the inspiration to pen the Declaration of Independence!".

These beatings and thrashings continued as John Randolph, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans came in and unleashed their anger on the Muslim terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and writhing in unbearable pain an Angel appeared.
Bin Laden wept in pain and said to the Angel, "This is not what you promised me."

The Angel replied: "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in heaven. What did you think I said?"

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Six or seven years ago, I used to look forward to a weekly column in the Express by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Along with my colleagues, we'd marvel at how she was able to write a full page about absolutely nothing.

My two favourites were an item in which she described what it was like having a cold - runny nose, feel crap - as if no reader had ever had one and needed the information, and another item about biros, in which she pointed out that the fact they were so cheap meant that it didn't really matter if you lost one.

I have missed her unique brand of banality.

So you can imagine my joy when discovering a piece in today's Telegraph. It's not by Ms Maxtone Graham but by Leonie Frieda. And it's very different in tone. But it shares the essential quality of my former idol's writings. It is quite mind-numbingly dull.

Please, please, please have a read of Ms Frieda's piece and then tell me, via the comments box: is there a single sentence in it which could possibly be of the slightest interest to anyone?

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I think this headline, from the BBC News site, is just about my favourite of the year:

Sir Mark Thatcher says coup allegations have destroyed his reputation.

It's beyond satire.

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This is for my millions of groupies: you can hear me being flippant on last night's Westminster Hour here (click on part 3).

You were warned.

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An interesting looking new blog, Jonathan Lockhart's Notebook.

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This post will, I am afraid, be of interest to almost no one. But since it's my blog, I am at liberty to bore people, just as you are at liberty to ignore it.

Earlier tonight I spoke at an Adam Smith Institute meeting on blogging (reported here).

The first comment came from a chap who attacked me for being a hypocrite. He pointed out that I had written a piece on Monday on the murder of Theo van Gogh and the dreadful response of Index on Censorship - and yet I had deleted a comment which he had made in response to a piece I wrote last year about tennis. On and on the man went: the Times itself had printed his letter, he informed the meeting, but I - craven and hypocritical being that I am - had deleted it because, plainly, I can dish it out but I can't take it. (I paraphrase but you get the drift.)

I said in response that I had no recollection whatsoever of his name or his post and could not remember deleting it. Indeed I have no memory of ever deleting a comment which has been abusive of me personally - but precisely because I have no recollection, I could not deny having done so. I then made the point that, far from deleting hostile comments, I relish them.

So guess what? I've just got back, looked up the post...and his comment is there, plain for all to see.

I quite fancy suing him for slander. It might be fun. But then he's probably penniless (he certainly deserves to be if he has nothing better to do with his life than store up baseless grievances for seventeen months and then air them in public). Much as I like the idea of worsening his penury, life's too short. And yes, I know I am over reacting to his stupid allegation. But sometimes it's enjoyable to overreact, and this is one of those times.

(I never fail to be amazed - this is a theme which I have aired ad nauseum - at how, of all the subjects on which I express strong views, the one which really gets people going is my hatred of tennis. Truly bizarre.)

UPDATE:
Hilarious. The man who accused me of deleting his comment (which has always been on my site in full view for anyone sad enough to want to look at it) informs us, via the comments section on the original post, that:

within minutes of its appearing on his blog site it had been buried, like Jo Moore's bad news, somewhere in the site's innards.

Er, no. It hasn't been touched by man, beast or machine since being posted. So I haven't, as he goes on,

unearthed my comment

I realise I didn't make myself clear when referring above to slander. I didn't mean, of course, that the comment about me being fat was slanderous. It was clearly true. I meant the accusation of hypocrisy which was made tonight at the meeting, when this rather strange individual said I attacked other forms of censorship whilst taking down comments which were rude about me. That accusation was an outright lie.

He goes on:

I suspect that Stephen is a sensitive violet and I shall monitor carefully how long this comment remains visible on the site before being buried with other bad news.

Sensitive violet! I've been called many things - both in an out of my comments sections - but that's a new one. The latest comment will remain on this site for as long as the original comment. For ever. (To be precise: for as long as this site is up and running, or until I decide to remove all comments which, as the post below indicates, I do unfortunately have to consider. I have a life outside this blog, and it is very time consuming having to police the comments sections for racist, biogoted and potentially libellous posts.)

Lordy. Talk about much ado about nothing. My apologies to normal readers for wasting so much of your time, should you have made the mistake of reading all this.

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This year's British Comedy Awards looks like providing a refinement of Sartre's definition of hell:

[T[he organisers of next month's British Comedy Awards are turning to Michael Moore to inject a little controversy into this year's event.

The American polemicist...is being lined up as a guest presenter at the ceremony, which will be hosted as ever by Jonathan Ross.

American stand-up and actor Chris Rock will also present an award, as will politicians Robin Cook and Neil Kinnock...

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Lovely line by Andrew Stuttaford on Billy Bragg's new lyrics for I vow to thee my country.

Songwriter Billy Bragg has come to the rescue with lyrics so irritating that I will now look at 'Imagine' with strange new respect.

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Please note: I will not allow offensive comments on this site. It really is very tiresome to have to repeat this, but if the comments sections are abused I will simply close them. And since this is my site, I alone decide what amounts to an offensive comment (and to the 'gentleman' who accuses me of deleting only those comments which criticise me, I suggest you learn to read: my comments sections are full of hostile remarks).

I will not allow racist or otherwise bigoted remarks. If you don't like that, tough. Don't read this site.

(6)

I've just had this pointed out to me.

Personally, I'm backing Nader.

(5)

For those of you who are still, as the Guardian would have it, too depressed to speak, might I make a small suggestion? Emigrate to Sweden. If these two stories from a Swedish newspaper on Friday (sent to me by a friend) is anything to go by, you'll have found a meeting of minds:

Nutritious panties to cheer up glum Swedes A new study by the Swedish government's National Institute for Working Life has found that students and young people are feeling particularly down in the dumps these days. But luckily a clothing retailer has just the tonic - underwear containing vitamins.

Don't try eating it, though. Lindex's new knickers impregnated with vitamin C are meant to be kept on - for "a complete feeling of health from the inside out".

Swedish prisons "full of psychopaths"
See also: Staff "behind Hall Prison escapes"

The more high profile murderers sentenced to psychiatric care and the more people killed on Sweden's streets by mentally ill people who should have been in psychiatric care, the louder the cries that something is amiss in Sweden's criminal care system.

...A new report suggests that a massive proportion of violent criminals should have been given psychiatric care instead of long term prison sentences. That's what the man suspected of murdering Helén Nilsson in 1989 is hoping for - but the Linköping double killer is still at large.

Linköping street art withdrawn after double murder A public art project has been withdrawn from the streets of Linköping following the double murder there last week.

Artist duo FA+ is best known for their works in public spaces - projects like the Strindberg quotations laid into Stockholm's Drottninggatan, for example. Two weeks ago they revealed another project, a series of street signs in Linköping, which they created in cooperation with the Forum for Living History and the National Theatre.

Each sign looks like a normal street sign but with a text from Lars Norén's play "Krig" ("War"), on tour this autumn with the National Theatre. The signs were meant to be installed in a number of cities that the production would visit - Linköping first, then Umeå, Gothenburg, Hallunda, and Vara.

(4)

Time to make the Jenkins Rule a bit more structured. On an entirely arbitrary basis, here's a selection from which you can choose a winner of the inaugural Sir Simon Jenkins award.

I have ruled out all politicians and Grauniad columnists - a bit too obvious (and although 'French foreign policy' isn't corporeal, I'm allowing it). I'm leaving out those such as Michael Moore who are so entirely without merit that they would warp the poll. Candidates have to some credibility (however spurious).

So if you caught the voting bug on Tuesday, or can't wait until May, take part in a vote which really matters. I appreciate it's an impossible decision to make - how does one choose between so many brilliant candidates - but to govern is to choose. Get governing...

UPDATE:
I'm afraid George Monbiot falls into the Michael Moore category: obvious lunacy.

(17)

According to Harry Mount, in today's Telegraph:

It's only at an American party that you could have too much food and drink, but not enough wine glasses.

Clearly he has never been to a Jewish affair.

(2)

It's time for some interactivity. Daniel Finkelstein had a labour saving piece in the Times the other day:

Let me introduce you to my Chomsky rule, which I am happy for you to borrow. You may not appreciate that you need to have a Chomsky rule but, believe me, you do. You’ll thank me.

Unlike Noam Chomsky’s contributions to linguistic theory, my rule is simple to master. If a book is described on its cover by Chomsky as “tremendous”, it isn’t. If a film poster carries the words “You must see this — Chomsky”, you really don’t have to. If an article contains a quote from Chomsky endorsing its view, it is almost certainly wrong.

There it is, the Chomsky rule. A bit crude, I know, but, given the number of things that now carry a Chomsky endorsement (pamphlets, documentaries, left-wing breakfast cereal), it’ll save you bags of time.

I myself apply another rule: the Jenkins rule. If I am unsure about a subject, I pretty much know straight away what I think by finding out Sir Simon’s views. And putting a ‘not’ in front of them.

Tim Garton Ash is quite useful in that respect, too.

The question is: who do you use for such labour saving? Do tell.

UPDATE

Suggestions so far:

Mary Dejevsky

AN Wilson

(33)

Adam Bruce has started a blog - Arthur's Seat - and I'm sure it's going to prove well worth looking at. Get in at the start!

(3)

I will be speaking at an ASI event on blogging.

Feel free to come and blow raspberries.

(4)

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been in Barcelona this week, deliberately without internet access.

Now I'm back, and ready to start annoying you again.

(3)

Someone at The Times print edition has a sense of humour.

Have a read of this story:

First-hand view of a cannibal feast
By Lewis Smith

A PAINTING of a cannibal feast that caused a sensation when it was exhibited has resurfaced more than a century after it shocked Victorian Britain.
Charles Gordon Frazer painted Cannibal Feast to provide an insight into the cannibal civilisations he feared were on the brink of extinction after witnessing the feast while hiding in long grass.

If you can't access it, the piece goes into great detail about the cannibal feast.

It's followed by this tagline:

2-for-1 Sunday Lunch: full listing of pubs and restaurants bonus online voucher www.timesonline.co.uk/sundaytimeslunch

(The online editor appears not to see the funny side; the link doesn't appear online.)

(3)

Clive Davis, an incisive columnist on all things American (and much else), has just started a blog. Since it's about 'Politics and culture from both sides of the Atlantic', it's surely going to be a must-read.

(5)

As part of my determination over the past couple of days to elevate this blog's content, here's a joke which Boris Johnson might have found amusing:

An Australian, an Irishman and a Scouser are in a bar.

They're all staring at a bearded man sitting on his own in the corner drinking a pint, trying to place him. They stare and stare, until suddenly the Irishman twigs:

"My God, it's Jesus!"

Sure enough, it is Jesus, nursing a pint. Thrilled, they send him over a pint of Guinness, a pint of Fosters and a pint of bitter.

Jesus accepts the drinks, smiles over at the three men, and drinks the pints slowly, one after another. After he's finished the drinks, Jesus approaches the trio. He reaches for the hand of the Irishman and shakes it, thanking him for the Guinness.

When he lets go, the Irishman gives a cry of amazement:

"My God! The arthritis I've had for 30 years is gone.
It's a miracle!"

Jesus then shakes the Aussie's hand, thanking him for the lager. As he lets go, the man's eyes widen in shock.

"Strewth mate, the bad back I've had all my life is completely gone!
It's a miracle."

Jesus then approaches the Scouser who says:

"Back off, mate, I'm on disability benefit."

(By the way, I heard the leader of Liverpool council say that Johnson's remarks were an 'outdated caricature'. Does that mean that, in his view, they were once timely?)

(4)

I'll be on CNN tomorrow (Saturday) at 08.30 on CNN Europe London time and on the US CNN at 04.00 and 21.00 (EST), talking about the anti-war plays which London seems to be enjoying this summer.

(3)

How not to do Kung Fu.

(1)

This chap was, presumably, attempting to enter the Darwin Awards.

(3)

Some great lines from Edinburgh:

Dodo died, Dodi died, Di died, Dando died... Surely Dido's looking a bit worried.

A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.. She said, "Can
you spare a few minutes for cancer research?" I said, "All right, but we won't
get much done."

We have our own local version of Big Brother round my way. It's called jail.

I joined a dating agency and went out on a load of dates that didn't work out.
And I went back to the woman who ran the agency and said: "Have you not got
somebody on your books who doesn't care about how I look or what job I have and has a nice big pair of boobs?" And she checked on her computer and said:
"Actually, we have one, but unfortunately, it's you."

My dad is Irish and my mum is Iranian, which meant that we spent most of our
family holidays in Customs.

Cats have nine lives. Which makes them ideal for experimentation.

A dog goes into a hardware store and says: "I'd like a job please". The hardware store owner says: "We don't hire dogs, why don't you go join the circus?" The dog replies: "Well, what would the circus want with a plumber".

Ask people about God nowadays and they usually reply, "I'm not religious, but
deep down, I'm a very spiritual person." What this phrase really means is: "I'm
afraid of dying, but I can't be arsed going to church."

(via PooterGeek.)

(2)

It seems that I am, indeed, Jewish (or rather, as some of my correspondents inform me, a filthy/ lying/ money-grabbing/ thieving/ stinking yid):

Your Results: The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

1. Orthodox Judaism (100%)
2. Islam (90%)
3. Reform Judaism (85%)
4. Sikhism (84%)
5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (73%)
6. Bahá'í Faith (68%)
7. Jehovah's Witness (64%)
8. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (60%)
9. Eastern Orthodox (60%)
10. Roman Catholic (60%)
11. Hinduism (55%)
12. Jainism (54%)
13. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (51%)
14. Liberal Quakers (50%)

(via Norm.)

(8)

If you've got a spare £199,999, I'd like one of these, please. Not sure about where I'd park it, though.

(6)

Forgive the sef-referential posts, but I can't resist this. Someone called Harry thinks that

My view is that everyone, regardless of nationality, should read at least one Stephen Pollard column once.

How kind.

The comment reminds me of a story which my old boss, Peter Shore, told me. As a young man he stood in a by-election whilst Macmillan was PM. In one speech, Peter spoke mockingly about the people never having it so good. The following day, his Tory opponent printed leaflets quoting Peter's exact words - without, of course, the mocking tone - and wrote that even his Labour opponent believed Macmillan's claim.

(8)

I missed this: I am an ignorant git. (Someone who styles himself the Virtual Stoa - stange name, even stranger views - seems to have latched on to this theme. If you are so minded, scroll up and down from that link for more references to my ignorance and gittishness.)

