A Woman Changed

‘THERE was a time not too far back when Camilla, the new Duchess of York, was the scariest thing out there.

She was worse than bird flu. She was Omar Barki in drag, a soft perm and contact lenses. She was a binge-drinking, pub-smoking MRSA super bug.

It was a miracle the Government hadn’t banned her. And they might have. The Government wants to ban us from doing most things. Last week they wanted to stop us drinking on trains.

Health Secretary John Reid was heard by the Times explaining the plan to the BBC. “It is right that people should be able to have a civilised drink at whatever time they want,” said he. “But it is right also that people should be responsible about not being abusive through drink on buses and other places. That is the balance of rights and responsibilities.”

A civilised drink? What’s that, then? Raising your pinky finger as you tip a can of larger into your face? Drinking hooch from a bone china cup? Mixing vodka with your Earl Gray tea?

By Tuesday, we had heard no more of the Government’s latest drive to make us all more like Tony Blair, albeit without the Army. But Camilla was very much in evidence.

She was off to the States with Prince Charles. But before she went the Mail wanted to tell us what this reinvented woman really thought about Diana. According to a “trusted royal aide”, Camilla felt “nothing but contempt” for Diana. She used to call her “that mad cow”.

She “blamed Diana for everything,” said this aide. “She hated what Diana was doing to Charles and blamed her entirely for how low the Prince was when he came to Camilla for comfort.”

And don’t for a moment think Camilla was in any way jealous of the younger woman married to her lover. Apparently, Camilla mocked how Diana had gone from “scrawny” to “muscly”. She would also draw attention to Diana’s small bosom and her own larger chest.

Camilla has no problem filling her clothes. But what would she be wearing on tour? As the Mirror reported in “CAMI££A”, the eight-day trip was set to cost the British taxpayer £250,000. Camilla was taking along 20 staff and 50 dresses.

Some of these gowns might even be black. And that would be a good choice. As the Express told us on Tuesday’s front page, black makes the wearer look slim.

To illustrate this breakthrough, the Express showed us two pictures of Charlotte Church. In one, the former Rear of The Year winner was wearing a satin gown that made her look ample enough to regain her title and hang on to it for the next five years.

In the other picture, Church was dressed in black. Her figure had been minimised. Those “brainy boffins” at New Scientist magazine were right. Darker fabrics do make it harder to see those unsightly bulges.

Of course, not everyone has bulges they want to hide. Like Camilla, Angleina Jolie has an

enviable figure. And she had been wearing white, as the Star used Wednesday’s front page to tell us that Jolie had just married Brad Pitt.

Black? Or white? What was it be? If only Kate Moss were around to help Camilla choose. But cocaine Kate was gone.

On Monday the Sun said Kate was “fleeing” her home in London “to escape her old druggie haunts as she fights to stay off cocaine”. Kate was leaving St John’s Wood, that sink of vice, boutiques and mums in 4x4s, and moving to a farmhouse in the Costwolds at a time when Camilla needed her most.

Things were getting complicated for Camilla. Time was running out. And when Thursday came we held our breath. What would she be wearing?

And then we found out. The Sun said that for the star-studded charity bash in New York, Camilla had worn a blue velvet dress.

That was important. As was the fact that for the occasion Camilla clutched to her bosom a sequinned Union Jack handbag. “I’m flying the flag for Great Britain,” said a beaming Camilla.

The paper said Camilla “wowed” the party. Guest Marie Pelman told the Sun: “Camilla dazzled us…It was obvious she was making a declaration, she’s the new girl on the block.”

Not the chopping block, of course. Lopping royal heads off went out of fashion years ago. Rather like Camilla’s dress.

And that’s not our opinion, but that of the New York critics the Express said had labelled Camilla “Frump Tower”, in reference to the city’s Trump Tower.

The New York Post’s fashion editor Orly Healy had taken one look at Camilla’s outfit and said that Diana “would be amused”. She called the dress “fussy”. Camilla looked like an “escapee from the choirboy pews of Westminster Abbey”.

But however bad the dress, it was surely a step up from a blanket.

And by Friday, Camilla was sticking with blue. The Mail had pictures of Camilla in the company of USA Vice-Admiral Richard H Carmona.

Carmona was ushering Camilla towards the medical establishment at Bethesda, Maryland. “He then tried to walk her through a plate-glass window,” said the Mail’s man on the scene.

But disaster was averted. To a cry of “Nooooo!” (surely “Whoaah!”) from the assembled photographers, Camilla was brought up short. The Duchess reared up about three inches from the 8ft high sheet of glass. “If I go any further I’ll break my nose,” the Sun heard her say.

Later in the day, the Mirror looked on as Camilla and Charles dutifully turned up for a gala dinner at the White House – she dressed in a shiny red dress, he in a dark suit.

From demure blue to vivid red, Camilla was growing in confidence as her outfits became more noticeable.

Camilla was no longer the most evil woman on the planet. She was dong alright. She was a woman changed…’

Posted: 7th, November 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Inns And Outs

‘LIKE a decent joke told too often, the papers flogged a dead parrot to death.

On Monday, the Sun told us that the bird found dead in an Essex quarantine centre had been infected with the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The paper’s Katherine Bergen, writing in her get-up-and-weep “THAT MONDAY MORNING FEELING” column, said we’re “getting more and more nervous about the possible arrival of bird flu”. If we weren’t panicking, the Sun was going to do its damndest to make us fear the worst.

So too the Express, which said that any outbreak of the human form of bird flu would lead to “mass panic, with millions refusing to leave their homes”.

And in the Mail (“BIRD FLU: IT IS THE KILLER STRAIN”), we heard Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt lay out her Government’s contingency plan. “If you’ve got pandemic flu, anyone’s who got any flu-like symptoms would be well advised to stay home and not spread it,” said she.

But how do you know what kind of flu you’ve got? It might just be one those everyday flus that kill the elderly and earn the young days off school. Until a parrot insider told us more about the symptoms of this killer disease, we could only fear the worst.

What our fear needed was a face. We needed someone to do for bird flu what Omar Bakri had done for mad mullahs and Islamic extremism. We needed an enemy with a human face.

And on Tuesday, the Mail spotted “MR BIRD FLU”. To give him his full name, Mr Bird Flu was Brett Hammond, a convicted fraudster who ran the Essex quarantine centre where the parrot with the deadly H5N1 virus had been found.

So there was Hammond on the front page with a parrot on his left arm, and for reasons of fairness, lest we only blamed parrots for all the world’s ills, a white cockatoo perched on his left.

Hammond was the “dodgy dealer”, who, as the Sun said, had “done bird”. His crime for VAT offences earned him 18 months in choky in 1997.

It was too terrible. As the LibDem’s Norman Baker told the Mail: “It is very worrying indeed that we are leaving the health of our birds – and potentially the health of our citizens – in the hands of convicted criminals.”

Surely it was. And it was about to get more worrying. In what the Mail called a “macabre coincidence”, we read that the “dilapidated sheds” where Hammond quarantined birds was only yards away from the abattoir where in 2001 foot-and-mouth was first identified in Britain.

Coincidence? Or something more shadowy and deliberate at play? We’d taken the liberty of doodling a beard, a headscarf and some huge NHS specs on Hammond’s face, and the resulting image was shocking. Bird flu really was the new terrorism.

On Wednesday, Hammond became Lord Bird Flu. The Mirror failed to tell us what title Hammond had bought, distracted perhaps by the £7.7million he’d made from smuggling birds, enough to buy him two sports cars and a “string of foreign holidays”.

Meanwhile the Mail was listening to Herman Koeter, of the European Food Safety Agency. As he told us: “We don’t have any evidence that the virus can be transmitted through food. But we can’t exclude it either.”

That sounded bad. And it made us wonder what else couldn’t be excluded. Could bird flu be transmitted via the feathers in our pillows? What about if we walked within ten feet of a bird while wearing a blue bikini and whistling the first three bars of the Dutch national anthem?

We didn’t know. Perhaps Mr Koeter could enlighten us. “If you don’t eat raw eggs and always cook poultry thoroughly, there should be no problems,” said he.

So boiled chicken and reconstituted eggs it was. Which though an improved diet for most of us was a worry to the Mail’s readership. As the paper said, Mail readers should think twice about eating home-made mayonnaise and Hollandaise sauce.

Or eating anything in a pub. Not that pub grub was seen as being as bad for us as pub smoking. The Government wanted an end to smoking in public. And on Thursday we got a dose of what was good for us.

After days of what the Times called “shambolic discussions”, the Government finally unveiled its Health Improvement and Protection Bill that will bring about a ban on smoking in enclosed workplaces and public places.

But while puffing at your desk was out, smoking in pubs and clubs was all well and good so long as the place didn’t serve food.

And herein lay the rub. Food in pubs was routinely terrible. Waving farewell to the microwaved, snot-textured slops served up with chips could only be good news for the nation’s health.

And it seemed a considerable body of people would rather smoke in pubs than eat in them. A survey conducted by the Times said that one in five pubs in England and Wales will stop selling food and allow customers to smoke.

On Friday, the Times saw another survey, this one in the Publican Magazine. It said that more than half the pubs in the North West would stop serving fresh food and so exempt themselves from the new ban on smoking.

The paper said that 53 per cent of pubs in Manchester, Liverpool and the surrounding area relied on smokers for trade. Ban the smokers and the pubs go under.

Compare that figure to the 11 per cent of pubs in East Anglia and the 20 per cent of pubs in the South East that would close their kitchens and you had a “North-South split”.

But not really. After all, all Londoners have to do to get a hit of noxious gases is to breathe in. Who needs smoking when you’ve got the M25..?’

Posted: 31st, October 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

One Flu Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

‘AS if Mondays weren’t depressing enough, the papers added to the downbeat mood by screaming that lots of birds and lots of people were going to die from bird flu.

“BIRD FLU WILL HIT BRITAIN AND KILL 50,000,” promised the front page of the Mail. It was the chief medial officer’s “chilling prediction”.

Sir Liam Donaldson said it was “inevitable” that infected birds will arrive in the UK and the deadly virus will, as the Mail put it, start “jumping from person to person”.

“We can’t make this pandemic go away, it’s a natural phenomenon,” said Donaldson. “What we can do is limit the impact.”

But surely we can do more than that? We saw off Sars, anthrax and mad cow disease, so why not this flu? On Thursday the Sun said that like some microbe-sized Hitler the bug had already begun its “deadly march” across Europe. It had just been spotted south of Moscow.

The Sun was running around like Lance-Corporal Jones from TV’s Dad’s Army. “Don’t panic!” it squawked. By the time the infected birds arrive next winter the Government will have had an entire year to get the vaccine ready.

It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine – unless you read the Mirror, which was doing a passable impression of Jones’s old mucker Private Frazer. We were all “doomed!”

“It’s winter 2006,” wrote the Mirror, “and everyone is scared… thousands have died… schools are closed… the streets are deserted… planes are grounded… as pandemic savages Britain.”

The paper went on to talk of “makeshift cemeteries” to deal with the rising toll of the dead. Children will become malnourished as animal produce – turkey twizzlers, chicken nuggets and kebabs – are banned.

“The country is under something akin to martial law” and “all large gatherings have been banned by Government order.”

Reading that lot you’d imagine Tony Blair billing and cooing at this bedroom window and blowing on a duck whistle to get the birds here pronto. Who needs Jamie Oliver to improve our children’s diet and ID cards to control the masses when an infected goose can do both jobs in one go?

By Wednesday, the dystopian vision of tomorrow meant Britain had been left with little choice other than to declare war on the birds.

Flu had become the new terror – a truth emphasised by the Express’s news that sniffer dogs at Heathrow Airport were being used to pick up the scent of birds, eggs and feathers in travellers’ bags.

