What's happened to saving the planet? And Smack and Chet, or, if you like, Chet and Smack (his funny valentine)

What with Libya, the atrocities in Syria, the Milibands pledging each other eternal loyalty (for which read ‘I’ll get that bastard brother of mine just as soon as I can’), Kate buying her dresses at Oxfam, drought being declared throughout the country despite the very heavy rain everywhere and widespread flooding, ‘climate change’ has had rather a poor Press these past few months. All together now: well, there’s a shame. But the debate is still going on, and canny businessmen throughout the land are still making a mint by building ‘wind farms’ everywhere, usually where no one wants them, on the back of government subsidies. It’s not really the government, of course, that is providing the money – we are.

I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of ‘climate change’ and whether it’s ‘man-made’, down to sunspots, just natural change or some mad scheme by the Teletubbies to take over the world. Life is simply too short for that. Either you believe that unless we do something now! we’re all off to Hell in a handcart, or you are thoroughly convinced it’s all stuff and nonsense dreamed up by damned lefties, I mean, look, it’s on record that the Vikings not only grew grapes on Greenland, but regularly used to sunbathe on the beach, and yes, I would love another G&T, but could you go a little easier on the tonic, please?

Me? I just note that we all love a disaster as long as it doesn’t involve us, and happens elsewhere.
There is a strong ‘apocalyptarian’ streak in all of us. A few years ago The Economist ran a feature detailing the various doomsday scenarios which had frightened the living daylights out of mankind for these past few hundred years, of which the Second Coming was always a favourite. The various Christian denominations learned very early on the best way to keep the faithful in line was to scare the living shit out of them.
In my lifetime the various coming disasters which were relied upon to put an end to humanity have ranged from ‘overpopulation’ (there won’t be enough food to got around / the Red Chinese – remember them? – will burst through their frontiers in search of Lebensraum), nuclear annihilation (which meant every earnest young man and woman and their beards and duffel coats were obliged to march to Aldermaston at least once a week calling for disarmament), acid rain (which was going to see off our forests for ever and always and leave Europe an arid wastleand), Aids (which was going to decimate humanity within months unless we all stopped shagging once and for all) and now global warming (there’s only 24 hours left to save the planet!)

That’s all changed now, of course. For one thing, no one refers to ‘Red China’ anymore, least of all the comrades in Peking / Beijing (it’s apparently racist to refer to Peking and Ceylon it’s got to be Beijing and Sri Lank, so that’s my goose cooked) because they are all – well, there’s no point in sugaring the pill – capitalists now. And anyway there’s even more of them (several hundreds of millions living on the poverty line by the way – so much for the ‘revolution’) but they still haven’t the stomach to invade Surrey in search of Lebensraum.

The fairweather bleeding hearts have also stood down on the Aids disaster (remember all those natty little red Aids badges they attached to their lapels. Can’t get one for love or money now). Granted it loome large in the late Eighties, but it has mainly peaked here in the ‘civilised’ West and we are, more or less safe (at least those of us who don’t own an extensive Judy Garland record collection). That Aids is still causing havoc in Africa and Asia (especially Russia) where in some countries infection rates are horrendous is, of course, neither here nor there, apparently. We in the West are OK now, so what is all the fuss about? Come on, get a grip.

As for ‘nuclear annihilation’, well gone are the good old days when only the Yanks, the Brits, the Frogs and the Ruskies had the Bomb. Now, it seems, everyone does, not least, India and Pakistan, who aren’t particularly inclined for a bit of peaceful negotiation when they fall out and from where I sit look more likely to pick a fight at the drop of a hat than not. But where are all the earnest folk in their duffel coats urging Britain to disarm? Well, a few years ago, they were all attending Aids benefits, but now the West is off the hook on that score, they have moved on to saving the planet. Unfortunately, first the Egyptians, then the Bahrainis, then the Libyans and now the Syrians have shown us they have other preoccupations.

. . .