(15)

A blog isn't just for Christmas...

I keep logging in, even though I'm supposed to be on holiday. One of my commenters has posted this rather fun (if repulsive) picture. Not really sure why anyone should go to such trouble, but since he or she did, here it is:

(8)

I know I'm supposed to be on holiday...but really, sometimes people just take my breath away.

As I write this, I have had 14 comments on my post about how mind-numblingly boring I find cycling to be. I can write that we should send troops to the Sudan, that parallel trade in medicines might be killing people and that...well, anything - and I get just a few comments. Mention that I find cycling dull, however, and the reaction is as if I've written personally to every reader to tell them that their mothers are whores.

Get a life. Get some perspective. Get some sense. I didn't suggest cycling should be banned. I didn't say no one should watch it. In fact I didn't propose anything. I made what, in the real world, was a rather unimportant observation about my personal taste.

I'll take a leaf out of the great Kelvin MacKenzie's book. A reader who rang The Sun to compain about something or other was told 'you're banned from reading The Sun'. A few minutes later, the reader rang back with a query. 'Does the ban apply to my husband, too?'.

To all the idiots who don't understand that expressing an opinion is not the same as demanding others share it, I have a message: you're banned. And your husbands, wives, partners, lovers, friends, school mates, college acquaintances, fellow workers, fellow dole scroungers, fellow benefit fraudsters, pets and robots. Anyone who has ever met you, in fact. You're all banned.

And with that, it's back to Goodwood. And a real sport.

(Oh, one other thing: in what language does writing that you find watching competitive cycling boring equate to saying that you don't cycle, or even that you disapprove of others cycling? Perhaps a few of the commenters should learn to read and understand English before making assumptions. My holiday, as it happens, involves cycling in the mountains. And that's the God's honest truth.)

(16)

...and with that, I'm off on my hols. Back in a little while.

(8)

Large parts of my life revolve around sport. I’m off to Goodwood tomorrow for a week’s idyllic racing. I spend days at Lord’s and the Oval watching cricket. Even when I don’t really have the time, I end up in front of the 3.45 from Uttoxeter on my TV. For nine months of the year I obsess about the latest inept performance by Spurs, wondering why on earth I bothered renewing my season ticket and wasting so much of my life at White Hart Lane.

But, like most sports fanatics, I do have my limits. Today’s coverage of Lance Armstrong’s record-breaking sixth win in the Tour de France is one of them. We are all, it would seem, supposed to be in awe of Armstrong’s achievement in cycling round France quicker than anyone on six occasions. Sports aficionados are, apparently, now hailing a new hero.

There is, however, a small problem with this. I know of no one — no one — who has the slightest interest in the Tour de France or who thinks cycling as a sport anything other than mind-numbingly tedious. I realise I will now be deluged with letters from cycling fanatics who will cite all sorts of figures proving me to be not just wrong — cycling is, apparently, the second-most-popular spectator sport in Spain — but offensively wrong. Lance Armstrong has, after all, come back from cancer to resume his winning streak. And yes, that is an impressive feat.

But when I spoke to a few fellow sports-mad friends yesterday, we all had the same reaction: Armstrong’s achievement is, clearly, admirable. But none of us has any interest it. Cycling is just plain dull.

Admittedly, in the pantheon of dullness, the Tour de France is far from the worst example. There are, at least, distractions — such as the possibility that one cyclist in the pack will stumble and cause a crash of some sort. Since the chance of serious injury is minimal, the piles-ups can be guiltlessly enjoyed as momentary respite from the narcoleptic effect of the actual competition.

No, if we’re talking dull, it’s difficult to beat the form of cycling which involves competitors pedalling round and round and round and round and round and round (etc, ad what feels like infinitum) a stadium against the clock. This has a name but I can’t remember it and I haven’t looked it up because, well, who cares what it’s called?

Difficult to beat, but not impossible. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . swimming. Is there any more depressing a sentence to hear from a sports presenter than, “And now, over to the pool for the 200m backstroke”? Time to make the tea.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the prowess of the competitors, exceptional human specimens all, swimmers and cyclists. I’ll even admit that walkers — and there are few more preposterous sights than competitive walking — are finely tuned athletes. It is simply that their exploits are fundamentally forgettable. There are few sports which have the capacity to entrance and to provoke genuine passion rather than curious interest. In part it’s because cycling, walking and swimming are things which many of us do regularly, and there is little romanticism — a crucial part of the emotional involvement which makes a sport interesting — in watching something so banal as walking or cycling being done faster.

And in part, it’s because the team element is missing. When there is a British swimmer or cyclist we do get involved, because he or she has started to represent us. When the Scottish women curlers won a Winter Olympics gold medal in 2002, there were ridiculous prophecies that the popularity of curling would grow. Not a chance. Hardly anyone gives a damn about curling. The country was interested because the Brits were winning, not because they were shoving a disc across some ice.

Rest assured that if some plucky Brits manage to get to the latter stages of some of the more obscure Olympic sports in Greece next month — let alone if they actually win — we’ll be told that the nation has gone “50m rifle 3 positions (3x40)” or “K-1 1000m (kayak single)” mad, as two of the events are poetically labelled.

We won’t have. We’ll cheer them on because they are British. But we’ll have forgotten who they are within a week. Can anyone remember the name of even one of the curling gold medal winners?

Lance Armstrong’s name may be splashed across the front pages today, but by the end of the week he and his sport will, deservedly, have slipped even off the sports pages. To the vast majority of the population, he and his sport are instantly forgettable.

(68)

My results from The Ethical Philosophy Selector:

1. Kant (100%)
2. Prescriptivism (76%)
3. Jeremy Bentham (72%)
4. Ayn Rand (65%)
5. Jean-Paul Sartre (61%)
6. John Stuart Mill (59%)
7. David Hume (57%)
8. Plato (56%)
9. Stoics (55%)
10. Aristotle (54%)
11. Spinoza (54%)
12. Aquinas (49%)
13. Nietzsche (45%)
14. Nel Noddings (40%)
15. St. Augustine (38%)
16. Ockham (33%)
17. Epicureans (29%)
18. Cynics (19%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (15%)

(9)

Nice essay by Christopher Hitchens on the Vice President's preferred choice of expletive.

And, yes; to those of you who will point I have form here - I KNOW!

(via Norman G.)

(4)

This is quite fun (with my answers):

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Fred
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Great Gatsby
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington
4. Cats or dogs? Cats
5. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse
6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Neither
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Updike
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock
11. The Who or the Stones? Neither
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Larkin
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Ella
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest book ever written.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? The End of the Affair
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Balanchine
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Hamburgers
19. Letterman or Leno? Letterman
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Neither - no idea who they are.
21. Verdi or Wagner? Wagner; just
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Neither, please.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Kingsley
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Mitchum
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Morris - greatest choreographer of our time.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Vermeer
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Chopin
29. Red wine or white? Red
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde. Can't abide Coward.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Grosse Pointe Blank
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Shostakovich
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Nureyev
34. Constable or Turner? Turner
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
36. Comedy or tragedy? Ouch - tragedy; just.
37. Fall or spring? Autumn
38. Manet or Monet? Manet
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? The Sopranos - no one, surely, could prefer a cartoon to one of the greatest dramas ever.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Rodgers and Hart
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Cole Porter
44. Mac or PC? PC
45. New York or Los Angeles? The greatest city on earth - NYC
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Partisan Review
47. Stax or Motown? Motown
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Neither
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Magazine
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Songs for Swingin' Lovers
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown - not even a contest!
54. Ghost World or Election? Election (toughie, that one)
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs Bunny
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Batman
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Neither
60. Johnson or Boswell? Boswell
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Neither
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Honeymooners
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Noguchi
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Double Indemnity
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Depends which I last saw or heard.
66. Blue or green? Green
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? As You Like It
68. Ballet or opera? Opera
69. Film or live theater? Bloody hell - impossible! Film, I suppose
70. Acoustic or electric? Eh?
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo
72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Naipaul
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma
75. Sushi, yes or no? Yes PLEASE!
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Ross
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Portrait of a Lady
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Cunningham
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Mies van der Rohe
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Diana Krall
82. Watercolor or pastel? Pastel
83. Bus or subway? Bus
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Stravinsky
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Neither
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Neither
87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Twenties
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huckleberry
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Mann
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Lester Young
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Whitman
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Churchill
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? No idea who they are.
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Piano
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Yes
98. Short novels or long ones? Short
99. Swing or bebop? Swing
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? The Last Supper

(via Norman Geras)

(13)

I've finally updated my blogroll on the left. The links should now all work. Sorry it's taken me so long.

(1)

It's all very disappointing. At the beginning of June I was awarded the most prestigious honour in the world of blogging: the Grauniad Diary's website of the month.

Cue a whole month of piss-taking, snide remarks and other celebrations of my oeuvre.

Except that since then...nada. Nothing. Diddly squat.

I realise that I've been a bit under form in posting of late, but surely they could have found something I've written worth sneering at. I really am most disappointed.

(2)

Sorry for the rather premature claim a couple of weeks ago that the blog would be back to normal. Events, dear boy, events, prevented me posting as much as I would have liked. Fingers crossed I should, now, be back to normal...

(1)

Prospect has a list of the 'top 100 public intellectuals'.

I've nothing to say other than this, by WH Auden:

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word "Intellectual" suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife

(9)

Well I have at least one fan out there...

(4)

Words cannot begin to describe the sense of awe I feel when confronted with the words and deeds of Rupert Read, the newly elected Green councillor in Norwich.

Not only is he a man of coruscating political cleverness, and a man ready to stand out from his Green colleagues in defending the reputation of the IDF; he is also blessed with the ability to construct some of the most extraordinary prose ever written.

I can but stand in profound silence when confronted with the inspiration that is ANTI--BEECHING, an "erotic-political 'short story' on trains":

he still

as if’s yesterday today now.

it was in the countryside, far from almost anywhere. straight roads. road besides open fields. roads meeting mostly at right angles, if they met at all.

she had said, “i feel ... fine. want me to ... drive?”

yes.

so they drove. driving home. half an hour, to their home, their ‘country idyll’. their bungalow, their West Country hideaway, where the little dog waited so eagerly, and their lovely sleek cat awaited its food and...

so, they were driving home. this was the last part of the journey. the final left right-angle turn. night driving -- it must have been about ten o’clock, maybe later. after. dark.

so

straight. one more mile, straight. just one bridge to cross it would be, then fast down the other side, then turn left into the driveway, to home.

the bridge was a little exciting. for the ground sloped up to it on either side, and the road narrowed, narrowed. the bridge was only wide enough for one car.

what she did when she approached the ever-narrowing bridge was this she started flashing the main beam of the headlights, on, off, on, off, faster and faster. they always did. so that anyone coming up the other side would see them approaching, would see their headlights against the sky would see the greater and greater speed of the change in them,

would know that they were coming,

would know that they were approaching the top of the bridge.

then suddenly the road flattened as you hit the actual bridge, and you were going level before you came down, down came down the other side real fast

it was exciting, you seemed to be going at an incredible pace, as the main beams went on and off faster and faster til they were almost just a blur and now the car was going very fast -- it wasn’t really but it seemed like it was it really did -- and you seemed to shoot over the bridge and almost fly off -- down, I guess -- the other side.

so there they were

shooting up to the top of the bridge

suddenly emerging onto its flatness with ourhead-lightsgoinglikewe’reunderneaththestrobelight--

and then--

forgotten what it was a bridge over.

there was, in fact, a railway line underneath. it only had trains going on it about twice a day. huge long (slow?) freight trains, usually, blasting with an enormous whistle, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Do read the rest. You will experience it.

To steal a line from Dame Edna: is there no beginning to this man's talents?

(13)

Sory for the absence of posts. Too much real work...

I'll be posting again imminently.

(2)

I'm back. The book's done, I've had a week (almost) off, and I'm now ready and willing to start proper posting again.

So, to begin with some links...

This is an excellent piece by the learned Victor Davis Hanson:

We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

(via Melanie Philips)

Meanwhile this piece by David Aaronovitch is a lovely piss-take of a 'Respect' meeting.

(BTW, isn't Respect the single most innapropriate name they could have chosen, given the lack of respect their world view implies for the people of Iraq, given their wish that Saddam was still in power and free to murder Iraqis?)

(3)

I have this morning had to delete a series of comments. I will not allow racist comments on this site. I will block (or manually delete) any commenter who posts racist comments. And I am not interested in debates as to what is or isn't racist. I will certainly not respond to emails from those commenters whom I have banned. This is my site and I have total editorial control. If you don't like that, tough. Go read someone else's blog and post your vile views there.

Like many other bloggers I am continually having to wonder if it's worth the hassle of allowing comments. At the moment I incline to believing it is. But I will have no hesitation in shutting down all comments if racists continue to post.

(10)

Philip Hensher in today's Independent (no link I'm afraid as it's sub only):

In general terms, Big Brother, like a neo-coloial invading power, has assumed and asserted power wihtout inviting explicit consent. Sme consent has been granted by the initial lacl of resistance; they have agreed to enter the house, just as many Iraqis clearly thought this this was at any rate a means by which a hated regime could be deposed.

Consent, however, has not proved unlimited. By continuing to assert an arbitrary, unnegotiated control over the lives of subjects, the ruling power has rapidly eroded its plausibility....When Big Brother commands Kitten to come to the diary room immediately, or demands the immediate return of the empty suitcases, the refusal immediately reveals the fragility on which arbitrary, assertive power rests.

I suppose you could call this an ingeneous comparison. Or you could say that by writing such hilarious gibberish, Philip Hensher immediately reveals the fragility of his faculties.

(2)

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

New York
You're competitive, you like to take it straight to the fight. You gotta have it all or die trying.

You bet.

(4)

I have hit hitherto unimaginable heights: this is now the official Guardian Diary Website of the Month.

I would like to thank my mother, my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephews, all my other relatives, my agent, my teachers, my friends, my enemies, the blogosphere, the chap in the newsagent who delivers my papers, the bloke who sold me my computer, the thousands of you - the little people who pass through my life anonymously - who have all made me the wonderful, humble, thought-provoking and just plain darling - and, clearly, phenomenally talented - human being that I am.

But above all else, I must thank my producers at the Big Blog Company. without whom there would be no site. I am touched at the faith you showed in me and your foresight in giving me a starring role.

It has been a hard slog to the top, making my way through mind-numbing local radio interviews and writing for nothing; never did I imagine that I would hit such exalted heights.

