Monday 25 January, 8.15am Got phone call from Perm Sec’s office, telling me to get to Aldergrove airport and make sure there is no red carpet. DUP don’t look amused that my tie is green. Apparently thery’ve been up all night practicing the scowl and the ‘never’. 9.30am Apparently they’ve been delayed, and they may [...]
This week has been dominated by the Iraq Inquiry, the phoney war precursor to the 2010 General Election and continued political fallout from the apparently unstoppable vagina of scandal surrounding Iris Robinson, MP MLA. The Iraq Inquiry has begun to become interesting. Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, was called upon to give evidence, and instead [...]
A new section of the blog whereupon we kick the tyres on the stories of the week and work out what lessons we can learn. Labour ‘Dodgy Dossier’ Launch Labour are rather keen on launching dossiers, aren’t they? As if their intelligence dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction hadn’t been a clusterbang enough, Alistair [...]
The young man caught up in the Iris Robinson affair story is currently at the centre of a serious attack storm on Facebook. Back at Queen’s University, we had a concept known as the ‘TNF’ which people used to guess the political views of a candidate for election on the basis of the ‘Taigness’ (catholicness) [...]
Fiona Apple has a song, ‘Limp’ which, although directed at a former lover, might well be usefully directed at our old friend Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool, Mortgage Application and Passport Protocol. In the past, if Mandy gave a major policy speech, the serried ranks of Trades Unions, newspaper and TV interviewers would be whip-cracked into [...]
I was bored, and have decided to promote a meme. The #MPsGotTalent twitter meme will track politicians in the UK and associate them with the fantasy talent fellow memeticists assume they have. For instance: @benarchibald believes that Sir Alan Beith (Lib Dem) is an expert knife thrower, that Dr. Ian Gibson (Labour) has the voice [...]
This is not a soak-the-rich budget, and the portion of it which would actually tax the rich hard will raise just over a billion in revenue – that’s against a £650 bn borrowing spree. This is an attempt to sweeten the deal for the sort of people who trade on the politics of envy – [...]
It’s absolutely obvious that the BBC is trying a smash and run on the Conservative Party today, and that the work of Alastair Campbell and the Dark Lord Peter Mandelson is again grabbing hold of the pro labour state broadcaster. I’ll prove it. Nick Robinson, the Political Editor, said on his blog and broadcasts today: [...]
The terror of Clontibret, Peter Robinson MP MLA, is to become First Minister, after the Grand High Wizards (or whatever they’re called) of the DUP elected to nominate him leader of the Party. Whether the Dear Leader Designate deigns to revisit the village of his fame remains to be seen. I’m giving odds of 50:1 [...]