Here are before and after pics of the great jazz trumpeter and occasional singer Chet Atkins. I dug out these two photos a few days ago specifically to post on this blog, but now I can't for the life of me remember why. Chet was once a good-looking young man described as having matinee idol looks. When he died (falling out of his Amsterdam hotel bedroom it seems while high on heroin and coke) he had lost those good looks and then some.

So all I will say is that they should be a warning to young folk everywhere: stay off the jazz!

One book and one film about the shooting of JFK. One is well-researched and fascinating, the other is a piece of cack. Sorry, Oliver.

I have just finished reading The Kennedy Conspiracy by Anthony Summers, and boy it is some read. Halfway through reading it, I sent off for a DVD of Oliver Stone’s JFK and sat through that, too. The two are like chalk and cheese. Summers is a journalist and former television producer, who worked on Granada TV’s World In Action (which, in its day, was highly respected) and he approaches the subject of Kennedy’s murder methodically and with a marked lack of drama. He states that his aim was not to reach a conclusion as to who was responsible for bumping of JFK or to ‘solve’ the case, but to marshal as much as possible of what we know so far. And he manages to marshal a great deal.

Oliver Stone had a completely different agenda and one which is true to what seems to me to be something of a champagne socialist outlook. I can’t deny that he can make very entertaining films, but the thesis of his film strikes me as being 24-carat bollocks and then some. Sorry, Oliver, but it does. (There is also the rather irritating fact that JFK was made in Hollywood, whose producers are not known for their interest in history and the truth, rather bums on seats and the cash to be made from getting those bums onto the seats.) According to Stone at the core of the conspirators was America’s military industrial complex who were rather alarmed by Kennedy’s intention to pull out of Vietnam. Stone postulates that the heads of the FBI, the CIA and the US armed forces were involved and that the ‘conspiracy’ went to the highest level with Kennedy’s deputy and successor Lyndon Johnson being in it up to his neck.

Naturally, I have no way of knowing what really happened more than anyone else, but Stone’s thesis does strike me as just so much steaming cack. He doesn’t help his case by inventing characters and scenes, including a ludicrous gay orgy involving two of the central villians on the ground. Some pretentious git might, at this point and in Stone’s defence, begin to talk about ‘dramatic truth’, but I’m not buying that either. In fact, the more I think about the film, the less it hangs together. If the security establishment really wanted to ensure Kennedy was bumped off, would they really have left organising it to two wacky gays, one of whom used to walk around in an orange wig and false eyebrows? There is also a welter of 'fact' - the rather neat and clean looking hobos who were rounded up, but who then disappeared who Stone would have us believe are CIA agents.

Although Summers doesn’t reach a conclusion — I repeat that he is at pains simply to present what we know and to allow the reader to reach his or her own conclusion — what emerges from his account of the assassination is that Kennedy was probably bumped off in a conspiracy between anti-Castro exiles and Mafia who were aided and abetted to a certain extent by rogue elements in the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence services of the armed forces and the Dallas police department. The central character, Lee Harvey Oswald, was almost certainly — as he realised within hours of the assassination and announced to the world before he, too, was murdered — a patsy set up to take the wrap.

. . .

I’m not claiming, never would claim, that I, too, could never be hoodwinked, but everything about Summers book rings true. Despite the often outlandish incidents he relates and his often bizarre protagonists, the tone of his book is utterly unsensational. I mention that the possibility that Summers’ book might be just another in a long line of flawed accounts of an enduring mystery because by chance when I had just started reading the book, I received an email in response to one I had sent warning me off Summers in no uncertain terms. Summers, the email’s writer suggested, was all ‘this might have happened’, and then, within a few pages putting forward his postulations as accepted fact.