Chris Pratt, the Products of Animal Origin Manager for Customs at Heathrow, said: “The risk is minimal, but what we’ve been asked to look out for specifically is dead or live birds, feathers and eggs. We’re looking for these things being imported in personal luggage.”

Fair enough. A holidaymaker might be flying in from Istanbul in possession of an egg bap, but does anyone really pack a dead chicken in with their socks?

Are the men and women who pose the security questions at the check-in desks now asking if travellers have packed their bags themselves and if anyone gave them a live parrot to carry, or, worse still, a dead one?

You really couldn’t be too careful. This was war. Perhaps we should launch a counter offensive? Send for the marines! Make ready the nuclear warheads! Call President Bush! We’re under attack! And if Bush refuses to help, tell him the birds have got beards and Iranian passports.

It was all so hard to know what to believe. And on Tuesday we read in the Mail that Posh and Day-vid Beckham were suing the News Of The World Paper for libel.

As the Mail delighted in explaining in a piece that began on its front page (“Posh defends her ‘happy’ marriage”), Los Beckhams were challenging the allegation that they “cynically” presented a false image to the world at large in order to protect “Brand Beckham”.

In court, Posh will maintain that the NOTW got it wrong when it claimed she had called Day-vid an “Essex yob” and said their marriage was in trouble.

She and Dayve are happy. They are happy, happy, happy. So happy are they that anyone who says otherwise will be taken to court. That’s how happy they are. Got it!

And they were a darn sign happier than Ken Clarke who, as Wednesday’s Telegraph explained, had come last in the Tory leadership contest.

Meanwhile, Davie Cameron was marching on – his bandwagon powered by the 15-minute address he’d given to the party faithful at the Tory conference in Blackpool.

By Friday – after Liam Fox has been voted out of the leadership contest – Cameron was in a head to head contest with David Davis.

And looking at the agonists’ heads, there can be only one winner. Cameron’s got nice hair. You can’t miss it. It goes everywhere he goes. It sits on top of his head like a glossy crown. (Davis is grey.)

And do not doubt its power. As the Times reported: “A slick coiffure puts one candidate head and shoulders above his rivals.”

We might not know much about Cameron’s policies, or his drugs history, but we know a nice shiny head of hair when we see one.

So vote Cameron for a brighter future and better hair – and if you want a return to the more interesting times of Tory politics, when oily-haired Kenneth Baker, Francis Pym and Cecil Parkinson were in charge…’

Posted: 24th, October 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Of Dogs And Men

‘PUTTING the news in perspective so often depends on which end of a pint glass you’re looking at it through.

Looking down, staring into their pints, readers on Monday saw a small corner section of the Sun’s front-page given over to the grim news: “30,000 die in quake.”

“You can hear kids crying under rubble,” said the story of the Asian earthquake inside the paper. There were awful pictures of flattened houses and tower blocks, and a hideous shot of an arm limply hanging out from between two huge slabs of fallen rubble.

But how important was it? Does such awful news affect everyone in Blighty equally? Clearly not in the Sun.

Alongside the news from Asia, we were invited to look up at the Sun through the bottom of an emptying glass of lager, drunk fast to celebrate the news that England FC had qualified for the World Cup finals this summer.

Great stuff. But can football really be as big a story as news of an earthquake that had killed thousands? What about if a footballer was injured in the process?

The Telegraph had no such problems over deciding what story to lead with. Overlooking the business-focused Financial Times, the Telegraph is now the only remaining nationwide broadsheet on the newsstands; something the Telegraph is touchingly proud of.

None can compete with the Telegraph’s size. And we were invited to look at the paper’s big shots of the destruction in Pakistan. An overhead picture of the flattened Pakistani town of Balakot took in the entire vista. No building had been left standing by a quake that measured 7.6 on the Richter Scale.

It would be unfair to say that the Telegraph rejoices whenever a massive disaster strikes; but it must take some pleasure in being able to report on scenes that give it the chance to showcase its size. The paper’s pictorial treatment of Hurricane Katrina was as shocking as it was captivating.

On Tuesday, the Times wondered if any good could come from the disaster. Aid to the region was flooding in, and much of it from the USA. “The terrorists make us out to be infidels, but this is not true and we hope this mission will show it,” said Sergeant Marina Evan, a spokeswoman for the US military in Kabul.

But while the earthquake gave the US a chance to whiten its image in the stricken region, the tabloids were playing their usual numbers game. Tragedy had stuck. Mother Nature had done her worst. And what we wanted to know was: how many were dead?

It was like listening to a macabre auction as the papers bid to work out how many had perished in the Asian earthquake.

The Sun estimated the death count at 30,000. The Express said the “disaster toll” had reached 40,000. The Mail said 20,000 children were dead, while the fate of a further 10,000 people was unknown.

The Mail also said there were fears that faced with so much disaster the British were suffering from “compassion fatigue”.

The combined effects of the earthquake, the famine in Niger, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina might have stopped us giving. Too many charity records had dulled the senses and made our hearts hard.

Perhaps that was why the papers spoke in big numbers? Were the papers worried that people would only respond to money-raising campaigns if the body count was high enough?

If so, why bother finding out the real figure when you can round up the number of those thought to have been killed to the nearest ten thousand? If you won’t give at 10,000 dead, what about at 20,000? 30,000? More? The papers could get more. How much would it take to get readers digging deeper into their pockets?

Perhaps the BBC can help us to make sense of things? But what would we spend for the Beeb’s version of the news.

On Wednesday, all papers reported that the BBC was looking to hike the TV licence fee from its current £126.50 a year to just under £180 a year by 2013.

But the Sun sensed something was amiss. While the BBC and other papers remained focused on Asia – to a lesser or greater degree – the Sun had spotted a bigger story.

The Sun knew what would touch its readers more than scenes of men, women and children injured, their lives in ruins, was Spot the dog.

Spot was the dalmation puppy left hanging from a tree by sick thugs. The Sun produced a photo of this heinous crime on its cover. It “outraged the nation”.

The Sun was fearless. Congratulations to it for bringing this wrong to the attention of us all. With Omar Bakri ousted, the paper needed a new cause. And it wanted us to bang the drum and join the campaign.

Addressed to Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, the Sun’s cut-out-and-send petition ran: “I demand the Government acts urgently to reform the outdated laws on animal cruelty.”

You the reader wanted the Government to “INCREASE” the maximum jail sentence for animal cruelly.

You wanted the powers that be to “ENFORCE lifetime bans on anyone found guilty of deliberate cruelty”. (Presumably this was a lifetime ban on owning animals, although don’t rule out banning culprits from watching England football matches and smoking in pubs.)

You called on Beckett to “INTRODUCE” a “duty of care”, making animal owners legally obliged to look after the critter’s welfare. And you wanted Tony Blair and his marketing team to “UPDATE” the “archaic” 1911 Protection of Animals Act.

You then signed the petition – either with a pen, if, say, you’re a chimpanzee, or by sticking your paw in a large pot of ink.

And if you’re George Michael you signed it in public. On Friday the signer was onboard. And he was joined by Mariah Carey (“The campaign is brilliant”), Rolf Harris and Jay Kay (“It beggars belief animals are killed or maimed in a society like ours”).

Jay Kay was right, as ever. It was amazing how in modern Britain a pet can be hurt.

Especially when the Express reminded us how there were so many humans out there to kill and maim.

As if stung into action by the Sun’s campaign, the Express dedicated two pages to “VIOLENT BRITIAN”. The paper hadn’t identified its own star victim, a human version of Spot – perhaps it was spoilt for choice.

“The true horrors of life in Britain were laid bare yesterday,” said the paper. The Express had noticed what it called a “series of mindless attacks” across the country.

“Hoodies batter old folk,” said one story. “Widow’s tragedy,” ran another. “Raider kills maid,” yelled a third.

It was sensational stuff. But we feared that without a petition, such violence could not be stopped? Without a slogan we could chant, what chance the protest? Without celebrity support, the campaign to stamp out attacks on human beings looked like a non-starter.

We were powerless to act – unless, of course, the murderers, thieves and rapists went for the pets…

Paul Sorene

editor@anorak.co.uk

Read Anorak everyday

www.anorak.co.uk’

Posted: 17th, October 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Donkey Derby

‘YOU’D have thought Blackpool had enough donkeys on the beach without the Conservatives feeling the need to bring along their own for the party’s annual conference.

But all the Tory big beasts of burden were gathered in the resort for the party’s group chat.

But it wasn’t what was said that interested the papers so much who was saying it – the papers viewed the entire thing as part of the party’s wider leadership contest.

The Telegraph looked at the runners and boiled this five donkey race into a straight contest between Kenneth Clarke (long ears, likes to be petted) and David Davies (broad back and unlikely to bolt). The rest – Liam Fox, David Cameron and Sir Malcolm Rifkind – were so much glue.

But if Clarke was Davis’s main threat in the Telegraph, the Times spent lots of time listening to Cameron.

As the Times reported, Cameron said that he was a “modern, compassionate Conservative”. He noted that Davis had moved to occupy the touchy-feely ground, and thought we should be wary. “If you like Coke, get the real thing,” advised Cameron. Or else get Kate Moss to support your campaign.

But Davis wanted something a little stronger. “I’m Mr Heineken,” said he. “I mean it when I say Heineken because what I want to do is [have] a Tory party that reaches the parts of Britain it never reached before.”

But whatever the merit and flaws of either brew, the combined effect was to cause a sense of unease in the stomach.

Perhaps best to stick with the carrot juice. Or look again at the drinks menu. And on Tuesday, we supped from Malcolm Rifkind’s tankard.

The Telegraph said that after Rifkind’s speech to conference, the Tory leadership contender was given a 60-second standing ovation which reached 93.5 decibels (a level somewhere between the noise made by a food blender and a rubbish truck).

Well done to him on successfully delivering his message of One Nation Conservatism. Getting the ageing Tory faithful to their feet is no small thing; keeping them there unaided is an achievement an evangelical preacher and a team of medics would have been proud to have performed.

(Cynics will doubtless point out that Iain Duncan Smith, in his speech to conference the last time the Tories were in Blackpool, took 17 standing ovations, even if his own decibel level was around the 6.1 mark.)

But on Wednesday everything had changed. Though not dressed in a hoodie and body-popping, David Cameron, 38, promised to bring back young voters to the Tory party. He wanted the Tories to be “comfortable with modern Britain”. Cameron vowed to deliver a happy slap to the face of British politics.

The audience lapped it up. The elderly delegates in the conference hall applauded as wildly as their doctors’ advice allowed. The younger delegates dreamt of glory under a young, sprightly leader.

Francis Maude, the party chairman – the man who in 2001 ran Michael Portillo’s failed Tory leadership election campaign with its modernisation mantra – wondered if Crawley Woman, the voter he’d identified as the one the Tories must seduce if they are ever to form a Government, would back the young buck.

Was Cameron the special one? Was he the Tories’ answer to Tony Blair? By Thursday, we were wondering whether we should start calling him Dave?

Luckily, we didn’t have to think at all. The Times had invited a loose assortment of Tories to chew over the evidence and give their verdicts on what occurred at conference each day.

And to keep things simple Cameron was given a score. He got 7.5 out of ten. That’s far from perfect, but better by 0.5 of a point than gregarious old Kenneth Clarke.

It was neat and clever stuff. Politics has already been reduced to sound-bites, so why not distil those lengthy and dull speeches a bit more and just given them scores out of ten?

“Martin Luther King gave a 9/10 performance yesterday,” writes the Washington Post. “Winston Churchill scored a 9.995,” reports the Mail. “And in improving his oratory by remaining mute on stage for a full ten minutes, George Dubya Bush became the Nadia Comaneci of the political scene with a perfect 10,” says the Texas Lone Star Iconoclast.