(4)

I may indeed be a 'snivelling Bush arse-licker' as one correspondent informed me recently, but I thought this letter in today's Guardian rather fun. Asked to suggest new public holidays, Marilyn Partridge writes:

How about July 4 - Dependence Day?

(2)

Guardian, schmardian; who needs it? This is, apparently, the 29th most popular blog in the UK.

The methodology seems a but ropey to me, but I don't care. I'm 29th and proud of it.

(7)

A foaming, white water welcome to the hundreds, thousands - even millions - of new vistors who have come via today's Guardian diary:

A battle breaks out for the Diary Website of the Month. Current favourite is StephenPollard.net, in which the trenchant rightwing columnist unleashes not so much a stream of consciousness as a foaming, white-water rapid. The challenger belongs to Tory MP Richard Bacon, whose "about me" section lists snobbery and racism as pet hates. What, nothing about child abuse and natural disasters?

Guardian website of the month, eh? I bet my mum's proud. I am on tenterhooks...Who is this Richard Bacon chap anyway?

I hope you are suitably offended by my unconscionable views. A small apology: I am three days away from the deadline on my biography of another foaming right-winger, David Blunkett, so I'm sorry for the paucity of posts. I'll be back to normal regular posting next week, and there'll be plenty more vile views to offend you.

(2)

To answer those of you who have asked:

No, Eve Pollard is not my mother, sister, aunt, cousin or friend. I've never met the woman.

Nor this woman.

(And this chap is fictional so, no, we're not related.)

UPDATE: Peter Briffa asks about Vicky Pollard. I am - surely you all knew this - her proud father.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: And Jonathan Pollard is my brother.

(3)

I'm in a rather sour mood for some reason. In which vein:

Is there anyone else out there who is physically unable to look at the TV when Sian Lloyd comes on with the weather?

I'm trying to think if there is anyone else who has the same effect on me, and I have to say I'm at a loss. Edward Heath? No. At least he's always good for a laugh. Fiona Bruce? Sort of. But I don't actually feel the need to throw something at the TV when I see her.

Time for a list. Suggestions, please.

(21)

Sorry for the absence of posts of late. I am a fortnight away from the deadline on my book and hence manic.

I will keep posting sporadically for the next couple of weeks and then resume normal service.

(3)

Oliver Kamm is back with an excellent post about Willy Brandt and a call for more red-baiting. Quite right, too.

If you get the chance, do see Michael Frayn's Democracy at the Wyndham Theatre. It's a wonderfully rich, thoughtful and provocative piece of drama. Some critics have said it's not as good as Frayn's Copenhagen. So what? Cosi fan tutte isn't as good as Le Nozze di Figaro, but that doesn't stop it from being worth seeing - repeatedly.

(1)

The Pope goes to New York and gets in a cab. "I need to be at the United Nations in 10 minutes," he says.

"You gotta be crazy. In this traffic that'll take half an hour."

"Okay," says the Pope, "sit in the back and let me drive." So he speeds the wrong way down one-way streets, runs red lights, mounts the sidewalks, cuts in front of ambulances, until finally he's stopped by a cop who takes one look at him and radios the station.

"Chief, I got a VIP here."

"How VIP? Is it the mayor of New York?"

"No, bigger."

"Is it a United States senator?"

"No, bigger"

"Is it the President?"

"Bigger than that!"

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who is it?"

"Put it this way, he's got the Pope driving him."

(from Simon Hoggart in the Grauniad.)

(11)

(via Amitai Etzioni's site)

(1)

I'm very sorry, but I've had to close the comments box on my posts about the Vlaams Blok. I reluctantly took the decision when they topped 150: I simply don't have the time (or inclination, for that matter) to look at every one and determine if it's libellous - and a large proportion were.

I apologise to the many people who posted entirely sensible comments both agreeing and disagreeing with my article for what is now a wasted effort on their part, but - this seems to be true across the blogosphere - those who are incapable of engaging in rational debate have ruined the efforts of those who would like to have a sensible discussion.

And please don't put comments about this on other posts; I'll simply close all the comments boxes if you do.

I do love overhearing snippets of coversations which don't appear to make any sense. How about this one, which I heard yesterday, between two quite attractive middle aged women:

"It'll cost you £60."

"That's OK."

"But he does listen to Radio 4 a lot."

"Oh so do I. Never mind."

What on earth can they have been talking about? I'm afraid I had to get off the bus at that point, so we will never know.

(3)

A friend sent me this revised version of that old email favourite about cows. I think it's funny, anyway:

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have down sized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATIN
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best looking cow.

CALIFORNIAN
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn't.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow.
You change your business to beef.
PETA pickets your farm.
Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your driveway.
Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help "working cows".
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm "for the children".
Gray Davis signs a law giving your farm to Mexico.
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times' analysis shows your business failure is Bush's fault.

(12)

Peter Briffa points out the shocking bigotry inherent in Roy Hattersley's latest column.

(2)

Every so often it's nice to have someone fight your battles for you, so I very much enjoyed - and appreciated - Oliver Kamm's demolition of this letter in the Sunday Telegraph which, in turn, sought to criticise my piece about the vile Peter Ustinov (about whom, I now realise, I was far too kind - some of his remarks which have been sent to me since I wrote the piece are much, much worse than those I cited and which I did not remotely, as some commenters suggested, take out of context).

(6)

For various reasons I've recently become obsessed with stinker book reviews. Today's New York Times has one of the best I've ever read, of Plum Sykes's new novel:

"BERGDORF BLONDES'' should inspire readers everywhere to rise up and rip one another limbless. It is not impossible that such a spontaneous revolution will begin first in New York City. After encountering this novel's manifestation of cultural illness, the tribes of the outer boroughs may be impelled to march upon Manhattan to enslave the emotionally warped hoarders of jewels and neuroses who reside therein.

In all seriousness: we must build a tiny apocalypse-proof time capsule. If we can resist the temptation to burn Plum Sykes's book, we can smuggle it into the future. Perhaps the next breed of humanoids can learn from the holocaust of culture and commerce that destroyed our icky civilization.

Ms Sykes reminds me of the no doubt apocryphal story about the boy who, on seeing a politician (variously named as Neville Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir John Simon), asks: "Mummy, mummy: what is that man for?"

(5)

This story about Will Hutton's fabulous hypocrisy (and this one, too) will bring a smile to your face on a dull Sunday.

The final three paragraphs are simply blissful:

Mr Hutton declined to comment. The revelations caused hilarity yesterday at The Observer, where his tenure as editor between 1996 and 1998 saw a marked decline in sales. "The hypocrisy we're in, huh?" one senior journalist said.

As for Mr Hutton, he remains busy with his work on behalf of the poor and dispossessed.

Last month he appeared in a BBC drama-documentary about poverty. The villain was a fictitious property developer, who lived in a rural retreat with a swimming pool.

(18)

Blimey. I passed the 300,000 visitors mark sometime last night. I don't know how that divides up - maybe my mum has been logging on 15,000 times a week - but I think one thing's for sure - a fair few people have had a look at my ravings.

You'll have noticed that posting has been sporadic for most of this year, at least relative to how it used to be. That's because I'm finishing off my biography of David Blunkett and have basically stopped doing anything else which doesn't pay the mortgage or involve shouting at horses or footballers. I've just written my 60,000th word, so I've made a good start (I broke my personal best yesterday - almost 6000 words in one day; well, I had to tell someone). If you're interested, it'll be out in January (David Bunkett: A Normal Extraordinary Man, Hodder and Stoughton, at an unbeatably good value price, rush out and order it now...err, no, don't - the bookshop won't know what you're talking about).

Anyway, I get my life back this summer, so expect to see the pace picking up again then.

I don't know what the specific etiquette is for thanking people for looking at a site, so I'll leave it at 'thanks'.

(7)

For any other members of the conspiracy, here's the best ever Pesach joke:

A man walks into Central Park from the West 85th street entrance, sits down by the Lake, and takes out his lunch - which, being passover, included a fair bit of matzoh.

A few minutes later, a blind man comes by and sits down next to him. Feeling neighbourly, the man eating lunch decides to pass a sheet of matzoh over to the blind man.

The blind man handles the matzoh for a few minutes, looking puzzled, and finally exclaims, "Who wrote this crap?"

(via OxBlog.)

(9)

You are David Brooks! You're exceedingly smart, but
your writing is as compelling as wallpaper. You
are a thoughtful though hard-line conservative,
but lack any of Safire's verbal pyrotechnics.
In addition, you dress like you're colorblind.
Fall down, juvenile.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(2)

I realise that it is bad form to speak ill of the dead, but really! The praise heaped on Sir Peter Ustinov since his death last week has been stomach-churning. He may well have had a gift for anecdote and he was a perfectly adequate actor; but his politics were so vile, and his judgment so warped, that it beggars belief that his death should have been met with praise such as "great humanitarian", "selfless" and "visionary".

Except, of course, that it doesn't beggar belief at all. Ustinov was representative of, and admired by, a loathsome strand of thinking that infects the British establishment, which holds that if a man is clubbable and witty, he is a "good chap". And, even better, if he is a man of affairs: then he is a "very good chap". It doesn't matter what he thinks.

I have tried to fathom how else a man with Ustinov's record of excusing tyrants and defending tyranny could have been so eulogised. The butchers of Tiananmen Square, Stalin, Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam: he defended or gave succour to the lot.

Among his many accolades, Sir Peter was chancellor of Durham University. In an address to the university in 2000, he made clear that, as far as he was concerned, Chinese dissidents are not real human beings: "People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights." So it is fine to kill them or let them rot in prison. We really should be more understanding of the Chinese government.

Hardly surprising really, given his attitude to the gulags. In his book, My Russia - a grotesque piece of Soviet sycophancy - he conceded only that Stalin had caused "suffering" to "thousands" - as if the gulags were a nasty outbreak of food poisoning on a busy night in a Solihull balti house. Then there was his television series, Peter Ustinov's Russia. Noel Malcolm's review said it all: Ustinov showed "all the investigative inclinations of an Intourist guide with a coach party and a lobotomy".

As for his friend Gorbachev: "I suppose you can't blame Gorbachev [for the collapse of the Soviet Union], but it is his fault for making America the only superpower." Yes, the world would have been so much better if the USSR were still around. What a crime that Sir Peter had to endure the last few years of his life without the comfort blanket of the Soviet Union.

Not that it was only Communists he defended. He opposed the military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan and criticised moves against Osama bin Laden: "You can't fight terrorism without becoming a terrorist yourself." Is that right, Sir Peter? What a shame he won't be around to point that out to al-Qaeda's next victims.

He opposed - as if I needed to tell you - the Iraq war and thus would rather Saddam Hussein were still in power. Not just Saddam: he considered it quite wrong that Slobodan Milosevic should have been removed from power and put on trial. He should have been left alone to murder at will. Intervention against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo "was a mistake because it was not done through the UN".

There were some people he did want to convict, though: businessmen. "The formation of the committee for the World Criminal Court is very important because there are corporations more powerful than many governments." Stalin: OK; business: criminal; al-Qaeda and the US: moral equals. Murdering Chinese dissidents: good; removing tyrants: bad. That was the world view of Sir Peter Ustinov, "humanitarian".

(25)

Apologies for the absence. My line went down thanks to wonderful Belgacom (yes, folks, I live a double life in Brussels) and I was too manic with paid scribbling to wander out and find a connection.

But now I'm back...

(2)

Brilliant piece on tax returns by the incomparable Dave Barry. Do read it - it's hilarious.

April 15 is lurking around the corner, so if you haven't yet filed your federal tax return, it's time to set aside a few hours, gather together your financial records, and flee the country.

...For openers, we have a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner, replacing former Commissioner Charles Rossotti, who, in what the IRS described as a ''freak auditing mishap,'' was eaten by hyenas. The new commissioner is Mark W. Everson, whose name can be rearranged to spell ''Rev. Snakeworm.'' According to his official biography, Commissioner Everson used to be a vice president at a major company in the field of -- I am not making this up -- airline catering. That is exciting news for taxpayers, because when it comes to customer service and satisfaction, the term ''airline food'' is virtually synonymous with the term ``Thanks, but I'll just chew on my seat cushion.''

(5)

What about those Nazis, eh? Their legacy lives on, in the form of...racoons.

Oh yes, my friends.

According to the Independent:

In 1934 (Herman Goering) came up with the idea of releasing a pair of raccoons into the wild, claiming he wanted to spice up the Third Reich's flora and fauna. Clearly, he was unaware of the havoc his decision would wreak almost three-quarters of a century later.

Today Germany is overrun with raccoons. While native German species, such as the wild cat, lynx and beaver, are now threatened with extinction, numbers of the black and white furry animals have soared in the 70 years since they were imported from North America. This week, wildlife experts estimated that Germany's raccoon population has hit one million...Kassel, which is north of Frankfurt and is set in wooded countryside, has been under siege by raccoons since the 1960s. Now the city has about 100 raccoons per hectare in the city - one every 100 square metres.

...But although raccoons can be legally hunted in Germany (as in the USA), and German hunting organisations are lobbying to put a bounty on raccoons' heads, the scientific view is that culling is not the solution. "They breed so fast, shooting them won't even make a small dent in the population," Dr Hohmann said. "The challenge is to educate the public not to feed them and how to live with them as Americans do."

Aha! It seems that, as with the Wisconsin Welfare to Work model, the Germans are clearly open to American models of raccoon management: "They breed so fast, shooting them won't even make a small dent in the population," Dr Hohmann said. "The challenge is to educate the public not to feed them and how to live with them as Americans do."

Welfare to Work for raccoons, in other words.

(5)

A little while ago I added a third member to what was at the time a duo of personal hate figures, Edward Heath and Roy Keane. The new member, who turned it into a trio, was Tim Robbins.

Unlike the first two, whom I loathe only for being themselves, I despise Robbins not just for being Tim Robbins but for what he represents: unthinking, blinkered, destructive western self-loathing; and the spouting of idiocy made all the worse for thinking that it is derived from insights denied to the common man.

My pleasure in reading this glorious destruction of the loathsome Robbins is thus almost unbounded.

(2)

Who'da thunk it (headline in the Washington Post):

Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept

(4)

Global warming: I don't give a damn.

Nuclear proliferation: bring it on.

GM crops: I'll be first in the queue.

No, there's only one thing I'm worried about: Nazi racoons.

(1)

Excellent piece by John Blundell in the WSJ on the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Road To Serfdom.

UPDATE: Ooops, sorry, didn't realise this was sub only.

(1)

It’s a shame I’m a coward and that the sight of a gun, even on screen, makes me want to close my eyes and hide. Otherwise, it appears, I could be doing something more useful with my life than this column. I could, to be specific, have been a spy.