Well, I am familiar with that technique, and very effective it is, too. Eric von Daniken (the author of Was God A Gooner?) and a certain Graham Hancock (who writes pseudo-intellectual volumes suggesting that the Bible is full of encoded references to next year’s Premier League results written four thousand years ago!) and many others put it to use with great effect. (‘As I showed several pages ago, when the angels arrived on Earth, they were wearing Arsenal shirts. Could it be that they made their way straight to the Emirates Stadium, or rather to that part of Europe which 30,000 years later would be chosen as the site of the Emirates Stadium? We can’t say for sure, but ...’ ‘As I demonstrated earlier, the angels who arrived on Earth as the emissaries of God and were wearing the Arsenal strip immediately made their way to what would later become North London. Were they looking for the birthplace of Arsene Wenger? Or if not his birthplace, the place on Earth which would forever be associated with his work on this planet? We can’t say for sure, but ...’). It’s a technique you can also spot a mile off and it is not one Summers employs.

I suppose one problem he does face, which is certainly not his fault, is that a great deal of what his cast of characters do often makes no sense or is contradictory. And in his account

an awful lot of people seemed to have some kind of direct or indirect connection with the security services, which is invariably held against them. Another hurdle he must overcome is to get us, the reader, to accept that, according to his account, there was a great deal of disloyalty verging on treason in the CIA and FBI. And one small problem I had with his book was that an acquaintance with a guilty party most certainly doesn’t imply guilt all round. So we are told that so and so was ‘an associate’ of so and so. Fair enough, but in truth a mere association doesn’t prove anything either way.
But, on balance, Summers more than gets my vote.

. . .


Stone’s work is another kettle of fish entirely. I mentioned the entirely fictional characters he comes up with (‘Willie O’Keeffe’, a gay prostitute, and ‘Bill Bruissard’, an assistant district attorney), but the character who really takes the biscuit is a Mr X. Stone’s film is based on a book by the former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in which he recounts how he tried to solve the Kennedy assassination. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know whether Mr X appears in Garrison’s book or is an invention by Stone. That character, who Garrison travels to Washington to meet in a cloak and dagger encounter in a park near the White House, is key to the whole military industrial complex, CIA, FBI and White House ‘conspiracy’.

Stone shows him as a retired army man who once headed a ‘black ops’ department who was not ‘in on the conspiracy’ and was conveniently sent on a mission to Antarctica at the time Kennedy was killed. And Stone has Mr X confirm to Garrison that the bad guys are those in charge. It is all rather to pat and convenient for my taste. And Stone makes no mention whatsoever of the murky Cuban exiles and mafia men (not least Jack Ruby, who murdered Oswald and thus silenced him) for which there is overwhelming evidence that they were heavily involved in all kinds of skullduggery to do with Kennedy’s murder. But look at Stone’s film and it is all apparently an open and shut case. Well, up to a point, Mr Stone.

. . .

Finally, I suppose, there is the question of whether there even was a conspiracy at all and whether Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t actually work entirely alone, as the Warren Commission concluded. Well, all I can say is that once I had seen the short snippet of film shot by Abraham Zapruder (which is available on You Tube), it seemed pretty obvious to me that Kennedy was hit twice. The first bullet came from behind in an area from where Oswald was allegedly shooting, but the second, fatal shot, came from in front of Kennedy (from somewhere on the now notorious grassy knoll).

So whether or not Oswald was one of the assassins, he most certainly wasn’t working alone.

Well, that’s all right then: Blatter reassures the world ‘it’s just a family tiff’

good news from Zurich where Fifa’s owner (or is that king, I can never remember) has reassured the world that the world football organisation is not in crisis after all. Well, that really is quite some relief, because I was under the impression that dollars, euros, roubles, pounds and Swiss francs were sloshing around with abandon and that Blatter was a crook. Well, apparently not, it seems. In view of his upcoming coronation on Wednesday to renew his kingship (or would that be ownership – please, someone, set me straight on this one), he thought that it might help that the allegations that