The Telegraph spotted the potential in turning politics into a sport, but instead of scores used a league table.

In “WHO’S UP, WHO’S DOWN”, the paper listed a few Tories and alongside each of the names placed a little arrow, pointing up for good and down for bad.

Top of the table was the Tory’s very own Chelsea Blue, the aforesaid Cameron. He’s “the youthful darling of the Notting Hill modernizers,” said the programme notes. And what’s more, his speech had earned him a decibel rating of 92.

That was again better than Kenneth Clarke, whose “joke-packed” conference speech received a 91.8 decibel standing ovation. The boys done good, but both fall short of the 93.5 decibels their agonist Malcolm Rifkind scored for his address.

On Thursday, Conservative Idol produced an upset. Like a contestant on TV’s Pop Idol, Davis looked a dead cert for victory until he opened his mouth. He’d the hair. He’d the Right-wing viewpoint. But he’d as much charisma as, well, Iain Duncan Smith’s cough.

MPs told the Telegraph they were “under-whelmed” by his speech, which was at best “adequate”. One Tory delegate invoked the spirit of another reality talent show and said Davis lacked the “X factor”.

Davis’s star was on the wane. As the Telegraph’s Andrew Gimson said in his sketch, Davis’s call for the Tories to “walk tall again” would be better phrased as “walk tall, but speak short”.

“It was not so much a leadership speech,” wrote Ann Treneman in the Times, “as a speech that led nowhere.” She said Davis’s furtiveness on stage make him look like “some sort of institutionalised bear”.

But on Friday, there was another potential twist. The Telegraph’s front page told of the European Court’s ruling that the British law banning all prisoners from voting was wrong. It was a breach of their human rights.

But not all of the country’s 70,000 inmates will be allowed to vote. The Times said ministers planned to deal with the ruling by introducing a system under which lags will be able to vote by category.

Colin Moses, the general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, told the Telegraph that the ruling had turned prisons into “political pressure points”. Politicians’ minds will be focused on winning the prisoners’ votes.

“A lot of prisons are in marginal seats and 600 or 700 votes from prisoners could swing the result of an election one way or the other,”

said he.

So should we expect to see electioneering politicians wooing the prison vote with promises of less police on the beat, a ban on CCTV cameras and a vow that rather than being sent down the very best fraudsters and identity thieves should be given their own shows on TV and hailed as the new Mike Yarwood?

If so, the political parties should start thinking about who should stand in areas with a large convict demographic.

This might well just be the comeback chance some former Tories have been waiting for. Archer for prime minister anyone..?’

Posted: 10th, October 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Waltergate

‘THE elderly are usually invisible to all but grandchildren and vote hungry politicians at election time – their grey hairs acting as a kind of cloaking device that renders the wearer undetectable to the world at large.

But last week a couple of the older generation were spotted. And both had fallen foul of Tony Blair.

But who would have guessed the week would be marked by controversy when on Monday we heard Gordon Brown issue an almost apologetic challenge to Blair’s leadership.

If Tony would like to step down as leader and anoint someone called Gordon as his successor, then that would be just great, said Gordon. And Tony must not worry because, when in charge, Gordon would carry on Tony’s good works. Gordon would bring about the “renewal of New Labour” before the next General Election.

Vote Gordon. Farewell New Labour and hello New New Labour – Brown aimed to go one better than Blair.

But on Tuesday, Brown’s tilt at the top was already old news. A far more vigorous challenge to Blair’s supremacy was being waged by 73-year-old Sylvia Hardy.

As the Mail said on its front page, Sylvia had been jailed for seven days for refusing to pay Exeter City Council £53.71 in arrears on her council tax plus £10 costs.

Sylvia might even have been the silver-haired tip of an iceberg as the Express talked about a “nation of martyrs” and said how thousands more pensioners had stated that they too would fight the power and refuse to pay their council tax.

But before our prisons turned into rest homes for the elderly and rebellious – seduced into jail by the regular hot food, as much hot water as you can shower in, a handy toilet in your room and the added benefit of a warden who makes sure you’re tucked up safe in your bed of a night – the Mail heard from the woman at the centre of the story. “I am not afraid,” said she, deftly adopting a slogan of recent times to her own ends.

And while Sylvia checked into Eastwood Park Prison in Gloucestershire for a bargain week-long break – with Maeve Binchy’s latest book, another tome about poverty in the 19th century and relishing the chance to meet new people and see new places – Tony and his machine ploughed on.

Tony was a punk. He had no time for a pensioner with nothing better to do than grumble. Pah! Sylvia should probably thank him for opening up her horizons and showing that life need not begin at the bingo hall and end in Cleethorpes.

Tony was unrepentant. What’s more, he was going nowhere (well, it makes a nice change from Barbados). As the Times led: “Four more bold years, vows Blair.” Gordon could wait.

But Sylvia could not. And on Thursday we heard that just 36 hours into her week-long stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the protestor walked free.

Her arrears had been covered. But she hadn’t settled her account. So who was the mystery donor the Mail said paid Sylvia’s bill?

We may only ever know the identity of Sylvia’s shadowy benefactor if she uses the Freedom of Information Act – as she did last year when at the 11th hour, and with the prison gates beckoning, another mystery donor paid her arrears. She wonders if this year’s good Samaritan person had “malicious” motives.

Over at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, things were pressing on regardless. The papers spotted Cherie Blair taking a break for her brand of supermarket diplomacy to sit in the conference hall.

She was wearing an “I LOVE TB” badge and delivering dewy-eyed reminiscences about her first true love, a certain Stephen Smerdon.

But while we were looking at him, the Times had spotted 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, a Labour member since 1948. The octogenarian escaped Nazi Germany in 1937, had been vice-chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and is a member of the Stop the War Coalition.

Walter was also on the cover of the Telegraph, being thrown out of the Labour Party conference for heckling Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, on the subject of Iraq.

As Straw was telling the assembled crowd that British troops were only in Iraq to help the elected Iraqi government, Wolfgang shouted: “That’s a lie and you know it.”

What’s this? A dissenting voice! A word that goes against the message! That will never do. And with the words still moist on his lips, Walter was surrounded by security staff, or “toughies”, as he calls them.

Walter was then physically ejected from the conference hall. When he tried to re-enter the secure zone around the hall, he was stopped by a police officer “citing the Terrorism Act”.

This doesn’t look all that good on Labour. But it must be said that it diminishes claims that the anti-terrorism policy in any way singles out bearded Muslims – Mr Wolfgang is a clean-shaven Jew.

F****** Tony Blair – well, he started it when he started talking about the “f****g Welsh”.

What was going on? How could he have done such a thing? And just as we were about to stand up and challenge Tony, over ambled burly Joe Ifill (You In) to tell us to pipe down or else.

The Sun said Ifill had been the Labour steward paid to chuck out hecklers and people off-message, like 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang.

Unluckily for Labour, the doltish henchman and his aides didn’t drive Walter to a secluded spot well out of Brighton and dump him there, but instead went and placed him directly under the media spotlight. In an instant, Walter was changed from being just another pensioner with an axe to grind into a man to be reckoned with.

So much so that the Labour grandees lined up to say “sorry”. “We’re really, really sorry,” said Tony Blair, proving that even he can apologise when faced with compelling evidence of wrongdoing. “We didn’t want it,” said Defence Secretary John Reid. “It shouldn’t have happened. It’s not the way we do things in here.”

But whatever the whys and wherefores, the Government’s handling of the episode, and of Walter, had backfired – in attempting to silence the heckler, Labour had pushed Iraq back to the forefront of the debate.

Or “f****** Iraq”, as Tony may well be wont to call it…’

Posted: 3rd, October 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Out Of Fashion

‘SO efficient are the Germans that last Monday’s news about how their country’s General Election was all set to finish in a dead heat, a perfect split down the middle between left and right, surprised only the Times.

On Monday, the paper led with headline news of “Election setback for Germany’s Thatcher brings chaos to Berlin”. The votes were being counted, and the result looked like being very close.

But so much for that. We were more interested in this German iron lady. As was the Telegraph, which told us that this blonde Brunhilde is called Angela Merkel.

The full results of the election were not yet known (she came out narrowly ahead), and the signs on Monday were that Frau Thatcher’s Christian Democrats were winning, just in front of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats.

A line was being drawn down the centre of German politics. And it was just about the only line that had nothing to do with Kate Moss.

Cocaine white remained this season’s black as the Sun brought more news of Kate Moss’s high life. We learnt how she’d dumped her “junkie” lover Peter Doherty.

He responded by letting his creative juices run wild – and proceeded to cover them in all manner of “coke, dope and liquid E…washed down with rum, gin and beer”, as the Sun reported.

Doherty then “threatened to carve up a terrified Sun reporter with a broken bottle”, “partied until 9am with groupies” and “hurled” bottles against a wall and into the swimming pool at his “posh” villa.

But while Doherty’s career played on loop, the Mail focused on “Cocaine Kate” and saw “the pressure grow on fashion chains to drop [the] model”.

But the “Model takes drugs!” shocker took a breather on Tuesday, and we were offered a different vision of the fashion scene. Our minds raced with nightmarish images as the Star told us that Cherie Blair likes to wear vibrating pants.

This is not as a rule, but when occasion permits. And, no, since you ask, these electronic pants were not chosen for her by her style guru Carole Caplin, but serve to keep the Blair thighs in shape.

By Wednesday, we were ready to shout, “Come back, Kate, all is forgiven”. Only, of course, it was not. Moss, now forever known as ‘cocaine Kate’, is no mere clotheshorse, a mobile mannequin hewn from flesh and bone – she’s a role model.

What she wears, the yoof want to wear. What she smokes, the yoof want to smoke. If she sticks cocaine up her hooter, every teenager able to break into their middle-class parents’ “secret stash drawer” will take cocaine.

And so it was that the great, good and clean of the fashion world began to turn their backs on Moss. The model was out of fashion.

As the Sun’s front page said, Moss had been dumped as the face of fashion label H&M. The Mirror confirmed this news, saying that its pictures of the model snorting cocaine were too much for the retailer, which acted after an “outcry from its teenage customers and their horrified parents”.

It’s hard not to sympathise with the parents and guardians of impressionable teenagers, worried that their children will ape the behaviour of an icon like Moss. But such is the way of fashion that while Moss models the genuine article, the youth often have to make do with fakes and imitation. For real fur, read fake fur. For cocaine, read talcum powder and dandruff.

Later in the week, Moss’s contracts with Burberry and Chanel were town up like so much cigarette paper and cast aside.

And there was more. The Mail said that Scotland Yard’s finest were taking a breather from chasing terrorists and armed robbers and planning to interview Moss about her alleged cocaine binge.

No less a person than Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, head of the Yard’s Specialist Crime Directorate, had ordered that his officers question Moss when she returned from New York.

No wonder Moss was sorry. And she was sorry. She most likely still is sorry. The Mirror had heard her say sorry and had published her apology to the nation on Friday’s front page.

The Express was watching alleged London bomber Hussain Osman leave Rome to face charges of conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder and explosive offences, and pleading his innocence – he told his Italian lawyer, Antonietta Sonnessa, it was all a “demonstrative gesture”.

The Sun was talking to Samantha Lewthwaite, wife of Jermaine Lindsay, whose demonstrative gesture on July 7 killed 26 people on a Piccadilly Line Tube train.

And the fearless Mirror was leading with the vital news of Moss’s apology.