In one respect, at least. I might be crap at languages. I might be unable to charm women into bed. I might not have a Lamborghini. I might not be able to abseil down mountains. And I might not have the slightest idea how to escape if held prisoner and facing certain death. So I might not seem an obvious choice for James Bond. But I do have one thing in my favour. I am only just over five foot seven.

MI5 has, you see, decided that it doesn’t want anyone too tall on its books. Its new application form says: “You should be able to blend into the background. We are looking for average height, build, appearance. Applicants would ideally be no taller than 5ft 11in for men and 5ft 8in for women”.

It’s the revenge of the shorties. Eat your heart out, Sean Connery, you 6ft 1in grotesque. Take heed, Roger Moore, you 6 ft monster. Go stick that where it hurts, Timothy Dalton, you 6ft 2in mammoth. And stop crying, Pierce Brosnan, you 6ft troll. We’re short, we’re loud, and we’re taking over from the lot of you. If James Bond is going to be an even passable impression of a spy, it looks like it’s going to have to be the 5ft 7in Tom Cruise in the role from now on.

Or me. Yes, it could be me lying on a dinghy in the Pacific with an ex-KGB spy who happens to look like a model. Thanks to the new MI5 recruitment policy, a whole new world of possibilities has opened up.

It would be nice, for a change, to have the world look up at me, metaphorically if not literally. Because it isn’t fun being a short-arse. OK, I’ve got a good seven inches on Danny De Vito. But at least his lack of stature is exceptional, and he’s been able to make it pay for him. Those of us who are simply bog-standard short don’t have any such luck. We don’t stand out because we’re tall, and we don’t stand out because we’re short. We just don’t get noticed. At all. Other than spying or a life of crime, it’s difficult to imagine when not being noticed might be an asset.

Yes, I know we shorties can sometimes be rather annoying, yapping away like chihuahuas on speed. But we’re only human, and we feel the need to make up for our lack of physical presence in other ways. I must have been a pretty obnoxious child; I did awful Frank Spencer impressions and told lame jokes. If I wasn’t going to be noticed when I walked into a room, I had to find some other means of attracting attention.

So next time one of my fellow pipsqeaks tells you how much they prefer being small, humour them. They’re lying. Yes, short people tend to be louder than the rest of you, and we sometimes behave as if we’ve overdosed on confidence.

But it’s all nonsense. The truth of the matter is that there are no advantages to being short. None. And I don’t just mean that, to my eye, most films have a lump of head at the bottom of the screen and that I yearn, as an adult in his fifth decade, to be lifted onto someone’s shoulders when I’m in the grandstand at Cheltenham.

Turn your mind back to the school disco. Think about this, all you tall people out there: in all honesty, did you give the rest of us a second glance? Of course you didn’t. You tall women burst out laughing when one of us shorties walked up to you. As if! And you tall men knew that we weren’t even in the same competition as you. It was a world of height apartheid.

And yes, I know about 5ft 4in Bernie Ecclestone and his 6ft 2in model wife. I simply point out that Mr Ecclestone, unlike the rest of us, is worth some £2.5 billion, and remind you of Mrs Merton’s question to Debbie McGee: “what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”.

As we get older and, hopefully, wiser, we develop attributes which others find attractive. But when you’re fourteen, an interesting job or a reputation as a decent catch aren’t really part of the deal. So it’s crap being short at school.

Then you leave school and – guess what? - it’s still crap, just differently so. If you’re sitting down as you read this, have a look at your feet. Are they touching the ground? Yes? Then, congratulations, you’re not a shorty. But for those of us who are, our tootsies are dangling. Kind of makes gravitas difficult, I think you’ll agree.

When you get into a car, do you curse the fact that you can’t push the driver’s seat any further forward, because you still have to stretch to push the footbrake properly? Not unless you’re a shorty.

You can tell what it’s like for us by the language used to describe our situation. Other than the one word, ‘short’, every other description is about what we don’t have: lack of height, lack of stature, lack of presence.

So it’s not great. But there are other things in life. If I lose some more weight, spend every day in the gym, learn to ride and then persuade a trainer to give me a job, I just might replace Keiren Fallon.

(24)

Sorry for the lack of posts. A combination of travel, meetings and trying to find enough time to write my book are ruining this! Please keep coming back - I'll be doing my best to post things more regularly than this past week or so.

(2)

Oh my God, we're all going to die! So the Observer and Arianna Huffington report, citing a secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer.

[It] warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

Blimey. We'd all better head for the hills.

Or maybe not. Both pieces are complete and utter bullshit. Quite appalling journalism, as Iain Murray demonstrates in this piece. I won't extract it; read the whole thing, for as clear a demonstration as you can imagine of the determination of the green lobby to use whatever illegitimate scare tactics it can dream up. I mean, it can't be that they were all - Greenpeace, the Observer, and Arianna - simply too stupid to realise the lies they were peddling. No, it can't be.

(15)

Apologies for the lack of posts. Manic. Things should be back to normal tomorrow.

(4)

Should you be inclined, you can hear me here on Radio 3's Night Waves talking with David Edgar about the obligations on subsidised theatre to put on plays which are not just from the usual left-liberal perspective. (Press the Friday button.)

(4)

I may be changing the title of this blog, to Idiot Murdoch Hack. I have been so anointed by Michael Billington:

Already the idea of the project has provoked idiot objections from some Murdoch hack ("I doubt if Sir David had even heard of the term 'neo con' until a year or so ago when it became de rigueur among the chattering classes").

(5)

If you're one of the seven people out there who has BBC4, I'm on tonight's Dinner With Portillo, at 9.30 and midnight. I'm the philistine who doesn't believe in arts subsidy.

(7)

Some people have suggested that I post the text of my normblog questionnaire. Since it's easily accessed here, I'm not quite sure why...but I like to be of service, so here it is:

The normblog profile 20: Stephen Pollard

Stephen Pollard is a political columnist who writes regularly in the Times, Sunday Telegraph and Independent. He has been described by the Sunday Times as a New Labour 'guru', and by the New Statesman as the leading 'British neoconservative'. He is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think tank, where he directs the health policy programme, and at Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, in London.

Stephen is currently writing the biography of David Blunkett, which will be published in the spring of 2005. From 1998-2000 he was a columnist and Chief Leader Writer on the Daily Express. From 1995-98 he was Head of Research at the Social Market Foundation, and from 1992-95 Research Director at the Fabian Society. Before that he was Research Assistant to Rt Hon Peter Shore MP. He is the author of numerous pamphlets and books on health and education policy, and is co-author with Andrew Adonis (now the Prime Minister's adviser on public sector reform) of the best-selling A Class Act - the Myth of Britain's Classless Society. Stephen lives in London. He blogs at Stephen Pollard.

Why do you blog? > To get off my chest the things no one will pay me to write.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Discovering, and being astonished by, some of the people who read my site.

What are your favourite blogs? > Yours, Oliver Kamm, Melanie Philips and Harry's Place.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Voltaire, and Milton Friedman (with whom, as a rather obnoxious school boy, I had a long correspondence; it says a lot about what a wonderful man he is that he spent a fair amount of time writing to a pipsqueak).

What are you reading at the moment? > My entire life has been, and will be, taken up for sixth months with the writings of, and writings about, David Blunkett.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Woody Allen, Martha Argerich, Benvenuto Cellini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Whit Stillman. (And Henry Clay Frick and Duncan Phillips for their art collections.)

What is the best novel you've ever read? > I’m going to answer a different question: the best books. Robert Caro's ongoing biography of LBJ. The book which has, I think, had the most influence on me is Alexander Murray's Reason and Society in the Middle Ages. And I adore Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography.

What is your favourite movie? > Metropolitan.

What is your favourite song? > A song-cycle: 'Dichterliebe', by Robert Schumann.

Who is your favourite composer? > I'm going to cheat again: Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > The death penalty, about which I am still in trauma. I do not think of myself as the sort of person who supports it, but I have thought it through and can't come to any other conclusion. And I used to think governments actively should pursue full employment, rather than allowing it to happen by getting out of the way.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > That apart from the few areas in which the state does good, it does harm.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That the state is beneficent.

Who are your political heroes? > Joe Chamberlain and Stafford Cripps. I long to write a comparative political biography. And yes, I realize those choices may seem incompatible with the answer to the above question, but the world is now a very different place.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > Nil desperandum carborundum (don't let the bastards grind you down).

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Introduce education vouchers, and have no state involvement in the running of education.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > Jeff Stelling.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Militant Islam.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > I was told this by a senior politician who seemed to have spent his entire career ignoring it: be nice to people on your way up; you'll need them on your way down.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I tried it once, and the answer is no.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I would lock up any man over the age of about 12 with long hair or a ponytail. I would hang anyone who says 'these ones'. And I hate football fans who only started supporting their team when it became successful.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Computer games. Most pop music. Drinking beer, when there's so much wine to be drunk.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > What's going to win the Champion Hurdle?

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd have backed Norton's Coin to win the 1990 Cheltenham Gold Cup. He won at 100/1.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > New York City: the greatest example on the planet of human inventiveness and civilization.

What would your ideal holiday be? > A week's racing at the Punchestown Festival.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Cooking. Eating good food. Drinking good wine. Horse racing. Reading books about American public policy. Writing: I am one of those sickening people who gets paid to pursue their hobby. Watching Spurs - although God knows why.

What is your most treasured possession? > My collection of Joe Chamberlain's letters.

What talent would you most like to have? > I would love to be a good pianist.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic. I'd turn it back into a decent orchestra.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Larry David.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Glenn Hoddle, Tony McCoy, Patrick Depailler (a now deceased racing driver). And two horses: Remainder Man and I'm A Driver.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > To be able to wake up and not give a damn about Spurs. Life would be so much more fun.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Joe Chamberlain, Norman Podhoretz, Clara Schumann.

(4)

I'm the subject of Norman Geras' questionnaire this week. You can read it here.

(6)

It’s a long time since I had to decline amo, amas, amat in my school Latin classes. But there is one more modern declension to which I regularly return: I exercise my choice; you take advantage of circumstances; he is a hypocrite.

Last week, Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Brighton College, used the ‘h’ word about a certain set of middle class parents who educate their children in the state sector. Attacking the “conventional wisdom” which holds that parents who go private are “selfish, not community-minded and are essentially social snobs who choose these schools to keep their children away from the great unwashed”, he pointed out that many are “very ordinary” people who work hard to save enough money to afford the fees. The real “moral unworthies”, as Dr Seldon put it, are “the middle-class parents who squeeze and twist the system for their own advantage to get their own children into the best state schools”. They are “the worst moral hypocrites”, who pay a premium for their house to ensure that their children live within the catchment areas of the best state schools.

Ouch. No sooner had the words left his mouth than the wrath of ‘Hypocritical of Tunbridge Wells’ descended on him. He had, of course, done the undoable – he had pierced the cosy self-image of the Guardian reading classes. They say how much they despise private education for ‘buying privilege’ at the very moment as the money leaves their bank account to pay the mortgage on their house, which just happens to be a quarter of mile away from the state school high up in the league tables. They boast how their children are being brought up without special advantages, whilst forking out hundreds of pounds a month for Henry and Amanda’s extra maths lessons. It’s notable how many opponents of independent schools pay for such tuition, whilst angrily condemning the morals of those who make enormous sacrifices to send their children to a private school. And what an extraordinarily convenient bonus it is for these hypocrites that they get to keep all their salary, unburdened by having to pay school fees. Who can blame them? Life wouldn’t really be worth living without that winter holiday to the Caribbean.

A fascinating study by the estate agency Knight Frank has demonstrated precisely the effect to which Dr Seldon referred. It found that the presence of a good state school has a marked impact on property prices, with Guildford, Tunbridge Wells and Beaconsfield prime examples. In St Albans, local estate agents remarked on this trend back in 1996; parents are especially keen to get their daughters into St Albans Girls School, consistently one of the top-rated comprehensives in the country. Property within its catchment area is around thirty percent more expensive than in other, otherwise similar, parts of St Albans. Or take Tetherdown Primary School, one of only 142 schools (out of the 20,000 in the country) to be awarded a perfect 100 per cent score in the national tests for 11-year-olds last summer. Live more than half a mile away from Tetherdown and it is almost impossible to get your child in. So qualifying properties cost – pure cause and effect - an average of £700,000, a premium estimated by local agents to be around 35 per cent.

One area of London is renowned for its schools: Muswell Hill. Well off professionals flock to it, knowing that living there will negate the need to pay school fees. Where is Tetherdown? You guessed it: Muswell Hill.

It’s very easy to proclaim your faith in the state system, and to condemn those who leave it, when you can afford to live in Muswell Hill. But when you’re in not a middle class ghetto but in one bordering a sink - or even a bog standard - school, then the much trumpeted equity of the state system is as mythical as the morality of the lefty middle classes.

Such hypocrisy goes far beyond schools. The Guardian reader’s life is built on a foundation of self-deceit and double standards, with one rule for themselves and another for everyone else. They despise private medical insurance. It’s queue jumping! It’s immoral! But when their hip replacement is urgent, and their firm can’t afford them to be off work any longer…Well, they might not have wanted it, but all those premiums were paid as part of their salary package. So – they’ve got no real choice, have they? - they’ll use the insurance. It’s for the firm’s benefit, you understand. They’re far too valuable an asset to sit around waiting for the NHS.

What’s their passion? The environment. It’s so worrying what we’re doing to the planet. It’s important to support Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. They considered voting Green last time, but until our unfair voting system is changed it would have been a wasted vote. What do you mean, why have they driven to the supermarket instead of taking public transport? How else are they expected to get the 36 bottles of Evian home. And they have to stop off at the bottle bank on the way.

They loathe American ‘cultural imperialism’, and bemoan the absence of European films at the local multiplex: ‘it’s all Hollywood rubbish’. OK, so they liked American Beauty, but that wasn’t really American; it was directed by a Brit. They loved their week in Miami, with the wonderful weather and the ‘have a nice day’ service. And the kids adored Disneyworld, But that’s the problem with America: it’s all so false. And Americans are so materialistic. And stupid. Not that they’re racist. We’re all the same under the skin.

They abhor all violence and terror. That’s why the Iraq War was so awful: we dropped bombs on all those innocent civilians. Saddam was a monster, yes; but we’ve not done anything about Mugabe. So it can’t be right for us to be interfering in Iraq. Yes, what happened on 9/11 was just horrific. But you really do have to ask why those people were driven to do it.