Very he and his cronies were stuffing their pockets and those of others with bribes and backhanders simply wasn’t true. On the other hand two chaps called Jack Warner, up until now his deputy king, and Mohamed Bin Hammamm, who was rather hoping he would be crowned on Wednesday, are most definitely wrong ’uns, according to Blatter, and should not be tolerated in polite society. Or not as the case may be. Fifa’s secretary general (or is that Blatter’s accomplice) insists that comments he had previously made about Bin Hammamm – that the man was a complete scoundrel who had bought the 2022 World Cup final for Qatar – had been ‘taken out of context’. What he meant was that Bin Hammamm was a nice chap, but sometimes he didn’t seem to know how to hold a sherry glass. All very innocent, you see. Nothing to worry about. No, sir. The problem is that Fifa’s main sponsors, Coca Cola and Adidas are beginning to get just the teensiest bit worried. And if there is any stuffing of money by some into the back pockets of others going on, at the end of the day it is their money. So, well, you know, let’s not overstate this, but business is business, and Coke and Adidas would, all things being equal, not want to have their brands associated with what is essentially a gang of crooks. Allegedly. Better get that in. I’m not daft, you know.

What’s cooking (Pt 2): a load of bollocks on TV served with hype and desperation. And thank you, Mr Dylan

If you want to make cheap television, go down the ‘reality show’ route. If you want to make cheap television which has the spurious aura of class make a ‘chefs/cooks competition’ show. Time was when we had simple cookery programmes (and boy did the British need them). I can’t actually remember seeing them, but the granny and grandaddy of them all here in the UK were Fanny and Johnny Craddock. Then there was someone called The Galloping Gourmet, but I can’t even be arsed googling the name to find out who he was. More recently we had Delia Smith, whose career followed the usual trajectory of the Press building her up to be the hero of our times, then to take great delight in knocking her down again as old hat. Though Delia (you only have to use her first name because everyone in Britain knows who you’re talking about) ruled the roost, there was competition — that is they all had their own TV series — from Antony Worrall-Thompson, Rick Stein, some fat Italian bloke, Keith Floyd and briefly Ainsley Harriot (who is stilled billed as a ‘celebrity chef’, although I don’t know why. Incidentally, the very term ‘celebrity chef’ indicates how bloody daft it has all become. For some reason it doesn’t actually sound quite as daft as ‘celebrity accountant’, ‘celebrity manager’ or ‘celebrity bus driver’ but it should. But as we also have celebrity gardeners’ — as in ‘my nan used to go out with Alan Titchmarsh’, I suppose celebrity I’m on a sticky wicket).
Of the younger generation there is Jamie Oliver, and then there was a whole raft of chefs who took part in Ready, Steady Cook, who were all working chefs and whose names gained greater currency because of the show, including Nick Nairn, Ross Burden, James Martin, Tony Tobin and Paul Rankin. So given the popularity of these TV shows you might conclude that the standard of food in Britain has risen. Well, don’t. It’s still usually reheated pigswill. It’s one thing watching a cookery programme and ‘gaining tips’, quite another to put them in practice. For example, despite all the good advice, the method of choice for preparing vegetables in Britain is still to boil them for half-an-hour until they show no sign of life whatsoever. And if even that is too challenging for your soap-hungry family, you can get a full meal — meat and two veg — and your local supermarket for less than the price of a pint. Of why not get something ready-prepared and stick it in the microwave for five minutes?
The irony is that meals don’t have to be prepared in under five minutes, that cooking from scratch is not difficult, and that buying fresh ingredients is not only makes for more enjoyable and healthier meals (all that ready-made stuff has to have all kinds of preservatives in it to ensure it stays ‘fresh’ until it is bought, not to mention the vast amount of salt, sugar and fat included to boost ‘taste’) but cheaper. The meal I described a few days ago — breast of lamb, leeks and new potatoes — cost around £4.50 for four.

. . .