“I take full responsibility for my actions,” began Kate. “I want to apologise to all of the people I have let down…I am trying to be positive…”

That’s that, then. Moss took “full responsibility”. She made no excuses. No-one forced her to take drugs. She blamed no-one she met in a mosque. The matter can rest here.

The nation’s morals have been damaged – but they are not beyond repair.

This is the time to heal. But if you’re still worried about things, if Moss has caused you to fret, you had best pop along to your doctor and he’ll be only too happy to give you something to chase way this season’s blues…’

Posted: 26th, September 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Panic Stations

‘AS an organic product, petrol carries a premium. But not everyone is on-message, and the week began with news of action by the Fuel Lobby.

On Monday, the Telegraph reminded us that there has been a 20 per cent rise in petrol prices over the past few months. Many professional drivers are unhappy with this and protests were planned.

Andrew Spence, a spokesman for the Fuel Lobby, told the paper that the cause even had an international bent – he’d been contacted by lorry drives in Spain and France who were planning “sympathy protests” and may target the port of Dover.

Brynle Williams, who led the stand-off at the Stanlow refinery, Cheshire, that triggered the big fuel protests of 2000, and now a Conservative member of the Welsh Assembly, told the Telegraph that hauliers may “park up” and stay put until fuel duty was reduced.

It was a dastardly plot. It had us all worried, not least of all Jordan who for her sensationally tacky marriage to little Peter Andre forwent the traditional petrol-hungry wedding car in favour of horses pulling a coach.

By Tuesday, it was panic stations. The cricket was over, there was nothing to watch on the telly and millions of motorists were filling the void in their lives by driving out to their local filling stations and making ready to sit in a queue for a few days.

The official call was for calm. “Don’t panic! Don’t Panic! Don’t panic!” yelled the oil firms and the Government, the latter blaming the entire global fuel crisis on Opec.

But at the same time ministers had noted the panic buying and were concerned that there might not be enough fuel for essential users, like John Prescott, Mrs Prescott, Doctor Prescott, Nurse Prescott and Chief Inspector Prescott of the Yard.

Hell, there might not even be enough fuel to power the England cricket team’s open-top bus through the streets of London.

On Wednesday, the panic reached fever pitch. Drivers were racing to the pumps to get what petrol they could. They were handing in the tokens to get their free tumblers and then filling them with petrol.

There were rumours of drivers hermetically sealing their car windows and doors with tape and filling the entire interior with unleaded. Children were being ordered to hold petrol in their mouths and spit it into a sink at home. People were bringing sinks!

The queues began to grow ever longer. But don’t panic. The Department of Trade and Industry had drawn up what the Telegraph called “an oil emergency response plan”.

The plan would see the Government ration forecourt sales and limit opening times at filling stations.

But there was no need to panic. Panicking was a mug’s game – even if it was good news for petrol sellers. The Times said that some garages were taking advantage of the climate of fear and putting up their prices.

People like Masood Meah, the owner of Nad Petroleum just outside Manchester, who raised his prices by 8p to 108p a litre. “It’s supply and demand,” said he, quoting from the Opec handbook.

We were worried. Even England cricket hero Andrew Flintoff was stressed enough to smoke, first a cigar and then a cigarette. Lord Richard Layard, a Downing Street adviser, told the Mail that the NHS needed 10,000 more people to tackle depression, “Britain’s biggest social problem”.

And then on Thursday it came. Hundreds of people were spotted standing on forecourts and outside oil refineries. The protest had got underway. And maybe, just maybe, one or two among the massed ranks were protestors, the rest being a mix of journalists from the press and TV.

While the media looked on, oil refineries and terminals operated as normal. Tankers made their usual deliveries. There were no blockades. And at the Shell refinery in Jarrow, south Tyneside, demonstrators were outnumbered by the good men and women of the media.

People like the Independent’s Martin Hickman and Terry Kirby, who spotted Nick Pallett outside an oil depot in Hemel Hempstead. Not quite alone. But with Tramp, his pet dog.

The protest had come to nothing. It was Thursday and the papers needed another story fast. And, as luck had it, it was Prince Harry’s 21t birthday.

Twenty-one today, twenty-one today, he’s got red hair and Nazi underwear, 21–one today. A cheer for Prince Harry. Hip-hip! Hooray! “Speech! Speech!” demanded the press, and Harry obliged.

The Express heard Harry says he wants to fight for his country – “There’s no way I’m going to sit on my arse while my boys are fighting for their country.”

He’ll always just be himself – “I don’t want to change. I am who I am. I’m not going to change because I’m being criticised in the press.”

And the Duchess of Cornwall, the fragrant Camilla, is no “wicked stepmother” – “She’s a wonderful woman and she’s made our father very, very happy, which is the most important thing. William and I love her to bits”.

That’s just great. But would we have preferred it if Harry had spat vengeance at Camilla, the women who undermined his mother, and said how his ambition was to roll a spliff the size of Devon? This was Harry being nice, and that won’t do.

He even did without the big birthday party that would surely scandalise us and be covered in minute detail in the press.

We needed sensation. And there was Kate Moss snoring cocaine on the cover of the Mirror. On Friday, that story had become the big news. The Sun said Moss had a £200 a day coke habit (which may or may not be a lot). It was a revelation that would, according to the Mail, put her career in jeopardy.

Only it won’t. MODEL TAKES COCAINE” is the big news, to rank up there with “FOOTBALLER IN CLUB BRAWL”, “ROD STEWART DATES BLONDE” and “SATURDAY FOLLOWS FRIDAY”.

But while we wait for some other news, perhaps from Iraq – where, apparently, there’s a battle going on – it’s the kind of stuff we’ll have to make do with…’

Posted: 19th, September 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Sheikh, Prattle & Toll

‘AFTER the broadsheets had produced the big colour pictures and surveyed the scene from the top down, the tabloids waded into the New Orleans’ waters and looked for the human interest angle.

And on Monday the human the Sun was interested in was Emily Smith, the paper’s girl on the scene with a pad and maybe even a pencil.

The lead shot of Emily on the Sun’s front page caught her placing her hand atop that of 81-year-old diabetic Rosella McCoy, a picture newsworthy enough to be repeated in a larger format inside the paper.

Black Rosella looked deeply pained. Blonde Emily looked compassionate. “This tragic widow begged me to save her from disaster,” wrote Emily, “and half an hour later she lay on the verge of death.”

It was just terrible. But spare your tears. It’s OK. Emily’s still with us. (And later in the week, Rosella was fond alive and well-ish.)

So much for the little people. What of the disaster? Could it have been averted? The Telegraph answered its own key questions.

“Could the disaster have been averted?” Answer: “No”. “Would better flood defences have made a difference?” Answer: “Maybe.” “Could the city have been evacuated before the storm?” Answer: “Yes.” “Could federal aid have reached the city sooner?” Answer: “Yes”.

And lastly the crucial question that must be asked: “Is it all Bush’s fault?” Answer: “Not all of it.” After all Tony Blair has got the weather machine…

And so the stories of the storm began to blow themselves out. So much for that. It was time for the big news story of the week, and undoubtedly the most enjoyable – Princess Michael of Kent and the ‘fake sheikh’.

It is very hard to like Princess Michael of Kent. So hard that most of us gave up trying years ago. It’s far easier to dislike her.

And that’s good, because it makes the Sun’s news of how she spoke her mind to the News of the World’s “fake sheikh” all the more enjoyable.

On the pretence of being a buyer interested in the Princess’s country pile, Mazher Mahmood was given a tour of the desirable drum.

In the course of the tour, Princess Michael described Princess Diana as “bitter”, ‘nasty” and “strange”. She said Prince Charles never loved her and had merely “married a womb”.

But how does such a woman sell a house? Thankfully, with the housing market in the doldrums, the Mail gave its readers a few pointers on the way “The Del Boy Princess” does things.

She offered to throw in tea services and all the bed linen if the sheikh bought the £6million house. She also offered her services for hire.

She’s a great writer – “hugely successful in France”, don’t yer know. And even does a good stand-up routine. “It’s a one-hour, one-woman show but I’m very good, as you can imagine,” said she. “I don’t usually discuss fees. But it’s £25,000 to speak. Is that not enough? Shall I do more? And expenses?”

And if that was not enough (“I’m robbing meself I tells yer”), what about a white tiger? Very good runner. Used to belong to Siegfried and Roy, who use the beasts in their Las Vegas magic shows. “They sell them, you know,” says the Princess. “I can introduce you to them easily.”

And then perhaps hold the buyer’s head in one of the beast’s mouths until contracts have been exchanged and the cash is hers.

And on Tuesday things moved on a step. The Mail said Princess pushy had gone “too far”. Charles was peeved because she had dared to cast aspersions on his jam.

In the course of her efforts to woo the would-be buyer of her house, the Princess produced a jar of her own homemade preserve. “That’s made with my own raspberries,” said she.” It’s better than the stuff Charles churns out. “He doesn’t make it himself – he’s got factories doing it. It’s just his name on it.”

Oh, too cruel is the woman who shatters our image of Charles in hair net and frilly apron spooning jam into jars. No wonder Charles is said by a source to be “pretty irritated”.

It was time for a calming distraction, a poem even. And On Wednesday we had one. “Oh, Lord, if I must die today, please make it after close of play. For this I know if nothing more, I will not go, without the score.”

Wipe that tear from your eye. John Major, for he is the writer of those poetic words, published in the Times, was ever one to inspire strong emotions in our inner Edwinas.

And perchance the Tory party, which is looking for its fifth leader in eight years. But who will it be?

It would appear to be a two horse race. Or sticking with the cricket theme, a battle between a beefy all-rounder Ken Clarke and the team player with the straight bat, David Davis. With John Major watching from the stands, and the Telegraph providing the spin…

But there is a third man. On Friday, Liam Fox, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, entered the stumbling marathon of a race. He was buoyant. And could he be anything other than confident as he unveiled his cunning election strategy.

“We have to stop some of those things [“crime, the break-up of the family, the lack of cohesive communities”], but we do not do it talking to ourselves, we do it by getting down with the real issues, with real places, with real people.”

Bravo! Fox was a champion of the real people. or the ‘reaple’, as they must now be known. And if he wants to really give them what thy want, he could do worse than call for England to sack Sven Goran Eriksson.’

Posted: 12th, September 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Picture Of The Week

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Posted: 11th, September 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Made In Orleans

‘AT first the hurricane blew in as a Silly Season story. America is hit by hurricanes all the time. The locals put up signs saying things like “Keep Out Hurricane” and “In Your Face”. It’s nothing serious. It’s a bit of fun with the weather.

So on Tuesday we were not surprised to see the Telegraph’s headline: “Wish you were here? Britons bask in sunshine as Americans flee hurricane.”

The story was served up to make us feel good about things at home. The skies in Blighty may be grey, but at least they’re not in the habit of moving faster than Princess Michael at a free lunch.

Then things changed. After a couple of weeks of non-news about non-events (Why can’t we see Tony Blair? Why can’t we deport mad mullahs? Why is John Prescott afforded a spell as the country’s leader every year?), nature has given the papers a real event to get stuck into.

Hurricane Katrina had not hit Britain, but it had destroyed large bits of the United States, and that was close enough for it to get on the Times’s front page.

“Mississippi drowning,” said the Times tastelessly on Wednesday. Given the news that many people had died – “the mayor is talking of bodies floating through the streets” – this was a cheap headline to herald a disaster that has “washed away escape routes and swallowed whole streets”.

This was a story made for the broadsheets. An entire city was underwater. It demanded the big page treatment. But the Times is small these days, and is unable to give such stories the full hit.

The city resembled Atlantis, immersed under flood waters, a non-place to be talked about in stories.