It’s fitting that the newly canonised patron saint of middle class hypocrites, Jenny Tonge, is the MP for another enclave, Richmond. The suicide bombers who murder those Israelis are terrible. Violence is never the answer. But the Israelis are beastly to them, beastly. And the way Jenny’s been treated is beastly, too.

No one is free from hypocrisy. None of us practise entirely as we preach. But there is something uniquely offensive about this lefty hypocrisy. The very people who seek to lecture the rest of the world about decent living and equity more often than not turn out, on closer examination, to be the most grotesque hypocrites of the lot.

(22)

I've been emailed by two enterprising interns in Westminster who have set up something called www.internsnetwork.org.uk, which they describe as

a new organisation working to make internships in the Westminster Village more transparent, fair and fun. There are about 3000 people at any one time working for free in think tanks, parliament, and the political media
- we want to address some of the ethical issues around this standard practice which makes life very difficult for talented graduates from poorer backgrounds.

I'm happy to link to the site, and to flag up the organisation, because they touch upon something which, while affecting a tiny number of people, matters to me. I spent a decade working in Westminster, first in the Commons and then in think tanks. Even now barely a week goes by without someone asking me if I know of 'someone good' who I can recommend for a job of some kind in think tanks.

In my last think tank (last full time, I should say - I am affiliated now to three) we had a 'try before you buy' policy for hiring staff: if an intern was good, and we had a vacancy, we gave them a job or called them back, somethimes a year or two later, with an offer.

It worked: chemistry is critical in a small organisation such a think tank, and if you know already that you get on, that's half the battle. So anything which helps interns find their way around a community which can be very intimiating must, in my book, be a good thing.

UPDATE: Peter Briffa has his own take...

(5)

Even in Utah, a man's home is no longer his castle:

Utah prosecutors crack down on incest and polygamy

I mean, just where's the harm in those?

(3)

I don't often agree with Nick Cohen (other than over Iraq) but his pieces are always meticulously researched and polemical in the best possible way.

This piece today, on the unimaginable trauma of parents who, because of what Cohen rightly calls the 'crackpot theory' of Roy Meadow,have had their children taken from them by social services in secret, and with no chance given to the parents to defend themselves in any sort of trial, is umissable.

(3)

Andrew Sullivan points to a typical piece of hypocrisy by the odious Mike Moore.

(And yes, I know - thanks to those of you who have written to me on this - that I have a penchant for the word 'odious'. That's because there are a number of odious people about whom I choose to write.)

(2)

Peter Briffa: inspired.

(2)

My sort of gals...

(5)

Oh Lord. This needs to be knocked on the head PDQ. Something very concerning: I agree with a Yasmin A-B column.

This worrying occurrence happened a couple of times last year; I fear it has started again...

(3)

I always enjoy British Spin. I'm even more of a fan than before, after reading his description of me in the comments section on Harry Hatchett's site:

...opiniated loudmouth, a more moderate Littlejohn on speed.

Littlejohn on speed, eh? I can't beat that for a compliment. My most enjoyable moment in the distant days when I reviewed books for the New Statesman was when choosing my 'book of the year' a few years ago. Sandwiched between the oh-so-earnest selections of the likes of Geoff Mulgan (who chose some German philosopher) and other pin up boys and girls of the left, I picked the collected columns of the great Mr Littlejohn.

I meant it; whatever one thinks of his politics, to deny his sheer brilliance as a tabloid columnist - the best by a country mile - is impossible. If I can be even half as good as Mr L then I'll be a very happy man.

But I have to admit that the thought of the NS' readers choking on their muesli as they saw such a choice was one of the reasons behind my selection.

(3)

More on the Kilroy-Silk fracas. Here’s a test:

How many of the 9/11 suicide bombers were from Finland? None.
How many were from Portugal? None.
How many were from Australia? None.
How many were Arabs? All of them.

How many suicide bombers in the Middle East have been Israeli? None.
How many have been Arabs? All of them.

Does that mean that all Arabs are potential suicide bombers? Of course not. Does it mean that by asking such questions, and pointing out those facts, I have hinted that they are? Of course not - any more than observing that all England footballers have two legs means that all Englishmen with two legs are potential England footballers.

But logic doesn’t enter in to it. Some facts are what might be termed ‘unfacts’ – facts which must not be stated, because to do so is to offend against the received wisdom of who can, and who can’t, be condemned. Point them out and you put yourself beyond the pale.

But it is worse, even, than that. In the looking-glass world in which we now live, good is decried as evil and evil is praised as good. America, which is going after terrorists and has liberated the Iraqis from tyranny, is regarded by the chattering classes as the embodiment of everything which is wrong with the world. A country such as Saudi Arabia, which funds terrorists, is regarded as an ally. And Syria, which uses terror as an instrument of policy, is praised for supporting freedom fighters.

Just a thought.

(23)

Have you managed to keep abreast of the many twists and turns of the most important story of 2004? I’m struggling. I just don’t know whose version of events to trust. Has there been a cover up? If there was, just how far did it go? Were the rules of decent behaviour ignored? How did they think they could get away with it, when it was always obvious that the facts would emerge?

I refer – as if you didn’t know - to the big issue of the moment: have Julia Sawalha and Alan Davies married? If you read the tabloids, they have. In secret. Not, however, according to the couple themselves. Indeed, they so didn’t get married that, according to the latest reports (which might well, of course, turn out to be as flawed as the original story) they are considering suing for libel those papers which alleged that there was indeed a marriage.

Think about that for a moment. I neither know nor care what two F list celebs get up to – or don’t - in the privacy of the registry office. But libel? Since when was it defamatory to accuse someone of not living in sin, as it used to be called?

Then there’s Britney. Once up on a time, she was seen as a role model to teenagers everywhere, with a career built on such harmless antics as tongue-sandwiching Madonna and dressing up in a school girl uniform, hips gyrating to the beat and bare flesh thrusting away. And then – the hussy! – she did something truly beyond the pale. She married someone.

Perhaps it’s just a youthful indiscretion. She would never, surely, intentionally do something as revolting as marrying, sullying the pure image which has earned her the admiration of parents across the globe.

I entered my fifth decade recently. Middle age is setting in; I’m not sure I should be allowed out in public any more. It’s a minefield out there: the world is changing beyond my ability to keep up. Behaviour which used to be the norm is now condemned as offensive. Ideas which were once regarded as normal are now quite beyond the pale.

Try telling a group of friends that, overall, you think the police are a good thing and that you admire people who, for very little money, put their lives in danger to uphold the law. You might as well say you’ve been reading some BNP literature and think they might have a point.

Admit that you try to live your life by a set of rules which might impinge on your ability to do whatever you feel like doing, whenever you feel like doing it, and you are clearly in urgent need of counselling to release the ‘inner you’, have a dependent personality (almost certainly a product of child abuse), and have most likely never had an orgasm. That you might simply believe in God is, it goes without saying, impossible. Something must be wrong with you.

Admit that you think that human beings should take responsibility for their own actions and earn praise or punishment accordingly, and you are – there can be no more damning a condemnation - a ‘moraliser’. Not only do you have no empathy or understanding for your fellow human beings, you are a racist, homophobic, xenophobic bigot. Your views are so beyond the pale that no civilised person should even give them the courtesy of a response. Ostracism is the only suitable response.

Friends of mine with four children tell me that they are regularly told that they are selfish – their fecundity is responsible for destroying the earth’s resources. The beast of a husband has clearly browbeaten all remaining independence out of his wife. And he must be a misogynist who sees his wife as a chattel, fit only for breeding his offspring.

It works in reverse, too. If you don’t go along with ideas which are now de rigeur then you are harking back to a golden age which never was.

Argue that classical music is dying not because of the price of CDs or cuts in school music lessons but because there were, after Schoenberg, very few composers willing to write music to which the public would ever want to listen, and you are a philistine.

Say that you think most native American and Aboriginal art is not fit to be compared to even the worst paintings to come out of Delft School and you are not just racist, you are a cultural imperialist.

And the last time I wrote – Robert Kilroy-Silk, eat your heart out – that Western civilisation was the pinnacle of man’s achievement, and that it was not merely possible but essential to judge those countries which fail to behave by the rules of civilised behaviour, I was told…well, you know what I was told. You may well be thinking it yourself.

So I am all of those things. But I plead one thing in my defence. I am not, nor ever have been, married. There are some lows to which even I have not sunk.

(8)

Best line in tonight's 'Tony Blair episode' of The Simpsons, from Homer Simpson to a hotel receptionist:

We saved your ass in Vietnam and shared our prostitutes with Hugh Grant. So give us some free maps and none of that dry, British wit.

(2)

Great line in the always-worth-reading David Brooks' column today:

The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission...

(5)

There's only one Peter Briffa:

The Times has an op-ed today by Colin Powell. The Guardian, on the other hand, has one by Osama bin Laden. You can't say their editors don't know their audiences.

(2)

Priceless. There really are no better headlines than the New York Post's.

This one is sheer genius, above a story about Wes Clark saying General people make too much of a deal of Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky:

WES: MONICAGATE WAS OVERBLOWN

(2)

The word is ‘embarrassing’. The BBC’s lunchtime news yesterday reported the triumphant transmission of pictures from Nasa’s space probe on Mars. As the reporter put it: “The Spirit rover survived the perilous plunge through the Martian atmosphere after a seven-month voyage from Earth.” A marvellous success, indeed. The report then – quite rightly - went on in breathless tones to describe how, as Nasa’s science manager, John Callas, put it: “The images are outstanding. The quality (is) the best that have been taken. This is incredible. This could not be better.”

And then, snuck in at the end of the report, came this single sentence: “The European Space Agency is still searching for the missing British-built Beagle 2.”

How typical. In the run-up to Beagle 2’s Christmas Day landing, we became a nation obsessed, the news dominated by previews of how Colin Pillinger and his plucky British team were going to sock it to the rest of the world. And then…oops. Nada. Much ado about nothing. Ah well, we tried. Jolly good show. It’s the taking part which counts.

Someone else was also taking part: Nasa. I won’t labour the point, but it boils down to this. We tried and failed. They tried and succeeded. And ne’er the twain shall meet.

I understand neither space nor science, so the value of yesterday’s pictures - indeed, of the entire space project – is not for me to judge. But I do understand the British and American psyches, and there are few more stark illustrations of the difference between the two than events on Mars over the past fortnight.

Take Prof Pillinger himself. He has been profiled everywhere, his name now synonymous in Britain with space exploration. Part of the media’s fixation with his project was because it was so clearly (ital)his(ital) project, which he alone got off the ground. Slightly eccentric, looking like a caricature scientist, battling against the odds to achieve his dream, he could hardly have been more perfectly constructed to appeal to the British mindset.

Here’s a question. Can you name his opposite number at Nasa – the person responsible for the success of Spirit? Of course you can’t, because such a person doesn’t exist. It’s Nasa as an entity which got the job done, not a gutsy scientist who tried to prove everyone wrong.

A caller to a phone-in which I heard yesterday took umbrage at the underhand tactics employed by Nasa: “It’s so typically bloody American. If they want to do something they spend billions, buying up all the talent and swaggering around as if they’ve got all the answers.” As opposed, that is, to the Brits who, when we want to do something, spend as little as we can get away with, come over all coy about it, deny it really matters to us and then, when someone else succeeds, behave like a kid who’s had his toy taken away from him.

Take TV. The Christmas edition of Dead Ringers had a marvellous line. Up flashed the ITV logo, followed by this: “Coming up next on ITV1: an opportunity to watch all your Christmas DVD presents”. Why is it that almost the only programmes worth watching (The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Frasier, The West Wing, to name just a few) are American? There are many factors, but one is the ‘Nasa effect’- the sheer weight of resources which they can put into a project. What few original and worthwhile British dramas or comedies there are (rather than hack-work programmes such as East Enders or Casualty) almost always have a writer – just one writer, that is - who sits in a room alone. After a few episodes, the ideas run out and the programme either ends or carries on and is awful. It’s the classic British model, which repeats itself across all sorts of other areas and industries.

American shows, by contrast, employ vast teams of first-rate writers who pool their talents and, more often than not, come up with a product far superior to anything achieved by the single British writer.

The same holds for lawyers, too – another field in which Americans dominate. Go to a top City firm with a problem and you will be put in the hands of one lawyer (and their subordinates). Go to a top US firm and you will be put in the hands of the firm itself, and the pool of its partners’ knowledge.

This difference extends to a more general problem with British culture, as opposed to American. They worship success and so – cause and effect - are successful. We sneer at their in-your-face attitude to success and so – again, cause and effect – end up with little choice but to laud failure. Thus our attitude to Nasa’s triumph yesterday – as if it somehow doesn’t merit that much praise because it was bought through vast amounts of time and money. While Beagle cost just £45 million, Spirit got through £220 million. How tacky and American!

We dismiss actors such as Catherine Zeta-Jones who move to Hollywood for ‘getting above themselves’, and we criticise actors such as Anthony Hopkins who appear in box office hits for ‘selling out’. And – my favourite, this - we loathe companies such as Microsoft, which have the nerve to make computing simple, accessible and popular not just because they are – crime enough – American but also because they are too successful. Too successful!

(33)

Lovely line on Dead Ringers this evening:

Coming up tonight on ITV1: an opportunity to watch all your Christmas DVD presents.

(4)

It may only be 1st January, but I already have a contender for the most stupid headline of the year.

From today's Times:

International cinema promises great names and award-winning movies in 2004.

Award-winning films, eh? How marvellous!

Just like every other year, as it happens. Since there are awards every year, there are award-winning films every year.

(1)

I seem to have struck a chord with my comments about today's revelries...
Quite apart from one of the largest postbags I have ever had, I'll be on the Jeremy Vine programme (on BBC Radio 2) at 12.20ish.

(4)

Can you contain your excitement? There are just three more days to get through and then, whoopee, it’s the big one: New Year’s Eve. The blow out to end all blow all outs. Fun with a capital F. The party of parties.

Excuse me, if you will, but I’ll pass. I’ll take myself off to bed at half past ten and wake up on Thursday morning. I’ll sleep through the whole wretched night. Now it may just be that I am what is known as - to use the technical term – a miserable git. That’s for you, and my friends, to judge. I like to think there are other reasons. But whatever the cause, there are at least a thousand other things I’d rather be doing at midnight on Wednesday than greeting the New Year with a glass of champagne and my fellow party guests. – banging a nail into my skull, translating Clarissa into Esperanto or hosting a dinner party for a dozen National Union of Teachers activists, to consider just three.

