Doctors used to say that people who die in an alcoholic coma inflict a severe insult to the brain, and this seems to have been the cumulative effect of his rule in Russia on the Russian people. They loved our Levis and yearned for our freedom, or so the story goes, so we endorsed for them a drunken clown whose lucid moments were devoted to the enrichment of his cronies. Sometimes he would defend parliament, at other times shell it with tanks. Why? Don’t remember, it’s all kind of woozy. Anyway, the man was a sport.

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What would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite possibly every man-jack of them was innocent?

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Something strange and disgusting has happened to a country, you couldn’t help thinking, that gives tens of millions to Comic Relief and just two weeks later echoes Mr Blair’s “am I bovvered?” about the easily avoidable deaths of innocents; a country in which the liberal centre has become so cowed by 25 years of brutal right-wingery that no senior politician from either Labour or the Liberal Democrats will risk the wrath of the right-wing press by venting their outrage that sick asylum seekers (”economic tourists”, in Geoffrey Howe’s deathless phrase) are treated like criminals, seized at dawn and moved to holding pens in their nightwear - in Caroline’s case, not even being allowed to fetch her epilepsy pills - for obeying Norman Tebbit’s diktat about getting on their bikes in search of a better life.

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The end of the month holds a special dread these days, because if four weeks have elapsed, one knows with absolute certainty that it will only be minutes before Charles Clarke issues a denial of his total irrelevance.

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I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

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Upsetting as the vision of a distressed young mother certainly is, in the nuclear scheme of things the manipulation of LS Turney for propaganda purposes looks a fairly small step on the long, winding and disturbingly signpost-free road towards regional nuclear proliferation. The anguish expressed here by politicians and pundits stems less, one suspects, from any genuine fear for the officers’ safety - the Iranians may have become audacious, but they are not suicidally stupid and will release them unharmed, if traumatised, as in the similar incident of three years ago - than wounded pride that the naval officers of a once-dominant maritime power should be treated with such undisguised disdain.

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A computer blip is threatening to wreck electronic counting in May’s local elections - delaying the potential overnight declarations in dozens of town halls across England.

Thousands of people who have downloaded postal voting forms from the Electoral Commission’s website could find they cannot be properly validated by their local council.

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Boy, am I looking forward to the next general election. Imagine it, the Clash of the Titans, Brown vs. Cameron!

It’s the political punch-up to end all punch-ups, the prize-fight for the championship, as these two heavyweights trade body-blows over the critical issues that will decide the destiny of the United Kingdom.

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‘All this, lest we forget, concerns a serious criminal inquiry, not some squabble about who moves up or down the cabinet rankings. The attorney general might have a case for arguing we should put a lid on it, given the dangers not only of prejudicing court proceedings, but also of unjustly blackening the reputations of the suspects, several of whom may soon need new jobs. But Lord Goldsmith, as I wrote last month, has tolerated reporting about terrorism suspects (much of it inaccurate) that goes far beyond legal conventions. When it’s a Muslim living in a Birmingham terrace house, the press is allowed to tell us (or invent) anything short of how often he changes his underpants.

…

‘I am not privy to whatever tortuous reasoning led Goldsmith to seek his injunctions, and the high court still refuses to allow the proceedings against the BBC to be reported. But I suspect Goldsmith’s actions betray an establishment mindset. What we, the little people, get to know about our rulers is to be carefully controlled. However, when we, the little people, are in trouble, almost anything can be said and written about us.’

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And I know I shouldn’t have, but I kind of couldn’t help myself. When I saw how tiny she was, I sidled up and did the old ‘Oh my God! Look at that!’ thing, pointing down the street with a look of anguish on my face. The second everyone turned, I scooped up the tiny Jowell, popped her into the paper pastry bag I was carrying and lost myself in the crowd. Before anyone knew what had happened, I was home.

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I was one of 60 citizens in Downing Street on Saturday, but the consultation was a sham, says Liam Curtin.

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But will the time ever come, one wonders idly, when our revisionist historians reconsider the ravings of Comical Ali? The idiocy of most of his statements will, admittedly, endure. Footwear-based supremacy has not been achieved, despite the much-vaunted boast that the Iraqis would be waiting for the coalition forces “with shoes”. But the smile fades when recalling other pronouncements. “Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge,” the old crazy warned. “You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat.” “We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire,” he said later, adding that “they cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege.”

There are, of course, rather fewer than 26 million people in Iraq these days, but even those who dispute the precise extent of the population depletion might agree that it comes to something when, in hindsight, several statements by this preposterous character seem more prophetic than anything spouted by the British government at the time.

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He told us that if everyone were to have just three low energy light bulbs in their houses it would save the equivalent of the country’s entire street lighting CO2 output. Obviously, he laughs, we can’t go round telling people what light bulbs to use. But, as one MP testily said, we’re switching the whole country over to digital television without asking them, why can’t we do the same for light bulbs?