But while the Times was constrained by size to showing the little picture, on Thursday the Telegraph led with a huge shot of coast guard officer Shawn Beatty peering out of his helicopter, scanning a watery landscape for signs of life.

The Times gave over a part of its ever-shrinking front page to Ray Nairn, the mayor of New Orleans. He said it was likely thousands had died. “There are dead bodies floating in the water,” said he. “The rescuers were basically pushing them aside as they rescued people.”

While the Times looked to the internet for freely available copy, those ubiquitous blogs, to pad out its coverage of the disaster, the Telegraph showed how things can be handled.

The stories of people who have lost loved ones were heartbreaking. The tales of looters showed the baser side of human nature. But it’s the universal struggle to cope with the disaster that was the real story.

The Independent recognised this and showed pictures of the “toxic soup” that had engulfed New Orleans and large areas of the region’s coast.

It said that residents were at risk from all manner of disease. E.coli and salmonella are possibilities, as is everything from diarrhoea and malaria to dengue fever and West Nile disease.

It was clear that the trauma was far from over. The Guardian’s leader was right in saying, “The storm has gone, but the crisis keeps rolling along.”

On Friday, A J Holloway, the mayor of Biloxi was horribly right when he looked at the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and declared, “This is our tsunami.”

Just like in the aftermath of that hideous disaster in the Indian Ocean, we were affronted by tales of the lowest sink of humanity.

“ANARCHY IN NEW ORLEANS,” yelled the Independent’s cover. “Chaos rules with 20,000 still stranded in the city.” And: “Looting, gunfire and a death toll still unknown.”

While not quite to the level of those sickening post-tsunami tales of children kidnapped by paedophiles, this news of human depravation stuck in the craw.

The Telegraph’s said that a convoy moving patients from New Orleans Charity Hospital came under sniper fire. The Independent talked of robberies, carjackings, rape and even murder.

The Times said that efforts to evacuate the city had been suspended after shots were fired at rescue boats and a military helicopter. “A National Guardsman was shot. Gunfire rattled through the city.”

But surely the might of the American machine was not being stymied by gangs of mindless thugs high on crack or whatever running amuck?

Or was America struggling to cope?’

Posted: 6th, September 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Summer Holiday

‘IF sex is the breakfast of champions, as motor racing legend James Hunt was wont to put it, we wondered if Sven Goran Eriksson been buttering both sides of his morning toast at the same time?

On Monday the Sun reported on claims that the cheating England football manager had been having secret phone chats with former mistress Faria Alam.

Given the speed of Sven’s oratory, we imagine him to be a slow and deliberate lover on the phone. Questions like “What are you wearing, Sven” will be met with a long pause, then the sound of rustling fabric before the telling answer: “My top is 70 per cent nylon with some viscose blend…shorts are a polyester-cotton formation and my glasses are made of, well, you know, (little laugh) glass.”

“Oh, Sven! You’re really turning on me on,” says Alam. Sven then sends Alam into raptures by easing open the dishwasher door and telling her how dirty the plates are.

Alam says that their conversations have been occurring “two or three times a week” and that he’s even been trying to speak to her in person in a Manhattan hotel room.

Nancy Dell’Olio, Sven’s leading lover, was not best pleased. Fired up, she returned to the London home she and Sven share and waited for his return. A friend of hers tells the Mail that when he did, Nancy and Sven had a “serious row” and that Nancy was “spitting blood”.

But Sven took out his magic sponge, cooled his strike partner’s ardour and reassured her that the story was untrue. She believed him, and later, as the Sun says, she told reporters huddled outside their home: “We’re not going out. We’re having dinner now.”

And then maybe some breakfast…

While Sven was getting to grips with more rumours of his absurd love life – and on Wednesday checking into a hotel just outside the Watford Riviera under the name Mr Jones – on Tuesday the Rolling Stones were launching yet another world your.

Keith Richards wanted to tell us that Mick Jagger was able to wear those very tight trousers for a reason.

Said Richards: “His c**k is on the end of his nose. And a very small one at that. Huge balls. Small c**k. Ask Marianne Faithfull.”

The papers declined the invite that so many women have accepted, preferring to celebrate the discovery of Tony Blair. Finally, the Mail has spotted our bouffant-haired dedicated leader on his jolly holidays.

“BLAIR BLOWS HIS OWN COVER,” shouted the paper’s front-page headline, as after days of guesswork we learn where our fearless leader has been turning his skin a lively shade of pink.

Hard luck on those of you who guessed that Tony had been staying in Texas, trying on all manner of ten gallon hats for size and perfecting his ‘Dubya Swagger’. And more fool you for thinking even for a nanosecond that the leader of this country would be holidaying in it.

Tony is holed up at a pal’s place in Barbados. And the reason we know this is because undercover Tony decided to turn up to a VJ celebration on the island.

And having located dear Tony, the Mail couldn’t take its eyes off him. And on Thursday readers were taken back to “Blairbados” to see Tone dressed in a pink shirt, sunglasses perched on his head and holding a ukulele.

The Sun said “sunkissed Cherie clapped and took photos while the PM…sang from a sheet of handwritten lyrics”.

Back in the Mail, we heard from George Hinchliffe, director of the Ukulele Orchestra of Britain, who said the instrument was a fine choice.

“It’s the ideal instrument to take on holiday”, said he, over looking the merits of a grand piano or tambourine. “We like to think of the instrument as the instrument of the people…so maybe Tony Blair is playing up to his Everyman image by being seen with one.”

What Tony sang we may never know. And if we know the name of the song, would we sing along? Problem is, as Andrew Marr, the BBC’s outgoing political editor, pointed out on Friday, it’s almost impossible to understand politicians at the best of times, let alone a singing one.

They need a translator. “That’s why people like me are used in bulletins,” said Marr. He then said that many politicians are unable to speak in “fluent human”.

He’s right. This Government seems incapable, or unable, to speak in clear English. As John Prescott displays every time he opens his mouth, using long words and speaking at length do not make you look smart or clever, even if you have made up some of the words yourself. Neither do they get you understood.

Is it any wonder the Deputy PM responds to an egg-throwing farm worker with his fists?

And are we surprised that Tony’s reign has thrown up so few sex scandals. Can you imagine the chat-up lines? Crikey! The pillow talk could go on for days…’

Posted: 30th, August 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Drinking To Success

‘JUST imagine how clever we’d all be if we’d stop binge drinking?

On Monday, the Mail had read a report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology which said that drinking large amounts of booze in a short space of time is a “distinctive characteristic of the British drinking culture”.

But we’re not drinking for the sake of it – we’re celebrating our A levels. The papers had it that nearly everyone was on course to pass an A level – even some people who hadn’t taken one.

The Times brought the good news that almost a quarter of girls were predicted to achieve a top A grade in the subjects of their taking.

Overall, the pass rate was expected to show an increase on last year’s 96 per cent pass rate. Rounding this up to the nearest whole per cent, showing workings wherever necessary, this meant that at least 97 per cent of students were expected to pass the A levels they took.

Which would have been impressive, and a sure sign that education has improved by leaps and bounds since 1988 – even if a report from the Curriculum Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University said that pupils achieved between one and a half and three grades higher in 2004 that they would have in 1988

But why the change? On Wednesday the Telegraph had an answer – pass rates are on the up because spending on teaching has risen by 50 per cent in real terms since 1997, the year Tony Blair became our leader.

The paper said that Lord Adonis, the schools minister, attributes the rise in pass rates to better teaching and higher standards in the classroom.

It’s not the students who are getting smarter, it’s the system that’s getting better at finding ways to deal with them and preparing them to take the “gold standard” exam.

Problem is that, as the paper points out, if everyone is passing – and the 3 per cent who don’t may soon be classified as non-persons – how can employers and university admissions staff differentiate between applicants?

But things were not as they seemed – not quite. The pass rate was lower than had been expected – 96.2 per cent. This year’s students were just 0.2 of a per cent smarter/luckier/better educated than last year’s batch, which included Prince Harry.

Though short of the 100 per cent target, it’s still the 23rd successive year in which the pass rate has improved. And a record number of students have secured places at their preferred universities.

But not everyone was happy. And on Friday the Times unearthed an A level student who did not pass their exams.

While on Friday the Telegraph stuck with the traditional picture of a couple of blondish girls throwing their heads back as if in a hair care commercial and facing up to rosy futures with white teeth and excited eyes, the Times showed a chubby girl in a state of resignation.

Her name is Karin Sime, and she was the “ONE OFF: the girl who failed her A levels.”

Rightly, Karin was held up to the world at large as a freak. We read that Karin, 18, who had dreamt of becoming a vet, had scored two U grades in her biology and environmental science AS levels.

“Can you help Karin?” asked the paper, inviting its readers to email in their suggestions and tips for this noteworthy failure.

But before the winning suggestion could be announced, there were yet more pressing things on the education agenda.

The front-page of the Times was not all about young Karin, but led with the headline: “Universities to close the door on 60,000.”

So many students have done so very well in their big tests that a record number of them have already claimed places at their chosen universities.

Good news for them. And made all the more enjoyable when the winners learned that there are 100,000 wannabe graduates now chasing just 37,000 vacancies in the scramble to avoid getting a proper job that’s known as clearing.

But there is only enough room at the University of Teeside’s undergraduate programme in Sociology & Youth Studies, and 60,000 students will not get in anywhere.

Unless they chose to enter the University of Life, or McDonald’s, as it’s popularly known…’

Posted: 22nd, August 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Bakri & Forth

‘THE week read like the Diary of Omar Barki. The Tottenham Taliban was in Lebanon seeing his mum/raising an army/going on the lash with the lads.

But before he could make the trip, on Monday the Telegraph said that officers at Scotland Yard were meeting the head of the anti-terrorism department at the Crown Prosecution Service, the body broadly responsible for deciding which criminal cases reach court, to discuss which charges could be brought against Bakri and his ilk.

Hey, he might even be charged with treason. But having dangled the rope, the paper thought its readers should know that Bakri was more likely to be deported than offed – the death penalty for treason was abolished in 1998, the Telegraph reminded us all.

But on Tuesday Bakri could take no more. And it wasn’t the threat of being charged with some crime under some new law that made him leave – it was the Sun.

The paper’s front page cheered that “hate” sheik Omar Bakri, aka the mad mullah, had fled the country “after being forced out of Britain by the Sun”.

In the paper’s editorial, readers learnt that the Sun had been pressing for Bakri to leave these shores for years. “It’s a great victory for us,” it said.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Simon Hughes told the Mail, “I guess the blunt public reaction will be ‘thank goodness for that’.”

But others may just miss the man a little. And that includes the Sun, which will have to find a new face of Muslim extremism to entertain and scare its readers with.

“But remember this,” it wrote, “Bakri was just one of the extremist lunatics in our midst.” There are “many more”.

But never fear, the Sun was and is on their case, and the nasties best bet is to run less they be monstered and then shot to pieces by busty Becky from Bridlington.

Hurrah! Ring the church bells. Barki was gone. Only, on Wednesday he was back. Not in Heathrow, but in the papers.

The Sun was learning the lesson that no war is over until the fat lady, or, as was the case, the fat man with the beard and NHS specs has signed an official truce, or been shot. Bakri planned to return in around four weeks.

But the Sun was not keen to see Bakri land in Blighty and wanted him to stay out. So the paper called on its “army” of readers to demand that stand-in Prime Minister John Prescott keep Bakri “OUT” of Britain.

To stir a million and more white van drivers, cabbies and topless stunnas into action, the paper produced a petition for each of us to sign and send to its London offices.

“Dear Mr Prescott,” it wrote. “Now that you are in charge of the country, we demand that you take action to keep vile preacher Omar Bakri out of Britain. He is not wanted here.”