The era of the ‘cookery show’ a la Delia and the others came to an end when they all more or less ran out of dishes to show us. I mean there are only so many times you can demonstrate how to prepare choux pastry, so the next move was to send them all abroad or give them some gimmick. Rick Stein buggered off to cook on French canals, Keith Floyd prepared soufflés on a primus stove in the Serengeti and Ainsley Harriot went back to his roots in the West Indies to bake cakes in an oil drum.
The gimmicks with which ever more desperate broadcasters tried to make their show stand out were several and each even dafter than the last: Two Fat Ladies was presented by two fat ladies who used to travel around on a motor bike and only came to and end when one of the fat ladies died. ‘One Fat Lady’ doesn’t have quite the same appeal. That seems to have led to The Hairy Bikers whose sole qualifications for having their own cookery show is that they are both hairy, bearded and fat. But neither is

The Hairy Bikers: redefining cooking for the modern world
a cook or has had any cookery experience at all, although what is in their favour is that they are ‘northern’, which, in the whacky world of TV, spells ‘sincerity’ and ‘lovability’. They also have the common touch (which always goes down well in Britain. It usually means that neither they nor their audience is in the least bit embarrassed when they wipe their noses on their sleeves and fart loudly. In fact, it shows they are ‘down to earth’. ‘My mam always used to say “Better out than in”, pet. Shall I do it again?’ Loud laughs and cheers all round.
Once the broadcasters had run out of countries to visit, and I don’t doubt they will have some pillock preparing a three-course meal on Mars just as soon as it becomes technically feasible to get him or her there, the next move was to introduce the element of competition. So now we have Masterchef, in which amateur cooks engage in a cook-off, with the prize being a job with some well-known chef or other, and, of course, the very, very inevitable celebrity version of the show called Celebrity Masterchef (now there’s a surprise). In Hell’s Kitchen, a chap called Gordon Ramsay makes life a misery for those taking part, the rationale being that there is tremendous pressure on chefs when they are working in anger (so to speak) so they had better get used to it. That show led on to another Gordon Ramsay vehicle called The F-word, because apparently Ramsay says ‘fuck’ a lot and for TV execs that kind of thing is important, darling. Typical of this latest trend is the Great British Menu, which pitches professional chefs from around Britain against each other, with the winner being asked to cook a four-course meal for — in the past — The Queen, the British ambassador to France and the Prince of Wales.
What I find so irritating about these shows is the spurious ‘excitement’ and ‘drama’ they all try to introduce into the format. Everything is against the clock and a collapsed soufflé is a tragedy. Then there’s the hype: every single fucking cook taking part is ‘passionate’ about cooking, ‘passionate’ about using fresh vegetables, ‘passionate’ about making sure they use the right size pan, ‘desperate’ to get it right, ‘unbelievably thrilled’ to have reached the third stage of the preliminary rounds and ‘completely and utterly gutted’ when they don’t. And it’s always, always, always ‘amazing’ when they beat their competitors. Oh for a modest ‘yes, I’m rather pleased I won’, ‘well, I do like to get it right if possible’ and ‘oh, well, I’ll try again next year’.
I can’t deny that were I a broadcaster and was charged with coming up with new ideas for programmes, I would also be clutching at straws, so in a sense my gentle rant is rather unfair, but has no one thought to cut back on quantity and aim for quality?

. . .

Next Tuesday, on May 24, Bob Dylan will be 70 years old, and already a round of the usual brouhaha is being published, with everything adding their usual schtick, so get ready for a welter of nauseating saccharine hagiography - ‘voice of a generation’, ‘he spoke for us all’, ‘protest came of age’, ‘redefined cooking for the modern world’ (no sorry, that’s the Hairy Bikers), ‘an earthquake in modern music’, ‘protestor, poet, propet – all the usual bollocks. The Daily Telegraph here in England, which makes it a condition that readers are over 50 and/or have served in the Armed Forces, ran a piece along the lines of ‘doesn’t matter if you have one foot in the grave – so do Dylan, the Stones, The Who and everyone else you wet your knickers/pants over 170 years ago’. Well, bugger all that. I just think he is a great songwriter, had – has – a – though admittedly unusual – voice and in a world where everyone tries so desperately to be a one-off, he is one without even trying.
To this day I get a chill up my spine whenever I hear the first chord of Like A Rolling Stone. (Another song that does that for me is Aretha Franklin’s version of Say A Little Prayer.) People often say about someone great ‘there’ll never be anyone like him’, but that’s nonsense. Of course there’ll sooner or later be someone of similar, perhaps even greater, stature, but I reckon we’ll be waiting some time.
Below are a few photos of the man himself, taken at different stages of his life are below. Incidentally, I could have written in the title to this blog entry ‘Thank you, Mr Zimmerman’, as that was his real name. But that strikes me as pretentious way beyond the call of duty.
Happy birthday, Mr Dylan.