I hate New Year’s Eve, you see. I don’t just dislike it; I hate it. If New Year’s Eve was a person, I’d hate it as much as I hate Edward Heath and Roy Keane, my two hate-figures. In fact I’d hate it even more than I hate them. (That’s, seven ‘hates’ in this paragraph so far. I hope you are getting an inkling as to just how much I hate it – and that’s now eight.) Neither Mr Health not Mr Keane expect to be liked; they seem, in fact, to relish being unpopular. New Year’s Eve is different. To admit that you loathe it is to announce that you are a misanthrope, and to court the sort of mystified stares which are usually reserved only for those of us who think George Bush is one of the truly great American Presidents. It is, in short, to reveal to the world that you are weird.

It depends on your definition of weird, I suppose. Maybe it’s not the thousands who turn up at Trafalgar Square to attempt to recreate the Hillsborough Stadium crush, only this time with added booze. Maybe it isn’t even people who go out on 31st December to parties full of people they barely know, get plastered, grab the nearest person for a snog, throw up, dance, throw up again, and then discover that they’re miles from home and there’s no transport. Maybe it really isn’t those wretched souls who have their own little party watching Jools’ Hootenanny and haven’t got a clue that the New Year cheer was recorded one dull autumn teatime? And maybe it isn’t, either, the ones who drink so much, so badly, that when they wake up on New Year’s Day they feel as if they are on a ferry crossing the North Sea in the middle of a force ten gale.

So maybe it is, after all, those of us who put the shutters up and enjoy ourselves when we want to, not when total strangers decide we should. In which case, I’m weird and I’m happy to be weird.

My proudest achievement – and yes, I do realise this speaks volumes about the limits of my accomplishments – is that on the night of 31st December 1999, a night which amplified everything which is so dire about New Year’s Eve by a factor of about a million, I was in bed, asleep, by eleven o’clock.

I’ve tried to think if there are less obvious reasons for my hatred of New Year’s Eve – less obvious, that is, than the grotesque forced jollity, the loathsome parties full of celebrants with whom one would normally not share a taxi, let alone a kiss or a bottle, and the puerile determination that EVERYONE IS GOING TO HAVE THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES. Perhaps. When I explained my view recently, I was asked ‘didn’t you cop off when you were younger?’. Quite prescient, as it happens, since the answer is a less than resounding ‘no’. So maybe it’s all deeply Freudian. The fact I didn’t pull at New Year’s Eve parties when I was young means that I reject the entire concept now.

I’d put it another way. Even as a kid, I loathed the whole thing. But when you’re fifteen, you can’t say ‘I’m not coming, I’m going to sleep’. Not, that is, if you want to have any friends. So I’d drag myself along to The Victory in Pinner, where we used to hang out - a foul enough pub even on normal evenings - and spend the night stewing in the corner with a false smile on my face. Now that I don’t have to go along with the crowd, I can stay at home and go to sleep.

I’ve discovered over the years that there are others out there who share my view. And since I don’t want to be wholly negative, I’d like to make a proposal. Since celebrating New Year’s Eve is an entirely arbitrary choice, why don’t those of us who would rather smother ourselves with rotting fish than go out on 31st December choose our own, random date, and quietly celebrate it, on our own. 23rd February will do for me. So if anyone wants to see me then, I’m afraid I’ll be busy getting quietly sozzled. Happy new year.

(16)

Here are some carols/songs for you to sing today (from John Derbyshire):

Mad Dogs and Neocons (after Noel Coward) Mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East. The Germans just don't care to, the French would never dare to, In Luxembourg and Amsterdam they don't care in the least; But neocons all hate a dictator. China's PLA just waits for the day they can massacre students and monks; While Kim Jong Il has orders to fill — without cash from his nukes, he's sunk. In Istanbul the only rule is to keep the Kurds policed, But mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.

Mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.
The Democrats would much prefer if to the U.N. we'd defer;
The ACLU want the motley crew at Guantanamo released —
But, please, no order on the border.
The paleo crowd will applaud out loud anyone who torments Jews;
A pogrom or a human bomb is easy to excuse.
At the New York Times talk of Bush's "crimes" has hardly ever ceased.
But mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.

O Come All Ye Faithful
(Adeste Fidelis)
O come, all ye faithful,
Take your Ten Commandments,
Hide them, O hide them
Where no-one will see.
If you believe in
Absolute morality —
Then you're just too judgmental,
Your faith's too fundamental,
Your rock so monumental
Has no place in here!

The Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic
(Apologies to Julia Ward Howe)
Mine eyes have never noticed any difference at all —
Black, brown, or white; gay, bi, or straight; or thin or fat or tall;
Male, female, or transsexual — they're constructions soci-al:
We must celebrate each one.
Glory, glory, there's no difference!
Yet still, we'd better give some preference.
To enrich our own learning experience,
Till critical mass is here.

We're stamping out all images of Christianity,
That religion of colonialists, of war and slavery.
To faiths of every other sort there's none more kind than we;
So let them all come in!
Christians have no special standing.
Moslem numbers are expanding.
Flight-school lessons they're demanding —
Sharia law is here!

Ten million illegals? — Oh, what need for any fuss?
Let's give them driver's licenses — they're just as good as us.
In fact, they're slightly better, for they're more industrious.
Who else will mow our lawns?
Down with dull assimilation!
We're a multicultural nation!
Celebrate the transformation!
Diversity is here!

Word! da White-Boy Rapper Sings
(To the tune of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing")
Word! da white-boy rapper sings
Of bitches, ho's, an' homie t'ings.
He one cool s***-kickin' mutha
Got mo' fans than any brutha.
Now he's called for Bush's slayin' —
Thass too much, kna wha' I'm sayin'?
Anyway, they's took his heat —
Fool's defenseless on da street.
Word! da white-boy rapper sings —
Suburban teens all think he's king.

(3)

David Carr says

I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I have literally not met a single person who has told me that they want them here. So I propose the most unscientific poll in history. If you are British, and you do want us to bid for the Olympics, can you just leave a comment saying so, please. Not the reasons - we all know those tired arguments. Just the mere fact that you want us to bid.

I have no idea what spurious conclusions I'll be able to draw from all this, but I've no doubt I'll manage something...

(22)

Norman Geras has one of his polls on at the moment, this time for the 10 Favourite Movies of All Time.

Here, to give you all something to sneer at, is my little list:

All The President’s Men

Annie Hall

Lost In Translation

A Man For All Seasons

Hannah And Her Sisters

High Society

Metropolitan

The Producers

Rushmore

When Harry Met Sally

(14)

An interesting, albeit not wholly convincing, theory on the Gaddafi move.

(1)

Hours of harmless fun for misanthropes everywhere...

(3)

I was about to post a sneering comment about this piece today by Polly Toynbee in which she tells how she was taken in by a Nigerian scam. Something along the lines of 'you can't fool all of the people, all of the time, but you can fool Polly'.

And then I stopped myself (I hope you appreciate that little journalistic trick of saying what I said I wouldn't after all say). Read the piece, and then tell me in all honesty that you would never have made the same mistake. Anyone with any charitable instincts would be vulnerable to such a scam, and she made what seem to me like pretty sensible checks.

I can't stand Polly T. I have to change channels if I see her on TV, her liberal pieties and condescending, smug superiority far more than I can take. But I have to say that in this instance she emerges with a lot of credit as someone who is prepared to put her money where her mouth is - and is prepared to admit in public that she was hoodwinked.

(25)

I think I might change the strapline of this site from 'never knowingly understated' to these words from Tom Watson:

Unravel the DNA code of this man and it spells "no surrender - new labour original".

I kind of like that...

(3)

Brian Mickelthwait has an interesting post at Samizdata about Living Marxism, spiked and the Institute of Ideas etc. based on a George Moonbat column in last week's Guardian.

As he asks:

So. Who the hell are these people? What the hell do they think they are doing? Any comments that make (any) sense of them would be most welcome.

Here's my take. Yes, they do write some sensible things. Mick Hume, for instance, is almost always interesting to read. But.

We should never forget who these people are, and where they come from. They are Marxists who found in the 1980s that everything in which they believed - their entire world view - was collapsing around them. They had two choices: quietly disappear from view with their tails between their legs; or re-invent themselves. They chose - hugely successfully - the latter.

As I say, they do sometimes say interesting things. But I nonetheless regard them with contempt, and I object to being lectured about the way world works by people who have had their entire belief-system shattered. Martin Jacques, here's a suggestion: shut the hell up. You have nothing to tell us which we haven;t already dismissed.

(And yes, I am aware of that the sentiments of this post might seem a bit of a cheek, given what I have just written in the piece below.)

(9)

To avoid missing the unmissable Norman Geras, make sure you note his new url: http://normblog.typepad.com/

(2)

Somehow I missed the release of this year's Darwin Awards, which pay tribute to those among us who have missed the evolutionary boat.

Some choice entries:

When his 38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a holdup in Long Beach, California, would be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder: He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and, after a little hopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company, suspecting negligence, sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine out and lost a finger. The chef's claim was approved.

An American teenager was in the hospital yesterday recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

(5)

Yes, I know: the Turner Prize is beyond satire and all that...

But I have another pressing question. Why is it that all transvestites look the same?

(4)

I’m looking out of my window as I write this. And no, that isn’t the prelude to what usually follows such a sentence: a paean to the bucolic English countryside. Quite the opposite: I live in the middle of London, in a road which is never without either cars or people travelling along it, and on which litter seems to gather just as soon as the bin men have disappeared.

Not that I’m complaining: such features are just a part of the very point of cities, the existence of which are an ongoing tribute to the astonishing endeavour and invention of human beings.

No, the reason why I’m looking out of my window with such pleasure is because a few moments ago I realised that life is about to get wonderful again. It’s winter. Properly so. The sun is out, there’s a cold bite to the air, it’s fresh and, at last, the best season of the year has arrived.

How can anyone actually prefer summer? How can they even it enjoy it at all? It has almost nothing to commend it. It gets too hot to do anything without breaking into an unpleasant – and deeply unsociable – sweat. Public transport is unusable, if not actually unsafe. Walking becomes something of an Olympic sport, given the effort it involves. London is invaded by tourists. Step outside your front door and you are confronted by the world’s ugliest people parading mounds of their bare flesh. It’s too hot to eat properly. And sport is a pale imitation of the real meaning of the word (with just one exception to summer’s litany of awfulness: cricket.)

Winter, on the other hand, is something altogether wonderful, when once more it becomes a joy to be alive. Who, after all, wants to eat a steak and chips – in the end, the most perfect of all dishes - in the middle of summer? Who wants a stew?

Ah, summer’s boosters say, there’s nothing better than eating outside. Who are they trying to kid? If you like flies and midges with your meal, perhaps. If you like sunburn, perhaps. And it’s bearable if, for some unfathomable reason, you want to experience the uniquely unpleasant form of hangover acquired when drinking in the sun.

But it doesn’t even come close to the pleasure of a proper winter meal and a real winter drink. A bottle of claret drunk indoors never gave anyone a memorable hangover. And who can possibly enjoy being stuck for months drinking insipid white wine (or, God help us, a ‘spritzer’, possibly the most revolting concoction involving alcohol ever assembled) all day and night, when the alternative is even just a half way decent red wine? Summer drinks: ugh.

This afternoon, London will be packed with crowds clamouring for a look at the England rugby team on their victory parade. Now there’s a proper sport, played at the right time of year. Rugby league – a pretty pointless exercise at the best of times, anyway – now has most of its fixtures in the summer, and few people bother to pay any attention to it any more. The truth of the matter is that real sport takes place in winter; summer sports are for poseurs who affect to enjoy sport, but treat it mainly as an excuse for socialising.

On Wednesday – decent ground permitting - my horse, Spring Dawn, runs in the 1.15 at Leicester. It’s his first race over the big obstacles, and I’ll be something of a nervous wreck. I’ll know by 1.25 whether he’s as good a jumper as I, and his trainer, Nicky Henderson, hope he is. But whatever the result, the real challenge is indeed the taking part. That’s because jump racing is a proper sport, unlike its summer counterpart, flat racing, which is pretty much a waste of everyone except a few high-rolling breeders’ time. It’s like a schoolground game of tiddlywinks compared with a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

Take the two supposed highlights of racing year, Royal Ascot and Cheltenham. The first, Ascot, is in reality a foul experience, full of obnoxious people who never otherwise go near a racecourse, dressed up in hired morning coats and paying not the slightest attention to the racing. Cheltenham is three – soon to be four – days of total bliss, attended only by genuine racing enthusiasts, with the sport as the central focus, not a pleasant afterthought.

But best of all is the weather itself. I guess if you are born in a tropical rain forest than summer might hold some attractions as something to which you are used. But how anyone else can claim to prefer sweating, burning and stifling to the pure, fresh, invigorating winter wind is quite beyond me.

I’m off for a walk, now. I spent Saturday watching the mighty Spurs demolish Wolves. Tottenham is hardly the most salubrious part of London, and the weather was overcast. But that mattered not a whit as the brisk wind, and Robbie Keane, worked their magic on the crowd. It was a typical winter’s day.

Today, the sky is clear blue, the temperature is vigorous, and winter’s spell beckons. You can keep summer. I’m going to enjoy winter while it lasts.

(11)

I am Charles VI of France...

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

(via Norman Geras.)

(6)

Has anyone ever told Dick Gephardt to step out of the shadows?

(via Brian Mickelthwait.)

(5)

I've just been browsing through Right Wing News' blog awards.

Could someone explain to me, please, how Instapundit can win both the 'Most Overrated Blog' and the 'Best Blog Overall' awards.

(7)

Glorious Oliver Kamm demolition of the Plain English Campaign

(2)

I was just about to write that the Plain English Campaign is plain silly for giving an award to Donald Rumsfeld for speaking gobbledegook, and that not only do his comments make perfect sense, they were both plain and simple to understand and were also, intentionally, amusing.

And then I saw that Natalie Solent has said almost exactly the same thing. So I won't bother posting it, then.

(4)

I have been, quite rightly, taken to task by a couple of correspondents for my horrific solecism, 'you and I', in my post on the BBC, below. I know - it should be 'you and me'.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

(3)

Norman Geras has the ideal Channucah present to suggest:

Israeli customs agents seized 400 Osama bin Laden dolls and 50 more Saddam Hussein dolls Wednesday, saying they were inciteful material, the customs authority said in a release. An Arab Israeli had ordered the singing and dancing dolls that carry toy guns as a "gimmick" for sale to Arabs and Jews in Israel, he told the agents when he was questioned.

(2)

I do a sort of regular slot on Saturday mornings on the Adrian Chiles show on Radio 5. I've referred before to my annual jousts on it with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; the producers know a good thing when they see it, and have us on the last programme of the year to do a round-up, knowing that sparks will, as they say, fly.