Acting Prime Minister Prescott heard the call. Leading with his left, he said that Bakri “has a right to come in and out”. Said Mr Prezza: “I just say, ‘Enjoy your holiday. Make it a long one’.”

That was it! The war on terror would be won by sarcasm.

But while Prezza gibbered, the Mail asked: “Will preacher of hate return.” Of course, with the Sun’s petition in its infancy, it was too early to say. But being a paper with a proud tradition of investigative reporting, the Mail should at least have tried to answer its own poser.

And on Thursday, the Mail did have an answer. Yes, Bakri would be back – the charmless prig would be returning for an NHS operation. Ironic as it was, Bakri was coming back for the good of his health.

To the Star this produced the front-page headline: “FREE HEART OPS FOR EVERY RANTING LOON.” And it heard from the man himself, who told the paper’s shocked and stunned readers: “I have a heart problem. I’m waiting for an appointment.”

But didn’t Bakri know that the Sun was on his case? He must have, and – shock of shocks – he didn’t seem to care.

In a matter of days the Sun’s power had been reduced from that of a telling weapon in the war on terror to a simple newssheet that said of Bakri’s impending operation: “In an act of Christian charity we should let the op go ahead – so long as it is performed by ham-fisted John Prescott.”

Or, for that matter, the Sun’s cack-handed editor…

But there was to be a twist. On Friday the Edmonton Ayatollah was arrested in Lebanon. The Sun said that Bakri was now sleeping in a 4ft by 6ft cell, no bigger than his own Ford Galaxy.

But even in choky, the British authorities were taking no chances – Bakri failed to tell the Department of Work and Pensions that he was leaving the country so his £43.30 per week disability allowance was cancelled for the duration of this trip.

You want tough, Bakri. The British Government and the press will give you tough! And then some…’

Posted: 15th, August 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Breast Of British

‘THE week began with some joyous news. “Seven months ago I was a nobody,” said Keeley, 18. “My life has been transformed by the Sun. People now recognise me in the street.”

The pneumatic Keeley had won the Sun’s Page 3 Idol competition. Keeley had achieved a fame that will see her recognised and hooted in the street by men in white vans, leered at by cabbies and lusted over by pubescent boys not yet brave enough to buy the Sport.

But Keeley was not the only woman in the public eye. Over in the Mirror, Julie from Suffolk had spotted David Beckham emerging from a London eatery with his wife is tow.

For all women who want to get close to Day-vid but are shy of masturbating a pig or screeching about Girl Power!, Julie gave a master class – throw your left arm around Day-vid’s neck and have him in a grip he cannot get out of.

On Tuesday, the news was still that women with large breasts are, er, newsworthy. “Kinky” Kinga Karolczak, Big Brother’s buxom new inmate, marked her arrival in the house in time-honoured fashion by whipping out her 44FF breasts for the Star.

And busty Anorak favourite Kerry Katona showed that you can’t keep a good woman down – at least not one with such excellent buoyancy aids – by signing a £500,000 deal to launch a new internet bingo game.

And so it went on. And on Wednesday the country’s men were being asked to debate the hottest of hot potatoes: do you go topless on the beach this summer or not?

This is no problem for men. Males have been proudly showing off their man boobs ever since that day in 1924 when Giorgio Speedo took a pair of his mother’s scissors to his swimming suit, borrowed a pair of socks and set hearts a flutter in his home town of St Leonards-on-Sea.

But for women, the advent of the mobile phone camera has added a new dimension to the debate – with the Star claiming that scores of the nation’s bikini beauties are now keeping their boobs under wraps for fear of being snapped topless.

And so it asked its readers to vote on whether women should sunbathe topless this summer.

As the Star readership comprises exactly the sort of mobile phone camera pests the paper is talking about, this poll appeared to be more stacked than Jordan.

But as the debate raged, the bureaucrats at the European Union saw a danger in woman baring any flesh to the merciless, lecherous sun. The Telegraph reported that the bods in Brussels had issued something called an Optical Radiation Directive – or “tan ban” for short.

And this meant that employers of staff who work outdoors must ensure that they cover up against the risk of sunburn.

We were aghast. Such was the power of the directive that it was hard to take in the wobbling, full-chested enormity of the Star’s poll – 87% of the paper’s readers had voted for brave British beach babes to defy the mobile camera pests and “CARRY ON TOPLESS”!

And on Friday we the outraged were invited to join the Sun’s “SAVE OUR JUGS” campaign. The paper heard from the likes of blonde Louise (34D) (“They can’t make people cover up. It’s how we get tips. If I covered up I’d be skint”).

And from Tash, a 30E, who put things in a global perspective when she said: “With all that is going on at the moment, I don’t think this issue should be foremost in their minds.”

Which it wouldn’t be if the girls just covered up…’

Posted: 8th, August 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Winning The War

‘IT was the week when the world according to the Sun returned to normal. Hurrah! A nation rejoiced as there on the Sun’s Page 3 was Charlotte Church and, more vitally, Charlotte Church’s bare nipple.

A hearty full-chested cheer to our Charlotte, who defiantly served up her breast as a warning to all terrorists and religious fundamentalists who would have women trussed up in shapeless burkas. She for one will not be cowed.

And showing that in Britain men and women are equal, there in the Mail was Richard Madeley’s “admirably trim body”, the one he “can’t resist sharing it with the rest of the world”.

“He has got excellent muscle definition and puts lots of men half his age to shame,” said a captivated observer, “although he seems to have a small paunch.” Or a Judy Finnegan, as it is most commonly known…

And from Madeley it is but a small push of a shopping trolley to Tony Blair, who, in many ways, is to politics when Madeley is to daytime telly.

News in all the papers was that the Prime Minister has spent nearly £1,800 of taxpayers’ money on make-up over the past six years. The annual expenditure on the PM’s cosmetics had risen from £43.80 in 1999 to £340.02 a year later.

His grinning face appears before us as a mask of bronzing powder, oil and lotion – and more concealer than is thought decent.

But while we looked for more of such cutting-edge news, for stories of footballers waxing their chests and how Anthea Turner ties her sarong by the pool, terror returned.

Horror of horrors, we discovered that the terrorists were not all that hard working. The Sun’s front-page headline, “BOMBER IN BENEFITS”, told of how Somalian Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, one of the four men suspected of trying to commit mass murder on July 21, had claimed £23,000 in housing benefits while living in a ninth-storey flat in Southgate, north London.

Doubtless police are right now liaising with social security operatives as Omar prepares to confront the already besieged British taxpayer with a full crown court case and, if found guilty, many years in a British prison.

There was more. The Mail wanted us to know that bomber Muktar Mohammed Said often played football with children from Arnos Park and Broomfield secondary school. We heard that the Arsenal fan had had a “mad tackle”.

He went in hard, although to our knowledge, his on-field aggression never earned him a yellow card. Said might well be a murderous, narcissistic bastard but he played football within the rules.

By now, anyone reading the papers should have built up a pretty good profile of what an Islamic terrorist or a terror suspect looks like.

And on Wednesday, the Sun wanted us to know that the Eritrean-born Said was a “menacing, drug-smoking bully”. He was, as the headline succinctly puts it: “ROBBER, DRUGGIE, BOMBER.”

But where would his being an Arsenal fan fit into his list of life’s achievements? Somewhere between “Robber” and “Druggie”, or lower down the chain of descent?

But things were to change fast. On Thursday, Omar was caught. “WE’VE GOT HIM,” said the Sun triumphantly. “Suspect zapped with 50,000 volts.” (Omar was hit with a Taser stun gun.) “Cop: I never saw anybody so scared.”

There was indeed, as the Mail says, “DRAMA IN A BIRMINGHAM SUBURB”.

And this paper’s cartoonist has taken the trouble to show the pain and fear on Omar’s face, depicted dressed in grey pants, a blue top and wearing his trademark black rucksack.

And better was to come in the war on terror. On Friday, the Times reported that the IRA had told its units to dump their weapons and instructed its operatives to end their “armed campaign”. They must engage in “no other activities whatever”.

“This may be the day when after all the false dawns and dashed hopes, peace replaces war, politics replaces terror on the island of Ireland,” said Tony Blair clumsily.

It was a time to breathe a sigh of relief. But what of the other terrorist threat, the one posed by Muslim extremists?

Well, the law caught up with the rest of the July 21 terrorist gang. And after the grainy shots of the suspects, we got to see a couple of them in their unlovely flesh, including the aforesaid Said.

It was hard to know that to make of it. Should we be happy that they looked so unthreatening, podgy and ordinary or more worried because of it..?’

Posted: 1st, August 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Four Warned

‘AFTER more than a week of unity, finally there was a split in the consensus as the papers began to go their separate ways.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs had looked into why terrorists do what they do and written a report which led the Mail to conclude on Monday: “IRAQ WAR MADE BRITAIN TERROR TARGET.”

The Institute, a group with a lower profile than a ping-pong ball, although the Mail saw it as Britain’s “most authoritative thinktank”, said invading Iraq upset Islamic fundamentalists and people who hate the West. Controversial just wasn’t in it.

But there was something bigger. In the Sun, Jude Law, the nice family man with the nice manners, the nice eyes and the nice looking girlfriend, was a cheating rat who had slept with his kids’ nanny.

Nanny Daisy Wright, the woman with whom Jude had cheated on his fiancée, Sienna Miller, said the actor had made her “body tingle” during sex. He had been a “masterful lover”.

By Tuesday things were getting worse for randy Jude as shy and retiring Daisy told us how he’d “begged” her for three-in-a-bed sex.

It was all too terrible, and a source close to the actor put things in perspective when they said Jude felt like the “most hated man in Britain”.

Though we universally loathed Law for daring to cheat on the blonde Miller, there were others who demanded to be despised.

There was Omar Bakri Mohammed, who spouted the opinion that Britons are all to blame for the terrorist atrocity in London. “I blame the British government,” said the Syrian-born polemicist, “and I blame the British people.”

And while Bakri claimed his benefits from social security and ranted about this and that, we noticed Anjem Choudary, the British leader of militant Islamic group al-Muhajiroun.

“The British want to show they are on the side of justice and truth,” said he, “whereas in reality the real terrorists are the British regime, and even the British police.”

And, of course there was Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, who said that decades of intervention in the Middle East and the Iraq war could have influenced the terrorists. “I suspect the real problem was that we funded these people as long as they were killing Russians,” said Ken. “We gave no thought to the fact that when they stopped killing Russians they might start killing us.”

Law may have been the most hated man in the country on Monday, but he was rapidly slipping down the league table as the week went on.

And on Friday, the competition to be hated was joined by four would-be mass murderers.

In London, passengers on three Tube trains and a bus escaped with their lives because their would-be killers’ bombs failed to detonate properly.

So much for the Islamic extremists being highly skilled bomb makers; these terrorists were unable to even injure themselves.

And so rather than being cowed we began to think. Perhaps the authorities had already apprehended the master bomb maker, so leaving his stack of “Mother of Satan” explosives in the hands of someone not up to the task.

Perhaps, to borrow the invective of the Islamic extremists, God was not on their side after all and in His infinite wisdom had put the mockers on his enemies’ plan to maim and murder.

In fleeing the scene, these idiotic, narcissistic, wicked terrorists had left clues, invaluable in the fight against terrorism. And so on…

The papers didn’t know what to make of it. But undeterred by any lack of facts, they gamely filled page upon page with tales of bombers on the loose and killers in our midst, all interlaced with lines about how we are not afraid.

But if the terrorists intent is to create fear, can we really say we are beating them? The terrorists have no chance of winning in any war. But we can still lose.

But things change fast. The fight back began on a Tube train at London’s Stockwell station when a suspect was chased onto a train and shot dead.