Sex-mad naked Frenchman chases chambermaid down hotel corridor! And British politician forgets his manners! A comparative analysis of the rationalist and empirical approach to scandal with especial emphasis on the tawdry and the dull

In view of the latest scandal involving a French politician, or in this case, a would-be French politician, no one could claim that life is always far less interesting than art. And it also goes to show that life can be just as outrageously clichéd as art: a naked Frenchman chases a chambermaid down the corridor to give her one. As one of our homegrown male Glenda Slaggs would put it: you couldn’t make it up. Incidentally, foreign readers who are rather baffled by my second reference in as many days to Glenda Slagg can go here to find out who she is.
By comparison with the latest Gallic misdemeanour, our current British scandal is pretty small beer. In fact, I feel honour-bound to describe it as a ‘scandal’ it is so pathetically unexciting: several years ago a leading Lib Dem politician got someone else to take the rap when he was caught speeding so he could avoid being banned from driving for six months. Shocked? No, I didn’t think so, but to be on the safe side, I’d best stick in an ‘allegedly’ – he ‘allegedly’ asked someone else to take the rap – Lord, I think I’m going to sleep. (Slightly off-topic – Q: Why did New York get all the crooks and Washington all the lawyers? A: New York had first choice. Having said that, if I had my time all over again, I think I should have tried for the law. But back to my comparative analysis of scandal and how French rationalist scandals beat our British empirical scandals into a cocked hat.)
Depending on how po-faced you are, the French scandal tends to make you smile and eager for further details, while the British ‘scandal’ simply makes you yawn and turn the page of your newspaper in search of last year’s shipping forecast. Certainly, for the chambermaid involved, who is claiming the randy Frenchman actually tried to rape her, it cannot at all have been amusing, but the rest of us are such salacious beasts who are only too delighted to read of the misfortune’s of others that I’m sure we can square it with our sensitivities when we burst out laughing reading the details.
Both scandals – i.e. the one scandal and the other ‘scandal’ – are shot through with the irony that what did or did not happen is way less important than the implications of possible consequences. For the randy Frenchman, who I gather is described as a chaud lapin

by those pretentious enough to drop in French phrases in an otherwise impeccably English piece of prose, was a chap called Dominique Strauss-Kahn (left) who is – or by now perhaps that should be ‘was’ – the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and who intended throwing his hat into the ring to become the Left’s candidate at the next French presidential election. Well, he can stick that ambition in the file marked ‘if only’. More to the point, the IMF is currently working with the EU to help cough up the readies to haul Greece, Portugal and Ireland out of the financial shit. As we know, Greece is already holding out its hand for a second bite of the cherry and given that, not putting too fine a point on it, the future of the euro and quite possibly the EU itself in its present form are at stake, the EU was rather hoping it would all go very smoothly. Well, the bureaucratic side of it all has every chance of going smoothly – it’s those damn money markets everyone is worried about. For if it doesn’t go smoothly and Greece, as I suspect, decides to hold two fingers up to the EU (on which it has form: it more or less did the same when it told lies about its finances to join the euro in the first place) and revive the drachma, it could certainly meadn the end for the euro and, quite possibly, the EU ‘project’.
A second complication which could also have rather more far-reaching consequences than is at first apparent is the question of who will be Strauss-Kahn’s successor. For Dominique had already handed in his notice and was due to leave the MD’s job at the IMF in four weeks in order to start preparing for the big one. And his deputy is also due to leave. Given the delicate nature of the various bailouts, it would suit Europe if the IMF, which is coughing up some of the money, were led by a European. This one is always a ticklish problem as many non-Europeans get rather shirty about the job invariably going to a white honky. Now those who demand the new MD should not be a European have a far stronger hand. Trouble is, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is due to host the next G45 meeting (or is it G7, no G8? No, of course G20), thinks he will look rather foolish if the IMF doesn’t have a European in charge when everyone gathers for drinks and canapés at the Elysee Palace. And French presidents don’t like looking foolish, especially if they are only 5ft tall and are invariably towered over by everyone else except North Africans.
This blog’s France correspondents haven’t yet been in touch to inform me of the mood in the street, but I think the days are over when a Frenchman who is caught with his trousers down

