Business as Usual

It has been a reassuring week. I had been getting a bit worried about all that 'change' stuff in America, so I am relieved to see that when Barak Obama said 'troops out of Iraq in 16 months' he really meant 'troops not really out of Iraq in 19 months, just like John McCain would have done'. Politics is alive and well in the Land of the Free!

There was also good news from Ireland, where robbers managed to find a bank which still had some money which they proceeded to steal. The British government is rushing to organise a fact-finding mission to see what lessons can be learned on behalf of Britain's criminal fraternity who are on their knees after the drugs and prostitution market collapsed along with the banking industry. Not that the bankers are being paid any less, of course. It is just that the few who are still bankers are having to stay in to avoid the angry mobs and the many more who are now employed as government ministers have to worry about the tabloids finding out. Which makes all the fuss about Fred Goodwin's pension all the more unfair. I'd have thought that Gordon Brown would have thought £16 million was a small price to pay to get Fred out of RBS before he did any more damage to the economy – he was, by the estimation of a friend of mine who works for the treasury, costing the country around £3,000 per second, after all. Unfortunately for Fred he has committed the cardinal sin of the New Labour era – he has generated a bad headline for the government.

Amusingly, Tony Blair has set up a consultancy which will allow him to advise those governments who are willing to pay him lots of money as to how they should run their country. I am thinking of going into the market myself. For a mere £3000.00 per day, I will show you how to raise funds for your political party by selling government policy, honours, seats in the House of Lords and so on, how to use spurious evidence to drag your country into pointless wars and how to run your country's economy into the ground then get out before the shit hits the fan.

Drunk in Charge

There was more bad news for Gordon Brown today – Scotland has been named as having the world's eighth highest alcohol consumption. I'm told that Gordon is determined to act and intends to appoint an Alcohol Tsar to address the problem. He believes that with a little bit of hard work and focus will soon restore Scotland to number one! Now all he needs is to find someone in the Labour Party who is capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery.

Earlier in the week I had been appalled to learn of the alleged fraud perpetrated by Sir Allen Stanford, who is accused of running one of those massive pyramid schemes, or Ponzi schemes as we are now obliged to call them as the media have decided that the American term is sexier than the old fashioned British one. Interestingly, the same thing happens with the code names given to military operations. The British version of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the obscure Operation Telic and when the Americans launched Operation Desert Storm, the British part of the liberation of Kuwait was called Operation Granby. I once asked an old military friend of mine who expained that this is because our army has been around for much longer than the American one so has used up all the good code names. The tradition was started by King Harold who named his defence of Hastings, rather unfortunately, 'Operation Keep Your Eyes Open'. The Battle didn't actually take place at Hastings, incidentally, but at the nearby town of Battle. Now what are the chances of that happening?

Anyway back to the point, which is, if memory serves, Sir Allen Stanford. On the day the news broke, I was lunching with an old friend, Anthony, and I expressed my indiganation that this chap had sullied the Knighthood with his actions. Anthony tried to reassure me by explaining that Stanford doesn't have a proper Knighthood but rather one that he got from the government of Antigua and Barbuda in return for bankrolling most of the country. This did not make me any happier. I had to give the bloody Labour Party a fortune for my Knighthood – if I'd known I could have got a cheap one in the Caribbean I could have saved myself thousands, and worked on my tan at the same time! Stanford has not, of course, been convicted of anything illegal in America. We agreed, however, that he has already been found guilty of the worst of all crimes – trying to make cricket entertaining. One doesn't go to the cricket to have fun! No, one goes to spend the morning reading the paper, the afternoon slowly getting drunk and the evening sleeping it off. One doesn't want to be interrupted by the game!

Earlier in the week, I noticed that Gordon Brown paid a visit to the Pope, and he will soon be going to visit Barak Obama to pass on the Papal advice. I have it on good authority that Gordon has been telling everyone that His Holiness spoke about Jesus casting the money-changers from the Temple, and how they were then gainfully employed by Pontius Pilate regulating the Judean financial system as it recovered from the mid-1st century economic downturn.

Britain : Leading the World in Wild Oat Sowing!

The country has been scandalized by the story of a 13 year old boy who has fathered a child with his 15 year old girlfriend. When a reporter asked the young chap how he would manage financially he replied, “What's financially?” Gordon Brown has already sounded him out about taking over the Treasury once Alistair Darling finally gets the sack. The Children's Secretary, a man called Ed Balls (yes that is his real name – I double checked) expressed his concern by publicly vilifying the young couple and the local Social Services Department revealed that they would be providing intensive support – beginning by allowing the story to be plastered all over the papers. They will also be taking responsibility for putting the new father through intensive training for his new career appearing on daytime talk shows.

This is a welcome new departure for the Government's job creation policy. After all, the wheels are starting to come off the plan for getting unemployable former bankers off the dole queue by giving them jobs in government. Sir James Crosby has had to leave his job at the FSA, on the grounds that running the Halifax into the ground didn't really qualify him for a job which involves stopping people from running their banks into the ground. If that wasn't bad enough Glen Moreno, who was overseeing the government's massive new shareholding in the nation's banks had to resign after it turned out that he'd spent most of his professional life helping rich people to dodge tax, Tom Daschele style. I am astonished that this took anyone by surprise – he was a banker, after all, so helping rich people to get richer was his job.

Meanwhile, the government's drugs adviser has said that ecstasy is less dangerous than riding a horse. This is true. My daughter Sally once rode a horse into a rave and banged her head!

A Message from Above

The Pope has got into trouble for de-excommunicating or re-communicating or whatever the right verb is, an English Bishop who is also a Holocaust denier and all round loon. The chap in question is called Richard Williamson and, until this week, was virtually unknown in the UK, this being a country which now gets its religious instruction from the sides of London Buses. For this reason we were always spared from having to share in Tony Blair's religious 'journey' while he was Prime Minister. Now that he no longer has any ambition to do anything other than make money and be seen with famous people, he has been speaking at something called a 'prayer breakfast'. He even invited his good friend Barak Obama, presumably to tell him why invading Iraq was a good idea after all.

The BBC has been having further presenter-related problems. Carol Thatcher, who had somehow got herself a job on a current affairs programme got herself sacked after she called an unidentified tennis player a 'golly-wog' and Jeremy Clarkson called the Prime Minister a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot'. He was forced to apologise after massive protests from the Royal Institute for the Idiotic whose members were deeply offended by the comparison to Gordon Brown.

And, just to prove that some things never change, the England cricket team have been hammered by West Indies. The England and Wales Cricket Board, who are responsible for these things, have set a new precedent for decisive action by sacking the coach before the series even began. Good for them!