Although the killed man was innocent, a Brazilian electrician, the message was unequivocal and deadly.

Which leads us to the question: who should be afraid – a rich country of millions backed by powerful allies, with a trained military and a ruthless armed police force that shoots to kill, or a few suggestible, none-too-bright, gene pool non-swimmers with low self esteem..?’

Posted: 25th, July 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Who & Why

‘WE can no more understand what it is to be a terrorist than we can know what it is to be a cockroach. Unless, of course, we are all terrorists, in which case we know what we are.

And do not suppose that terrorists are not out there, lurking around every corner. The harbinger of doom and gloom that is the Express was running around telling us on Monday: “BOMBERS WILL STRIKE AGAIN.”

It was the same in the Mail, where we were told that 3,000 men with British links have been primed for murder at Osama Bin Laden’s terror camps.

So much for stoicism and fortitude; reading the papers was enough to instill a sense of fear in anyone.

But not to worry, because the BBC had hit upon a neat way of eradicating fear and making things sound a whole lot better. You see, there were and there are no terrorists. Really.

As Helen Boaden, the Beeb’s knowing director of news said in her memo dispatched to her editors after the London attacks, or ‘pranks’, the ‘perpetrators’, the ‘misunderstood’, the ‘accidental tourists’, call them what you will, are not terrorists.

She advised the BBC’s news staff not to use the word ‘terrorists’ when talking about, er, terrorists and to resist any urge to talk of the ‘event’ as being part of a ‘terror attack’.

That was clear enough. But to the Mail (“So whose side is the Beeb really on?”), the move was controversial, although surely in keeping with the Beeb’s labeling of men and women who blow up buses in Israel as “extremists” or “militants”. Or ‘happy slappers’.

Whatever way up was, the Government told us how we were all deeply shocked that the suicide bombers had been British.

But were we really so shocked the London killers were home-grown British terrorists working out of Leeds?

To many of us, each looks exactly what an Islamic terrorist looks like. They are all male. They are heavily into religion. And they are prepared to kill themselves and others on busy buses and trains.

The papers wanted to tell us just how everyday these mass murderers were. And on Wednesday the process of normalising the murderers began on the cover of the Mail, where the paper produced headshots of three of the killers and a brief captioned profile for each.

Hasib Hussain “became religious overnight”. “Mohammad Sadique Khan was a “special needs teacher”. “Shehzad Tanweeer was a “talented sportsman and student”.

See? They’re just like the rest of us. Only, they are not. They are murderers. Which is amazing, isn’t it.

Well, not really. It’s a bit like hearing that Harold Shipman was a simple local doctor who didn’t care for old people, Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t overly fond of prostitutes and John Reginald Halliday Christie was a bad neighbour.

Now the Sun had a go, replacing the Mail’s captions with a headline for each of the aforesaid three mass murderers.

Khan became “THE TEACHER”. Hussain was transformed from an instrument of evil to “THE SHOPLIFTER”. Someone who admitted to having known him called him a “dopey dork”.

And Tanweer was “THE SPORTY YOB”. A kind of loveable rogue, albeit with a big bag of explosives attached to his person and harbouring a murderous grudge against just about everyone and everything.

We’d heard enough. And on Friday there was a dignified two-minute break in the posturing, commenting and vain attempts at understanding the outrage.

It seems the only way you can get yourself heard above the din of voices decrying this and blaming that is in silence.

And in those moments of quiet reflection some of us may have realised that the West is not at war with Islam. Britain is not under siege. There are no reasons to walk onto a bus and kill and maim yourself and everyone round you.

Or we simply thought of the victims, their friends and families…’

Posted: 18th, July 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

The Mourning After

‘WE knew it was coming. It was, we had been told, inevitable.

At the moment when Londoners were chatting about the Olympics in 2012 – how they were going to pay for it with higher taxes; how the Games will be a great show; how public transport won’t cope; how it’s good to have something to look forward to – evil struck.

Why then? Why when people were happy? Well, that’s just the way with terrorists – they like to spoil things. When the rest of us are having fun and enjoying life, they get their sick kicks.

But the Games will go on; no cowards hell-bent on killing the biggest show on earth can stop that. We cannot let them.

‘OUR SPIRIT WILL NEVER BE BROKEN,’ vowed the Sun on its front page, those words written in deepest black ink below shots of a bombed-out bus, a man with horrific wounds and the news that many were dead.

The Sun is often given over to jingoism and anachronistic references to the World War II, but its mention of the spirit of the Blitz was apt.

Even Tony Blair, who so often sounds like one of Dr Who’s Daleks in a dog collar, hit the right note.

Tony’s words were spot on. ‘When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated,’ he began, ending his message with: ‘We will not be terrorised.’

He was right. We won’t be. But we can feel pain. We can become apprehensive about something so every day as getting on a train or a bus. We can search bags, install more CCTV cameras and remain vigilant. And we can be made to carry ID cards.

But none of it will stop the scumbags from trying to ruin things, from trying to achieve their single goal of causing death and fear.

So we carry on. We raise our motherf****** hands in the air and wave them like it just doesn’t care, as Snoop Dogg told us to at Live 8.

At the big anti-poverty convert, Madonna wanted to know if London was “f****** ready’. It was. Razorlight’s lead singer Johnny Borrell urged us to sign the “f****** petition’. We did. We didn’t. We can sign or not sign whatever we like. It’s a kind of freedom.

We all have choices. Eat or don’t your own body weight in crisps.

Nod like a mad cow when Jacques Chirac told the world that he doesn’t think British cuisine is up to much: ‘We can’t trust people who have such bad food,” said Chirac: “After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.’

So eat crap. We’re pretty fat. We’re out of shape. Things aren’t perfect. But, even so, we did win the Olympics – which makes us fitter than our rivals.

And gives us all something to look forward to…

Paul Sorene’

Posted: 11th, July 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Giving Him Ten

‘PRINCESS Diana was spinning in her grave last week – and if Simone Simmons’s revelations are based on any truth, she may not have been doing it alone.

For in death, as in life, Diana occupies our thoughts, men’s beds and the front page of the Sun.

The paper had seen the latest book on the life and times of the late Princess and heard that she had had a fling with JFK Junior.

Like Diana, the scion of the Kennedy clan is now also no longer with us, him having gone upstairs to the fabled 6th floor of London’s Harvey Nichols department store.

Simmons was adamant that her story on Diana, the women who had confided in her, was as true as true could be.

But countering her claim was that rock-like Royal lackey-turned—D-list celebrity Paul Burrell.

Writing in the Mirror, Burrell gave it to us straight. “There was a time when people like Simone Simmons were hurled into the water, trussed up and weighed down with stones,” said Burrell by way of a history lesson.

Indeed, he is right. We’ve looked it up. And in other history books we’ve learnt of a time when a servant’s job was to be seen and not heard and a time when anyone so much as suspected of stealing was deported to Australia.

But we digress. And while Burrell gave us his inside take on just how awful Simmons is, how her “goodness has become rotten with the so-called revelation over JFK Jr”, the Sun squeezed the juicy bits of the story until the pips squeaked.

The Sun was reporting that Di ranked her lovers in the same way the red-top gives players scores after football matches and “Busty Beach Bum” contests. Diana gave John Jr a 10 out of 10. He was “the tops”. He was Di’s star man.

Kennedy topped Diana’s league table of lovers – the points system for which is complicated, but thought to be based on three points for a mutually satisfying score draw, two points for saying something nice about her hair and one point for every disparaging remark made about Charles.

As such, Hewitt scored a commendable but slightly disappointing 9 out of 10. Oliver Hoare held his own and the bronze medal position with an above average 6.

And in last place – although this is by no means a definitive list – was Charles, barely making it back to the stables on a pathetic and tired 1 point.

It was all so tatty, so tawdry, so tabloid. And we began to wonder what Diana would have made of it all were she alive today.

And, in all likelihood, we could have caught up with her at Live8. Surely Di would have rocked up to the big rock concert and given it all for poverty.

“Down with the monarchy,” she’d have screamed at Live8 and G8. “We want a revolution and we want it now! And we want it in a nice dress…please!”

Tony Blair was all for overthrowing the world order – well, he’s on his way out and every revolution needs a salesman.

And on Friday there was Tony cosying up with Bob Geldof in the Mail. The pair were the MTV generation – in Comfi-Slacks.

Sitting on an orange bench, showing off his Make Poverty History wristband, Tony spoke to some teens and fielded pre-recorded questions from Destiny’s Child and rap artiste Snoop, who asked him if it was President or Prime Minister Tony Blair.

We never got to hear Tony’s reply to that. Nor he and his Ugly Rumours play Hyde Park…

Paul Sorene is the Anorak’

Posted: 4th, July 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Three Lions On Her Chest

‘FOR the past seven years Nancy Dell’Olio has been Sven Goran Eriksson’s main strike partner.

Despite his brief flirtation with a very forward blonde from his native country, the nippy Italian has remained Sven’s first choice and has continued to play alongside the coach of England’s football team.

On Tuesday we saw the pair limbering up for a bout of something or other. “The Karma Sventra,” said the Sun’s front page. “A Sven and Nancy guide to holiday love.”

Over a double-page spread, readers who want to learn what it is about wealthy Sven that sends a secretary’s pulse racing got to see the silver ferret going through the motions with his Nancy.

“Play in any position,” said the headline, as the Sun invited readers to watch Sven engage something “between yoga, the Karma Sutra and all–in wrestling” with his “flexible friend”.

We don’t dare give this workout a name, but do give our heartfelt thanks that Sven chose to do whatever it was in a pair of shorts and not a thong.

In any case, Sven’s love life was to get more interesting. Another of his conquests, the thrusting Faria Alam, had taken the stand at an employment tribunal – she claims to be the victim of a constructive dismissal from her post at the FA.

We heard how the England manager had seduced her away from then FA chief executive Mark Palios with the come on, “You’ve never tried me, give me a chance”. And that FA executive director David Davies tried to tap her up.

Alam alleged that Davies, a former BBC reporter, had come on to her, made advances, tried to woo her. Faria didn’t want three lions on her chest, and claimed to have rebutted his unwelcome advances.

Davies, for his part, denied any wrongdoing, calling the allegation “cruel”, “grotesque” and “callous”.

The case goes on. A sordid tale full of cheeky one-twos around the office, mazy runs through the legal system and FA own goals.

The only surprise is not how many men were interested in Alam, but that the moneymen at Chelsea were not.

And neither was Charlotte Church. She was busy elsewhere. On Tuesday we learnt that she’d been away and had flown 12,000 miles to be with her lover, ruby star Gavin Henson.

In New Zealand for just three days, Charlotte had travelled light, taking along the bare essentials: chocolate body balm, naughty lingerie and a bathtime love potion.

But Church wanted more, and on Wednesday we read what she likes to do when she isn’t turning her man into a finger of fudge.

The Telegraph lined up 10 shot glasses full of vodka and a glass of Charlotte’s early evening livener of a Cheeky Vimto (two shots of port, and a bottle of WKD original blue vodka) to show how much she can down in an evening.

In excess of the Government-approved 21 units of booze a week in a single session, the clear minds at Alcohol Concern were aghast.

“Over 10 units and the chances are you are going to be intoxicated,” said the paper’s expert knowingly. We sat back in amazement.

But by Friday, Church was doing a passable impression of the Crazy Frog and going potty in Cardiff.

We heard that police had to break up a “huge row” between Church and her former boyfriend, Kyle Johnson. Johnson, you will remember, sold secrets of he and Charlotte’s love affair to a newspaper. So when they bumped into each other in a Cardiff bar, words were exchanged.