is awarded treble brownie points. Strauss-Kahn has form on that front, having previously faced an attempted rape claim (though, note, no charge) and another scandal a while ago when he was shagging one of his subordinates. But feminism has quite a foothold in France and I reckon even quite a few guys will read of the man’s latest exploits and tell themselves he’s a bit of a plonker. Things still haven’t reached that stage in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi gets ever better poll ratings among men every time he is caught out servicing one of his many ‘nieces’. Italian women, of course, have long thought of him as just another sad old tart.
Pictured is a chambermaid much like the kind Dominique Strauss-Kahn apparently finds quite irresistible

. . .

There are rather dire implications in our very own ‘scandal’. No one actually gives a flying fuck whether or not the politician involved, a rather oily chap called Christopher Huhne (pictured below with his wife Vicky) did or did not ask someone else to

take the rap for allegedly speeding, especially as the story came from the wife he ditched in favour of his new squeeze, a lesbian pole dancer (or bus conductor, I still haven’t been able to establish which it is). She, quite naturally, can’t be at all happy about being ditched, so no one is surprised she blew the gaff. At first she said Chris had asked ‘someone’ to take the rap but wouldn’t reveal who the ‘someone’ was. Now we know she was the ‘someone’, so Vicky is either telling the truth or a very stupid liar. If Chris did actually do what she claims he did (and, yes, I think I falling asleep again, too), he would be guilty of a criminal offence which can carry a jail term. But none of that is what makes it interesting. What makes it rather juicy – OK, as juicy as these things can get in Old Blighty – is the background of the Coalition government, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s growing unpopularity and the suspicion among Lib Dems that he is a bit of a pushover, and the ambitions of the ballroom dancer and part-time politician Vince Cable as well as our very own Chris Huhne to oust young Nick (who I understand had his first shave two weeks ago) and take over. And they, they promise their disaffected Lib Dems will be a damn sight tougher on the bloody Tories than Nick. Oh yes!
Well, what with this ‘scandal’, that would seem to leave Chris out of the running to oust Cleggy, and I just can’t see the faithful taking tippy-toes Cable seriously as an assassin (who reputedly never get the crown anyway), which would leave Cleggy pretty much still in place.
There is one more Lib Dem troublemaker doing the rounds with both eyes on the leadership, one Simon Hughes, who also long ago had ambitions to head up the party, but nothing ever seemed to go right for him on that score. For one thing, for a while he denied being gay, which didn’t go down well with the Lib Dems who don’t mind a gay one little bit, but then came clean and said that although he wasn’t actually gay, he did bat for both sides if and when. That went down even less well, not because the Lib Dems mind a chap or chappess batting for both sides, but they were rather miffed that he didn’t come clean from the outset. There is also a very horrible story I was told about Simon Hughes, but it is so disgusting that I have decided not to believe it and shan’t recount it here.
I should imagine that the only one laughing his socks off at Chris Huhne’s discomfiture is David Cameron, who really is getting a lucky ride. Things were getting a little hairy for David before the speeding ‘scandal’ blew up in as far as Huhne, a Cabinet minister, was causing all sorts of trouble in Cabinet and generally gaining brownie points with the disaffected Lib Dems who want to see the fucking Tories get a fucking bloody nose. (‘Bloody toff scum! Bastards!) Now, he is utterly neutralised, and it looks as though he will stay that way. So David can stick with young Cleggy who despite promising to ‘get tough’ with the Tories (‘I’m going to bloody well start swearing and banging my fist on the table and that kind of thing! You just wait! I’m not nice, I’m really not!) and put into practice something he calls ‘muscular liberalism’ (which sounds so phoney, I can’t even think of a joke. Well, I can but I’m not going to waste it on crap like that).