Anyway, the show has been off the air for nearly two months for the World Cup, and it's back on Saturday. Guess who's on with me. Yup, you got it...for it is she.

You can hear it at 10.15 on Saturday, if you are so minded (and here, via the web).

(11)

Apologies for the lack of posts. Manic travels. I should be back to normal tomorrow.

(2)

I've just made a rather unnerving discovery. I am not, in fact, Stephen Pollard. It appears that I am a comedienne called Linda Smith:

Room 101
Paul Merton gives celebrities a chance to banish their pet hates into Room 101. Linda Smith suggests Tim Henman and adults who read Harry Potter.

Or so this and this seem to suggest.

(3)

BLOODY MARVELOUS!!!

(6)

As, I've always said, that Oliver Kamm is a splendid fellow.

(2)

I like Sky News. I really do. It's far, far superior to the BBC and is, when I'm not watching Fox, my channel of choice.

But here's how they chose to headline today's news just now, on a day when at least 27 people have been murdered in Istanbul, and 70,000 people have marched in London:

Now for today's main story: Michael Jackson is in police custody in California.

(8)

Jackie at au currant has as a category miscellaneous idiots.

Kind of says it all, really.

(4)

Possibly the best contribution I will ever get to my comments section:

I went out with Harold Pinter's niece in 1960. Hackney Young Socialists. Nice, romantic girl. If only these were orange groves she said, staring at the street lights in Clapton High Road. Wore green stockings. Went off with a Trotsky lookalike. Wonder what happened to her. Pinter was intriguing and baffling then. What a difference 43 years makes.

Never say I don't have interesting readers...

(2)

I think the word is 'entrepreneurial'...

(4)

Sasha Castel makes an observation about French rugby fans...

(4)

The Telegraph describes the woes of Peter and Beryl Mills:

Just after the New Year, following days of torrential rain, the Thames burst its banks at Wraysbury, Berks, and flooded their £400,000 home to a depth of almost two feet.

They escaped in a rowing boat. They had never experienced flooding on such a scale and an accusing finger was pointed at the newly completed Jubilee River, a man-made canal designed to remove flooding upstream where celebrities such as Michael Parkinson, Rolf Harris, Vince Hill and Yuri Geller have their homes.

While Maidenhead, Bray and Windsor stayed dry, riverside homes in Wraysbury, Staines and Chertsey suddenly found themselves under water.

"We had been assured that the Jubilee River, which returns flood water to the Thames just upstream of us, would make no difference," said Mr Mills, 65, a retired personnel manager.

"But we had a huge amount of rain in 2000 with only minimal flooding. The only difference between then and last January was that the Jubilee River was in operation.

"The insurers paid out and we have repaired the damage but we now have to pay £5,000 excess if we make a claim against flooding and we have no guarantee that we will be able to continue insuring our home if the floods return.

"We put our home on the market in July. We lowered the price to £350,000 but we did not get a single offer. We now have no choice but to spend £80,000 of our retirement savings on gutting the inside of our house and raising the floors by four feet. We will never be able to sell until we have done this work."

I've just one small point to make. They bought a house on the banks of a river. ON THE BANKS OF A RIVER. FULL OF WATER.

What else did they expect? It to dry out in a drought?

(Here's what I had to say about this issue at greater length last winter.)

(7)

The Grauniad's letters page is a joy today, and not for the usual reasons:

I intend to go to the demo next week. In a crowd of that size, there's bound to be a fair quantity of dropped change.
Jeremy Dore
Coggeshall, Essex

I have a question about ID cards that nobody has answered yet. What does the D stand for?
Philip Pullman
Oxford

And then a bizarre letter arguing that

Programmes like Kilroy, some parts of daytime TV, and discussion and speculation on rolling news, form a vital part of a new approach [to current affairs on TV].

By bizarre, I don't just mean the argument - the idea that Kilroy is anything other than pap is simply dotty - but the signature:

Lis Howell
Director of TV development, City University

Why on earth does City University (of which I am an alumnus) need a 'Director of TV development'? What can it all mean?

(3)

I don't want to become an Atkins bore (I know, I know, that happened weeks ago). But I've noticed an interesting reaction to my diet on the part of those who aren't sent to sleep by news.

Some people are fascinated. But what's really surprised me is the number who are, well, angry. Not nutritionists, who have a vested interest in damning the whole Atkins regime. Ordinary people, who seem put out somehow that I am losing weight so easily and enjoyably.

A common response from people who remark that I've lost weight and then ask how I did it, when I then tell them that it was through Atkins, is to turn from what looks like admiration and happiness for me to smeering. It's usually a variation on the theme of 'well, it isn't a proper diet' (as if the only form of acceptable weight loss is one which involves suffering) and 'it's not safe' - by which they mean not that Atkins is unhealthy, but that weight loss itself is unhealthy when achieved so effortlessly.

If they themselves were fat I could undestand it, but fat people seem to be hugely supportive. No, it's normal sized people who seem affronted by it.

Take this from yesterday's Guardian:

Attached to a press release from rightwing thinktank Civitas - senior fellow, Stephen "T Rex" Pollard, the Atkins diet's greatest living proponent - was a glossy booklet resembling a copy of Heat magazine. [There's then some stuff about a recent Civitas publication.]

...Meanwhile, how is T Rex's weight loss progressing? "Thirty-seven pounds so far," he announced on Saturday. "I gave myself 10 days off a few weeks ago, as I was in Vienna and NYC, and it seemed a crime not to have cake in the land of sacher torte. Despite gorging myself on all sorts of things, I put on only two pounds, all of which fell off within a couple of days back on Atkins." Stephen forgets, of course, that Christmas is approaching; and if you want to do your bit to feed the shrinking rightwinger, send gifts of stollen and mince pies care of Civitas.

Now this isn't, of course, angry in tone, but it is - sort of - sneering. And weird. I cannot begin to fathom why readers of the Guardian would be in the least bit interested in the dietary habits of a man of whom they have never heard. But the diarist obviously is.

I have no idea if the Guardian's diarist is a porker or a stick insect. And I also have no idea why he (I assume it's a he, since I omitted to point out above that this is an exclusively male reaction - neither I nor any of my Atkins dieting friends have ever had a sneering response from a woman, of any shape) should be so fascinated by my diet.

Any ideas?

(17)

I went to Harry Hatchet's bloggers gathering last night, and was rather disconcerted when people seemed to recognise me (my picture rarely appears by my newspaper columns).

"Oh, you look just like the cartoon on your site" was the universal comment.

Not sure if I will ever leave my flat again...

Reminds me of a (very cruel) Private Eye joke. In the days when I used to read it - I long ago gave up when I realised that the one decent joke was surrounded by 100 duff ones, and the gossip is almost always (at least those stories I have known the truth behind) totally off beam - they had an annual Christmas spoof classified ads section. The one that sticks in my mind was short and to the point:

Scare your friends with an Anthony Howard face mask.

(9)

One of the commenters to my most below, in which I say that

...if the party's [Labour's] majority is less than, say, 75 - and I'd be astonished if it's less than 100 - then I'll spend the next decade in Siberia shovelling horse manure with my bare hands

says that I should

Put your money where your mouth is. Sporting Index is currently offering a spread of 337-347 seats for Labour at the next election. By my maths this would mean an overall majority reduced to 15-35 seats. If you are right and the majority remains in three figures, you would win 33 times your stake.
How much are you going to put down? £20 per seat? £100?

It's a fair point, and a tempting bet indeed. But for one thing. In 1997, I made a vow never to place a pread bet again, and I intend to stick to it. The reason: I was almost wiped out by another prediction.

I was working, at the time, for the Evening Standard, and wrote a daily guide during the election to political betting. At the start of the campaign, the spread on Labour's majority pointed to a majority of around 100 seats (I forget the precise details). Aha! It was giving money away. We political sophisticates all knew that the polls understated Tory support, and such was the political geography of Britain that there was no way Labour could get a majority as high as the polls said. 40 or so was more like it.

So I wrote a piece saying, in effect, that you could buy money with this bet by selling the spread. Thank heavens the lawyer did his stuff and said I couldn't write something like that, and we changed the wording to something more equivocal. I, however, took my own advice and sold the spread for a ridiculous stake, confident that it was simply a matter of how much I won.

Come the day before polling day, I woke up and - I cannot even begin to tell you how relieved I still I am by this - thought to myself 'Just what if I'm wrong? What if the polls aren't lying'. And I realised that I would lose well into five figures. Well into five figures. So - because the polls barely shifted, neither did the spread - I bought it back at the same rate.

You all know what happened. If anything, the polls understated the size of Labour's majority. I would have been financially destroyed. Bankrupted. Kaput.

And so I vowed that, however certain I was of the outcome, I would never make a spread bet again. Yes, I've missed some easy money - the result of the 2001 election, for instance, was a given from the start - but I don't regret that for a second. The thought of what might have happened in 1997 is quite enough, thank you.

Just finally to destroy any remaining credbility I might have as a forecaster, in 1992, when I was working on the Labour campaign, a group of us went in to the William Hill in Westminster to place a bet on our impending victory. I remember a friend looking at the Tory price - they were something like 6/4, to our odds on - and simply laughing at how anyone could possibly be tampted to back the losers at such cramped odds. Hmmm.

So I'll stick to Fondmort at Cheltenham on Saturday. I see that within hours of my flagging his chance up here earlier this week, his price crashed in from 6/1 to 7/2. stephenpollard.net - the site that moves markets.

(8)

It's been at least, oh, a month without a tube strike, but thank heavens the RMT union has managed to find something to down tools over. And this one's special.

They're striking because an RMT member who was off work on sick leave for "several months" with a supposed ankle injury was filmed leaving a squash club.

Here's the cracker, from the Evening Standard:

LU claimed he had been playing "competitive" squash. But he told the Standard last month: "I was not playing squash. I was just exercising my ankle on a squash court."

Surely he deserves some credit for chutzpah?

(6)

Michael Moore on Start The Week:

I can't imagine anything more abhorent than voting for a general, but that's what I'm going to do.

Nothing more abhorent? Nothing?

(9)

One of my commenters asks for an Atkins update. Happy to oblige.

37 pounds so far. I gave myself 10 days off a few weeks ago, as I was in Vienna and NYC, and it seemed a crime not to have cake in the land of sacher torte. Despite gorging myself on all sorts of things, I put on only two pounds, all of which fell off within a couple of days back on Atkins.

Onwards and upwards. Or inwards, I suppose.

(6)

The American Spectator has been relaunched, with a new website. I don't agree with all its politics, but it's well worth a look for some well written, thought provoking pieces.

(8)

I'm re-investing the Pollard fortune.

(2)

I should be more regular with my postings now. I won't bore you with the details; suffice to say that dealing witb Belgacom is like dealing with BT back in the 1970s.

I'm now (fingers crossed) all broadbanded up in Brussels, so when I'm in the capital of the Belgian Empire I'll no longer have to rely on a dial-up from my mobile.

(3)

Midge Decter has written a 'personal protrait' of her friend, the great Donald Rumsfeld. I read it last week and it's well worth having shipped over by Amazon - I understand it's not being published here. More on the book later.

Meanwhile, here's an excellent interview with Midge Decter about Rummy.

(4)

Just heard Sarah Montague ask a Honduran Cardinal - I didn't catch his name - I gather from a bookmaker that you are rated at 10 to 1 to be the next Pope.

Is it just me, or is that not straight out of Monty Python?

(2)

Back with internet access Thursday night. See you then...so much to write about!

(2)

Harry Hatchett has done me over good and proper.

I'm flattered that he obviously remembers so many of my previous pieces that - and I'm not being sarcastic here, I mean it - he should be able so brilliantly to point out my pretty spectacular hypocricy on my post below calling for a smoking ban.

I've also prompted a string of hostile comments. Let me respond:

OK, you've all got me banged to rights. It's a pretty awful post, I concede. I went out of my way to keep saying weasel words pointing out the principled objections to such a ban. But they were, clearly, not enough and my weak argument has been, quite rightly, shot to pieces.

And it's not much of an excuse, either, to point out that I wrote the piece after being up for nearly 36 hours in a row and feeling like shit. If it's good enough to offer for publication, it should stand or fall on its merits. And, clearly, it falls.

So what does this all mean?

It means you're all right, and I'm wrong; a smoking ban isn't the way forward.

It means I find smoking to be such a truly disgusting habit in the way it affects others (and I don't mean medically - I didn't mention passive smoking once) that I am reduced to spluttering what is clearly ill-thought through nonsense in reaction to my hatred for the habit.

It means that I so admired the upside of the NYC ban that - like, I imagine, millions of others - I allowed my pleasure at not having to inhale other people's burnt tobacco to outweigh the principled issues at stake here.

I'm wrong. OK?

(21)

Excellent post by Oliver Kamm on the Concorde fiasco.

(4)

A dilemma: what do you do when your principles conflict with the evidence of your own eyes (or, in this particular case, nose)?

Everything about the recently imposed smoking ban in New York City bars and restaurants offends me: its genesis – it was pushed through by Mayor Bloomberg, an anti-smoking fanatic; its scope – it is the nanniest of all nanny state responses to smoking; and its prescriptive power – it gives the most direct legislative effect to the idea that the state should determine the rules of individual polite behaviour.

Many of the forces which pushed for the ban are, in other contexts, those I consider to be the forces of darkness: opposed to freedom, opposed to choice, and opposed to individual responsibility. So neither the ban’s proponents nor the principles underlying it have anything to commend them.

Except for just one thing: it works. Its impact has been magnificent.

I’m just back from a week in New York City, much of that time being spent in bars and restaurants. And I’ve had a unique experience: not only do my clothes not reek of tobacco smoke, I’ve managed to enjoy all my food and drink without being nearly asphyxiated by neighbouring smokers.

I’ve been to New York a couple of times already since the ban came into effect, but this time was different: the previous fortnight I’d been in Brussels and Vienna, two of the smoking capitals of the world. The contrast was – literally – breathtaking. Living part of the time in Brussels, I’m used to the fact that no meal, no drink and no meeting there is possible without the accompanying smoke. Brussels has some of the finest restaurants in the world, but the number of meals I’ve had which have been ruined by cigarette smoke would keep the Swiss Army fed for many months.

And bad as Brussels is, its air is positively fresh compared with Vienna, which I had the misfortune to visit a couple of weeks ago. I had thought my misanthropic demeanour was a result of discomfort in the presence of so many elderly Nazis and their younger Freedom Party voting friends. In large part, yes. But it dawned on me when I left that the real problem with Vienna is not simply the Viennese, but that it is almost impossible to breathe properly, so prevalent is the cigarette smoke. Other than two hours in the Musikverein listening to the Vienna Philharmonic – for once not just metaphorically life enhancing but literally so - I spent almost my entire time in Vienna wheezing.