Bad words were said. Two men exchanged blows. The bouncers threw the singer and Johnson out. Police then arrived and told the exes to calm down. Then the pair went into her flat in Cardiff and the row continued.

It was too, too much. The Voice of an Angel behaving in such a terrible fashion… Had the world gone mad? Whatever next?

Good job we’ve got Tim Henman to uphold the values of a decent society. Come on, Tim…

Paul Sorene’

Posted: 25th, June 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

The Jackson 12

‘WE’D read about it for weeks. The world was gripped. What would the outcome be? And last week we found out the truth: Jordan gave birth to a baby boy.

That was Tuesday at 10am. But as medics were being pumped for quotes by Wapping’s keenest minds – Had the nipper taken to mum’s breast as keenly as the tabloid press had? When would Jordan return to modelling? Was the baby delivered in the same Portland Hospital bed as that in which Posh had had her Romeo? – the Jackson jury was deliberating.

And just after 10pm, the jurors delivered their verdict. Michael Jackson was innocent of all ten charges levelled against him. Michael Jackson was over the moonwalk.

But even with his total acquittal, and the promise to change his ways, there are people who believe there is no smoke without fire.

And though the singer’s head was not ablaze, the Sun heard from Jackson trial juror Raymond Hultman.

Hultman said Jackson displayed a “pattern of molesting young boys”. And in bolder terms: “Michael Jackson probably molested boys.”

Probably?

But not with Arvizo. At least not beyond any reasonable doubt. And certainly not without a Jackson comeback retrial.

No sooner had we heard from professional Michael Jackson case juror No.1. then it was time to hear from another. Step forward, raise your hand and repeat “Jacko dad stared at me in deli” Pauline Coccoz, a blonde 46-year-old delicatessen worker.

The story goes that two weeks before the trial ended, Pauline was at work. A customer approached. She looked up, and her eyes were met with a “beady” gaze.

The man with the eyes like lifeless buttons was none other than Joe Jackson, father of Michael, who was shopping in the store with his wife, Katherine.

“Joe’s stare was only for about 20 seconds, but it was the longest 20 seconds of my life,” said Pauline.

It must have been awful to be presented with such an anecdote with which she will certainly dine out on for years to come.

But while we were distracted by the Jackson 12, the Sun’s man in a blazer was gaining access to Sandhurst, the Royal Military College in Surrey, where he would get close to Prince Harry and even make a bomb!

No, not a bong, that’s a tool for smoking cannabis. This was a bomb. Well, at least it was an approximation of such a device lump, fashioned from a lump of blue plastercine, some wires and a portable alarm clock.

But it COULD have been a bomb. And Harry MIGHT have been blown up.

While military minds and suicide bombers wondered how the Sun can nearly blow someone up with plastercine, Harry was at his studies.

Having perfected the art of urban camouflage – chinos, baseball cap, spliff, bout of mindless violence – Prince Harry had moved swiftly onto Module 2 of his Army training.

As the Mail said, the young Prince had been taking ‘The Exemplary Officer’ course at Sandhurst.

The paper told us that the course covers “everything from which cutlery to use at the dinner table to how to give the loyal toast” – vital weapons in any officer’s kit bag.

And how to pass the port. The received method it not to smash the bottle into the head of the person to your right, nor is it to take a swig and wipe the top clean with your thong before vomiting into the gutter, but to pass the decanter to the left.

It’s all quite simple, and Harry will not go too far wrong if he employs the simple and refined cannabis etiquette.

“Don’t Bogart the port,” as they now say in the better billets…

Paul Sorene is the Anorak’

Posted: 18th, June 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Real Love

‘LAST week began with a question: “Do you know the brunette?”

The Sun wanted anyone who could identify the woman seen kissing David Beckham for “15-20 seconds” to get in touch. There was an email address and phone number for just this purpose.

Posh used neither, and preferred to give her views via the Mirror. “It’s a pathetic joke,” said Posh. “Fans come up to him all the time. It’s as if it’s part of the job.”

Hold the phone. If married and very much in love Day-vid’s kissing other women is a joke, surely it’s more cruel than pathetic. And is chewing a fan’s face off in David’s contract? Are Real Madrid pimping their star player out to the club’s supporters? And, if so, can we expect to see some of the less photogenic, fatter and more masculine Madrilenos locking lips with Dave?

Meanwhile Posh was pouting hard. She had something important to share with the world. “I’ve got so much saggy skin on my stomach! And I’ve got no bum at all,” said she. “I might fit into jeans but, trust me, I look really awful naked.”

We trusted her. Just as we trust David.

In any case, if we want to ogle fuller-figured women, there was Charlotte Church.

The papers had wanted to talk about world debt relief, but something more pressing came up – Charlotte Church was seen in a dress at Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year ceremony.

The former Rear of the Year (jeans section) was spotted in a hideous, multi-patterned blend of pink swirls, leopard skin and unflattering hip-hugging cream.

We’re unlikely to see such a dress again, at least this side of Lagos. And it’s easy to picture Charlotte doing her bit for African poverty by wrapping her outfit up in a black bin liner and dumping it outside Bob Geldof’s house.

That’s if it’s good enough for his holiness. News was that the patron saint of pop would not be asking Posh, arse or no arse, to play Live 8 with the rest of her former Spice Girls. They just weren’t popular enough. They could f**k right off.

Pardon our free use of expletives. We just imagine it’s how Geldof would have phrased it. Indeed, it’s pretty much how everyone speak these days, especially on television where there’s too much f***ing swearing.

And on Thursday, having located Ms Loos on Celebrity Love Island – and left her there – we heard her fellow castaway from central casting, Paul Danan, tell Isabella Hervey she was a “f***ing bitch”.

That was no way to treat a Lady, even if she was wearing a bikini and appearing on a TV show designed to give British TV its first live shag.

No sooner had the Mirror spotted one flare up than it had switched over to the Big Brother encampment and heard wannabe fishwife Lesley scream at “silly little tart” Sam: “One day you’re going to have the s*** knocked out of you.”

Lesley was not good enough to tell Channel 4, which broadcasts the show, when the beating will occur, so denying TV producers the chance to advertise it and produce some teasing trails.

They could have called it Celebrity Happy Slapping, and sold it as the first show made with a mobile phone audience in mind. But Lesley failed to elaborate on her confident prediction.

And while Channel 4 bosses sense a missed opportunity, we offered the show our hearty congratulations for combining TV’s twin passions of swearing and violence.

It might even just help us through the short summer season without football…

Paul Sorene is the Anorak’

Posted: 10th, June 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Spice World

‘WILL it be “Yes” or will it be “No”? It’s not yet been put to a public vote, and the decision on the biggest news of last week has yet to be made. And we ask it again: will the Spice Girls perform at Live Aid II?

‘There’s no need to be afraid…’

On Monday, the Mirror was unfurling its union Jack dress and screaming “Non!”

The Mirror had spoken to someone or other at the BBC, which is to broadcast the show on July 2, and they had apparently told the paper, who told the world, that “with all due respect to them [Spice Girls], Live 8 isn’t Party in the Park”.

So what is it then? “It’s a political rally to out pressure on world leaders and their kind of pop act didn’t seem right for this kind of event.” They were, to use the Mirror’s words, “plastic pop”.

How so? Come on. Would a selfish non-politicised band consider singing, “If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give”? And as for Girl Power and the championing of a woman’s right to vote and flash her knickers, well…

And we wonder how if the selfless Spices are not allowed in, why the likes of Robbie Williams singing a version of We Will Rock You and Oasis doing for the Who’s My Generation what they have previously done for the Beatles oeuvre are.

While we all have a rethink – and slowly come to realise that Destiny’s Child, who will be playing, are something other than a manufactured trio, and how being bootylicious is not a chance to brag about your big arse but a biting satire on world hunger – we wonder if Geldof has got it wrong.

On Tuesday, he was fessing up. “I spoke to them [Spices] this morning and it’s looking good that they will be there.” Saint Bob went on: “There’s a lot of stuff they have got to sort through…There are only two people in a marriage, remember – but five in a band.”

Unless, of course, the Girls are in a polygamous marriage, which opens up an altogether different debate, and makes us wonder which one, if any, is the man of the outfit. (Answers on a shell suit to the usual address.)

By Friday, the debate had turned into a cause, and, as with every worthy mission to save, there was Coldplay’s Chris Martin happy to offer a few bon mots on what’s what.

Martin, who is fast turning into pop’s Mr Rent-A-Quote, said in the Sun how he hopes the Spices will play because they were a “phenomenon”. “They should get back together and do it.”

No, not that ‘it’, Rod Stewart. Oooer, too late! He’s only gone and done it. And on Thursday, we turned greener than a Crazy Frog bogey to the news that Rodders has gone and got his Penny in the club.

And what a club it is – none too exclusive and open to any of Rod’s six born children, two former wives and now his latest leggy squeeze, dear Penny Lancaster.

Which made us all wonder: if Rod can still do it at 60, how long before those young and frisky Big Brother housemates get it on?

And threaten not to stop until Ginger, Posh, Scary, Baby and the other one resume their rightful place as spokespeople for the planet’s hopeless multitudes…

Paul Sorene is the Anorak’

Posted: 3rd, June 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment

Boys In The Hoods

‘CLOTHES maketh the man, and the man maketh lots of greenhouse gases that will one day kill us all.

Just ten more fines and Pc Mansell would have enough cash for a new race car

Helpfully, Japan’s finest brains are onto this problem, and last Monday we were being introduced to Cool Biz, an attempt to get the country’s so-called salarymen to cast aside their suits in favour of new airy garb.

The effect would be to cut-down on the need for air-conditioning, so vital in keeping the men the polyester and wool uniforms of corporate anonymity cool in the summer months.

But would the outfits achieve the twin goals of keeping Japanese manhood chilled, while getting Japanese womanhood hotter than a wasabi enema?

Time will tell. But items like a top which incorporates the pleat of an evening shirt with the sleeves and back of a polo shirt is more likely to go the same way the short-sleeved suit favoured by Tsutomu Hata, the former Japan prime minister, who went about looking like his clothes have been hacked to bits by a vengeful lover.

By Friday, male apparel had taken a sinister turn, and the papers told of one Dale Carroll, a 16-year-old from Manchester with a criminal history that embraces throwing fireworks at cyclists, driving a car over the pavement and attempting to cut down a CTV lamppost with a chainsaw.

Carroll is a human Crazy Frog. With a Manchester accent. In a hood. With a ringtone.

So bad is Carroll that he’s been banned from wearing hooded tops for five years. Of course, if the scamp really wants to evade detection and look like every other law breaker on the block, he should move to Derbyshire and dress up as a traffic cop.

All week, we were treated to tales of how the police in that locale uphold one law for themselves and one law for the rest of us.

Not only were we frog-green with envy at how speeding cops escaped punishment for breaking the rules, but we were appalled that road safety played second fiddle to camaraderie.

But we were wrong. Of course we were. Firstly, our police are a selfless bunch who only speed so as we don’t have to. They lay their lives on the line.

Secondly, yobs are not born the second they pull on a nipple-shaped hat. No, sir. Indeed, on Wednesday we learnt that yobs can be born as much as made.

Just as you can inherit mum’s teeth and dad’s Comfi Slacks, you can be imparted with a gene that gives you an ardent desire to smash someone’s face in. It’s not your fault. It’s theirs. They screw you up, your mum and dad.

Just ask Julie Williams, whose three girls, created fresh life on their 12th, 14th and 16th birthdays respectively. It’s was mum’s fault, said the Mail. It was the school’s fault, said Julie.

It was in the genes’ fault said the scientists. Which left us all free to blame God, the Government and men in suits…

Paul Sorene’

Posted: 27th, May 2005 | In: Broadsheets | Comment