The Lib Dems are, of course, a goldmine for the Cameron. Without them, he couldn’t have formed a government and that keeps his right-wing in place for the time being. But it also means that all the crap that’s going down over the cuts can be shared with the Lib Dems. In fact, the Lib Dems can be made to carry more than their fair share in such underhand behaviour — bloody Tory toffs roaming the country snatching the bread from the mouths of babes in arms — is quite naturally only to be expected from the Conservatives but not from theose nice fluffy Lib Dems. So when the Lib Dems are guilty of that kind of behaviour, it is twice as bad. (At this point it is worth repeating a comment overheard by one political commentator at last September’s Lib Dem annual conference six months in to the Coalition government. My Lib Dems were very unhappy indeed about their party jumping into bed with those nasty Tory toffs, and one delegate was heard to complain bitterly: ‘I didn’t vote Liberal Democrat to form the government.’ That says it all, really.) So Cameron doesn’t have to do half of all the things the Tory right want him today, excusing himself by saying the Lib Dems won’t stand for it. And he can more or less dictate to the Lib Dems what he does want to do because they know that this is their first sniff at real power in more than 80 years and they don’t want to blow it. In fact, they already have: at the local government elections two weeks ago they were utterly hammered. So as far as they are concerned let the Coalition continue, because if it collapsed and there were a general election, they would no longer have 50/60 seats as they have been accustomed to, but would be back down into almost single figures as they once were when they were nothing but a joke. Actually, from where I sit, they still are a joke, but that’s another entry. Right, I’m off to chase a chambermaid or two.

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And so it goes on, with the euro lurching from dire straits to outright danger, all brought about because the rescuers can’t agree on the right thing to do. They are all agreed that those feckless Greeks most definitely need another several billions in handouts to ensure the country doesn’t grind to a halt. The problem is that the Germans (and I must declare I find them a rather more practical folk when it comes to economic efficiency than some of the other wallies abroad in Europe) who will be coughin up most of the rescue cash are insisting that the ‘plan’ - the Greeks must pull in their belts, cut wages and generally ensure everyone has a miserable existence while their debt is paid off - must be fine-tuned, or even tuned and not so finely. They are in favour of changing the terms of the debt repayment and allowing the Greeks a greater latitude in how they get the money as long as in time the debt is paid off. No sir! say the hardliners from the European Central Bank: forget about debt restructuring, just pull in your belts even more! This alarms the Germans who believe that it will simply piss off the Greeks who will get to the point where they simply say ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, we’re off’, leave the euro and revive the drachma. And they have a point. For one thing, the Greeks could solve their economic problems at a stroke by devaluing the drachma (which would mean loads of cheap Greek island holidays for the hard-pressed Brits who like nothing better than getting takned up on ouzo and shagging a couple of slags from Nottingham), and relaxing once more. It’s at this point, of course, that the ideal of a universal brotherhood of right-thinking Europeans will be put to the test. And, I am rather certain, fail. Institutions can count themselves to be a success when they weather the bad times. The EU was hunky-dory when times were good (an illusion, we now know, built on excessive consumer borrowing and unrealistic cheap Chinese imports, but now the seas have got considerably rougher, the good ship is leaking like a sieve. Now there’s a surprise.