What a contrast with New York. For years it was little more than a dirty, crime ridden, smelly urban jungle; now, without the slightest doubt, it is once again the greatest city on the planet. I don’t for a second contend that the ban on smoking compares with the transformative effect of Mayor Giuliani and New Yorkers’ decision that they would no longer put up with limp-wristed, half-hearted policing. But it’s the icing on the cake. It’s not just the streets’ cleanliness and the visible presence of the NYPD which puts London to shame. It’s the fact that its bars and restaurants are pleasant even for those who don’t get their kicks from inhaling burnt tobacco.

Yes, I hate smoking, and I have always considered smokers who inflict their foul habit on the rest of us to be – let’s be charitable – downright inconsiderate. OK, let’s not be charitable. It’s a disgusting habit, and far more anti-social even than that other commonplace today, spitting in the street. But I’ve always been against the idea of a universal ban on smoking in public. Individual bars and restaurants can do as they see fit, and it’s up to the rest of us to decide if we want to frequent their smoke-filled rooms. It’s not the place of the law to legislate for polite behaviour.

And yet…years of leaving it to individuals to decide how to behave have had almost no effect for the better. In New York, the impact of legislation has been truly wonderful, reclaiming the city from smokers who, as experience clearly shows, almost never act considerately.

On Friday the Norwegian government launched an advertising campaign to prepare Norwegians for their own smoking ban, which is due to take effect next year. So what am I supposed to think? How typically Scandinavian, interfering yet again in the individual’s right to choose? Well, yes.

Oh dear. My principles are all over the place. I appreciate all the arguments about the individual’s right to enjoy air that hasn’t been contaminated to tobacco smoke, and my right to enjoy a nice meal without someone else’s cigarette blowing all over me. But they won’t really do, will they? What right is that? If I don’t like the air in a bar I don’t have to go to there. I can go to one which bans smoking.

But. The fact is, the ban works in New York City, and I’ll bet a jumbo packet of Marlboro Lite that it would work here, too. So rise up and unite, clean air freedom lovers of the world. Let’s ditch our principles, and push to make London a capital in which we can all breathe freely.

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Norman Geras has a go at copy editors.

Hmmm. All I've got to say on the subject is this:

I co-wrote a book a while ago on the British class system. When we received our marks from the copy editor, almost every reference we had made to private schools had been corrected. Quite rightly: for, I'm sure, deeply Freudian reasons, we had referred almost throughout to pubic schools.

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Sorry for the lack of posts of late. I'm in the US at the moment, and truth to tell feel rather out of touch - it just shows the limits of the internet. I'm reading the UK papers and all that, but just not really connecting.

I suppose that makes me a sort of IDS clone, from what I gather (I spoke to a Tory MP on the phone yesterday who told me with certainty that IDS would be gone within days - the same view I was given by a very prominent Conservative columnist). We'll see.

I'll ty to post in the next day or so...

Meanwhile, I won second prize in the Bastiat Prize.

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Buy now while stocks last...

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Posting will be light over the next few days as I'm travelling. (And, BTW, tkins loss is now 31 lbs. I'm disappearing before my own eyes...)

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You could, had you been so inclined, have read the thoughts of John Humphrys, the Today programme presenter, in his newspaper column yesterday. If the reports are to be believed, however, you may not be able to hear them on Radio 4 for much longer. Mr Humphrys is, apparently, on the point of resigning from the programme, pushed to the limit by the decision to cut a critical part of his interview on Friday with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Good. He should have been put out to grass years ago. I can barely listen to Today any more, with its reliance on Mr Humphrys' hectoring, smug, self-satisfied, argumentative tone. There may have been a time when he was indeed as good as he appears to think he is. If so, it has long since passed. Today, he has just two modes: sneering condescension and straightforward contradiction.

Remember that wonderful Monty Python argument sketch? "Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous pervert!" "Look, I came here for an argument." "Oh. I'm sorry. This is abuse. Try next door." Clearly, John Humphrys has made a careful study of the script: "Oh look, this isn't an argument." "Yes it is." "No it isn't. It's just contradiction." "No it isn't." "It is!" "It is not." "Look, you just contradicted me." "I did not." "You did!"

But he has moved way beyond mere contradiction and aggression, and has now entered another universe altogether, where it is John Humphrys who defines what is acceptable behaviour.

At the end of July he interviewed the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, an eminent foreign policy specialist who, although in favour of the Iraq war, is a critic of George Bush. Mr Humphrys' casual, blatant anti-American bias was paraded as if it was only rednecks who could possibly disagree. Friedman seemed genuinely taken aback. After one anti-Bush rant by the Today programme presenter, Mr Friedman interjected rather meekly: "The American people elected George Bush" - to which Humphrys replied, "Just - or possibly not, as the case may be."

Then this: "What, Thomas Friedman, could cause the Americans to pull back from this?" "From what? Iraq?" "No, this position that 'we are the masters and we can do whatever we want'." Only John Humphrys and a few hard-line anti-Bushites bother with that old chestnut any more. But then only John Humphrys is allowed to get away with his constant sneering interjections.

Take his newspaper column (it's not OK for Andrew Gilligan to write, but it is, it seems, for the master himself) after the destruction of the World Trade Centre. He criticised President Bush by writing how wrong he was to "damn those who did it as evil, as though there is nothing more to say, as though we still believe in a devil with a forked tail". But he couldn't leave it at that. At a time of unprecedented trauma for Americans, when they naturally looked to their President for leadership, he added this sneer: "Perhaps President Bush truly does - his Christianity is of a pretty fundamental variety - but most of us do not."

I am neither Christian nor American but I, like most decent people, was moved by the way many Americans' faith helped them through the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Is there anyone left who can listen to a man whose technique is to behave as if he is prosecutor in a show trial rather than as a seeker after truth?

The Humphrys style infects the programme. Instead of calm, deliberate, thoughtful interrogation by the likes of Ed Stourton and Sarah Montague - two ridiculously under-rated presenters - the Today programme sounds, when presented by Mr Humphrys and his colleague James Naughtie, like a gratingly unpleasant competition between male egos. Testosterone rather than intellectual rigour seems to be the main precondition for preferment.

When one of the women, or less self-satisfied men, is presenting, the tone and content change for the better. Ms Montague and Martha Kearney, of Woman's Hour and Newsnight, would make a fine pairing. Both know how to ask worthwhile questions and to draw an interviewee out without sneering at them.

And if the BBC really promotes on the basis of ability rather than a sense of self-worth, why was Nick Clarke, of The World At One - the best presenter/interviewer now broadcasting, by an embarrassing long margin - not long ago made chief presenter of the Today programme? Instead, I have to pay my licence fee to have John Humphrys thrust his prejudices at me every morning.

The sooner he resigns, the better. And if it's all bluster designed simply to screw more money out of the BBC, here's some advice to the powers that be at Radio 4. Make our day. Sack him.

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Paul Richard's is rightly annoyed by wayward apostrophe's.

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Of the many lies told by politicians and policy experts with an axe to grind, the most pernicious is the most frequently proclaimed: “This will save money in the long run.” Since in the long run we are all dead, the sheer nonsense of most such claims is usually ignored.

The pattern is always the same. In the short term, ideas that supposedly save money in the long term cost a lot. Advocates call them “start-up costs”, as though such things can safely be ignored. In the medium term, spending rises still more. And in the long term, the idea that is going to save money ends up costing more than anyone imagined possible.

There are few clearer examples of such insanity than the current obsession with obesity. Yes, being fat is a bad thing, but the idea that, because obesity is bad, spending government money to try to tackle it is good is the perfect illustration of the this-will-save-money-in-the-long-run mantra. After all, since obesity makes us ill and costs the NHS and the economy, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that we’ll save money overall if the Government tries to do something about it?

Fine. Now take a guess at how much of our money this Labour Government has spent on attempting to make us thinner: £100 million or so? £500 million? £750 million? £1 billion? Don’t be so stupid. It’s not possible.

Yes it is. The Department of Health claims that £9.6 billion has been spent on projects that reduce obesity across all government departments. You read that right. Nine point six billion pounds.

And guess what? Like all ideas that involve huge spending today to save money tomorrow, it has been spent to nil effect. All the figures show that we are becoming more, not less, obese. “We still need to raise awareness,” says Dame Yve Buckland, chairman of the Health Development Agency.

Of course she says that. That is because abject failure is taken as a sign, not that the idea should be scrapped, but that it needs more “investment” if it is to succeed.

And so, right on cue, we learn that the Prime Minister himself wants, in a stroke of genius, to link spending money on obesity with the Olympic bid. It is what is known as synergy. Take one giant waste of time and money, the Olympic bid, and combine it with another, tackling obesity. Since neither stands the slightest chance of success, putting them together into one mega-waste is sheer inspiration.

Mr Blair has decided that he wants “an ambitious delivery strategy, using the Olympic bid as a catalyst, to develop more innovative and interventionist policies across the public, private and voluntary sectors in both health and sport”. So there will now be a “£1 million publicity campaign showing how gardening, walking to work and even housework can help to make you fit”. Hmm. That is a bit limited, surely. Best to add the information that breathing in and out keeps you alive.

The real problem, according to a report yesterday by the analysts Dr Foster, is that “many obese people do not have access to expert advice to help them lose weight.” More than half the primary care organisations in the UK have no organised weight-management clinics. Heavens! How on earth can anyone lose weight without a weight-management clinic?

Well, here’s a radical idea. The solution is not spending large sums of public money. It is fat people going on diets and taking exercise because they realise they need to.

I know what I’m talking about here. In the past few months, I have lost 27lb, with more to come. And I have lost it because I looked in the mirror, not because a civil servant told me to diet.

The author is available for hire as a dietician for £9.6 billion.

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Having already managed the glorious triumph that was the Dome, you might have thought that the latest giant waste of government time and our money, the Olympics bid (which stands not the slightest chance of success) would be enough to satisfy this government’s urge to squander other people's money on frivolities which don't even work properly.

As if! It takes a special kind of genius to be able to come up with a way of ensuring that the bid is even more of a waste but, yes, they've managed it. Congratulations on a remarkable piece of lateral thinking. Having already wasted £9.6 billion "tackling obesity" (yes, really. NINE POINT SIX BILLION POUNDS. You'd scarcely think it possible, would you?) they've come up with a plan of genius: linking the two.

Well, it's certainnly got logic to it. If you've got one ludicrous waste of money - the Olympic bid - then why not combine it with another?
Tony Blair has apparently decided he wants “an ambitious delivery strategy, using the Olympic bid as a catalyst, to develop more innovative and interventionist policies across the public, private and voluntary sectors in both health and sport.”So there will now be a “£1 million publicity campaign showing how gardening, walking to work and even housework can help to make you fit.”

That's a bit limited. Best to add the information that breathing in and out keeps you alive.

The war on obesity is the archetypal government programme. Its failure means not that it will be scrapped, but that more money will be spent.

And here, right on time, is the Olympics bid.

Well here's a radical idea, The solution isn’t government initiatives or
programmes. It’s fat people going on diets and taking excercise because they realise they need to.

Cue self-congratulatory drum roll…I’ve lost 27 pounds so far. And that’s because I looked in the mirror, not because a civil servant told me to diet.

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The already superb Harry's Place is now even better. Johann Hari has started writing there.

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I'm in Vienna at the moment, and have just come from a lunchtime concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Rostropovich, in the Musikverein.

Good God. I have never heard a sound like it in my life. I thought I knew what people meant when they talked about the sweetness of the VPO's sound, but I didn't. However good they are when you hear them abroad - and, like all orchestras, they have their off days (what were once referred to by a former leader of the LSO as 'mortgage concerts'). But hearing them in the Musikverein is something very, very special.

Everything about the acoustic is, literally, astonishing. The most amazing combination of lightness, delicacy and immediacy. The clarity is breathtaking. And yes, sweet!

It makes you realise how bloody awful our halls are.

(The concert was Shostakovich's 11th Symphony and the Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto, with Yefim Bronfman, who was good but LOUD).

One other thought, which has dogged me since I arrived. I can't help thinking that every third person I see is a Nazi (OK, fascist, to be pedantic).

There. Got that off my chest.

What I mean is that there is an enormous number of very elderly Austrians at the things I've been doing. Now being elderly and Austrian is hardly evidence of Nazism, but it is disconcerting if you're Jewish when you can't help but wonder what they did and thought during the war.

Add to that rather unseemly thought the fact that a very large proportion of them, and their younger fellow countrymen, voted for the Freedom Party, and it feels very, very odd being here. Many of them didn't want me to be born, and the younger ones who voted for the Freedom Party think I shouldn't be here either.

But hell, they have a bloody good orchestra.

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Carpe Diem: Gray Davis Announces Presidential Bid (2003-10-08) -- Deposed California Governor Gray Davis declared his candidacy for the Democrat nomination for President this morning.

"I have the best name recognition," said Mr. Davis. "I'm better known than any of the other nine candidates. My track record is equal to any of them, and better than some. And now I have some time on my hands "

Gov. Davis gives credit for his strong showing in the recall election to the help of former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and the former Rev. Jesse Jackson.

(From ScrappleFace.)

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Martin Johnson, Richard Hill and Johnny Wilkinson are standing before God at the throne of Heaven. God looks at them and says: "Before granting you a place at my side, I must first ask you what you believe in."

Addressing Johnson first he asks, "what do you believe?". Johnson looks God in the eye and states passionately, "I believe Rugby to be the food of life. Nothing else brings such unbridled joy to so many people from the grim North to the bright lights of Twickenham. I have devoted my life to bring such joy to people who stood on the terraces supporting their club." God looks up and offers Johnson the seat to his left.

He then turns to Hill: "and you, Dicky, what do you believe?". Hill stands tall and proud: "I believe courage, honour and passion are the fundamentals to life and I've spent my whole playing career providing a living embodiment of these traits". God, moved by the passion of the speech offers Hill the seat to his right.

Finally, he turns to Wilkinson: "And you, Johnny, what do you believe?".

"I believe", says Wilkinson, "you're sitting in my seat."

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There's an interesting new blog - EnviroSpin - here on all things environmental, written by Professor Philip Stott.

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We will immediately increase the single pension by £5 a week and the pension for a married couple by £8, as the first step in re-establishing a link between pensions and average earnings or living costs, whichever is the most favourable to pensioners.

IDS? David Willetts?

Neither.

The Labour Party Manifesto, 1987

(Thanks to Paul Richards for this.)

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