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‘Mr Tokhi and his family had long feared this would happen. He repeatedly pleaded while seeking asylum in Britain that his life was in danger in a sectarian and political blood feud back home . But the Home Secretary at the time decided that Afghanistan was now a safe place thanks to the intervention of Britain and the US, and Mr Tokhi was sent back to his home, and his death, after the appeal process failed.’

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‘On the morning of 22 January at midday the eldest boy rang. “We’re being deported at 8.25 tonight.” The phone went dead. Later Mrs Bokhari rang to say they’d all been handcuffed, put in a car and carted off to Heathrow. I went back to the minister. Not there. “Who’s running this department?” His secretary told me he hadn’t yet made the decision and promised to get on to Heathrow. I did too. My last phone call came from the plane to a background of Mr Bokhari shouting, Mrs Bokhari sobbing, the kids all crying. They took off at 8.25.

‘The fax from the minister saying he’d rejected the case was sent to my Grimsby office after it was closed and his e-mail reached me next day. Cunning that. Three days later the Bokharis arrived in Lahore to find their house daubed with the sign of the cross and occupied by squatters.

‘It leaves a nasty taste. An out-of-control Immigration and Nationality Directorate is doing what it wants to get deportations up. The minister goes along, ratifies its decisions (he hardly ever rejects them), observes its deadlines and strings MPs along, pretending to listen while doing nothing. Perhaps scarring young souls will teach them not to come here when they grow up.

‘Perhaps it will win votes to Labour from the lumpen lunatics who’ve deluged the Grimsby Telegraph’s website with abuse of their soft, immigrant-loving, geriatric, fool of an MP. Perhaps we’ll win enough National Fronters to compensate for the loss of the many liberals this has alienated. I don’t know. But I do know how I feel. Ashamed.’

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British diplomats said privately that they did not wish to create difficulties for the United States at a delicate time and they did not believe it was possible to do it now. Holland, Denmark and Hungary subsequently took the same view.

It is the second time that Tony Blair’s government has torpedoed Italian efforts to spread Europe’s confirmed aversion to capital punishment across the world. The first was in 1999, when a last-minute British “no” killed the initiative.

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(via Blairwatch)

‘There are far too many people attached to our government and our commentariat who are determined to attach important policies to more or less crude threats. Let’s get this out in the open; whenever we do a big deal about “our shared British values”, then the implicit message is “and if you don’t sign up to this list, we’re going to put you on a boat”.

‘Nobody would be so vulgar as to put it in quite exactly those words, but unless you are very careful with the mood music, that’s the message that the audience is going to hear. Now for a rhetorical question; precisely what is it about our experience with radical Islam since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that makes us think “yes, these people respond well to threats”?’

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The paradox is this: Because we can travel large distances quickly, we have to. Because we have to, we do. Because we do, we can’t: Traffic. Strangely the only time people moan about traffic is when they’re in a car. “Bloody traffic” we say, forgetting for a moment that we are ourselves part of the problem we condemn.

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Anti-war protester Brian Haw has won his latest legal battle to maintain his demonstration in Parliament Square.

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That’s the essence of the hype surrounding Guido, that he’s somehow ‘influential’ - he even made one of those tiresome newspaper list of the most ‘influential’ people in the media a short while back (in the low 40s, as I recall) which sound impressive until you looked a bit more closely and notice that Polly Pot was the winner - but come to think of it, just what can one actually point to in order to say that Guido has actually influenced anything?

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Looking increasingly vacant in that ravaged, glassy-eyed way, the widow’s peak stretching the hair-thickening sprays more by the day, his recent statements of intent - sorting out the Middle East, revolutionising university funding, saving the planet from climate change while continuing to star in Carry On Turning Left At The Stewardess - have been so barmily self-contradictory or plain delusional as to suggest the sort of character for whom the first question, on being hurriedly admitted to a clinic, is “Now then, dear, do you know who the Prime Minister is?”

In a vaguely sane political system, with a vaguely coherent written constitution and a vaguely effective legislature, the answer “Tony Blair” would trigger the appearance of a syringe and the whispered request “Straitjacket, sister, quick as you can”. But thanks to this weird, unsettling stasis gripping Westminster, it still qualifies as that rarest of commodities to emit from Mr Blair’s mouth, the literal truth.

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There is a real market in ex-leaders, people who’ve made genuine friends and contacts in their time at the top which can later be utilized at the service of major corporations and consultancies. I’m not so sure Mr T is in this category. It’s not clear to me that anyone’s going to pick up the phone to him in his capacity as a private citizen. It’s a bit like some executive who gets overpromoted, botches the job to the point of dismissal and then can’t find anything on his pay grade. The press release says he’s “decided to step down” but everyone in the know knows he’s a dud.

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First, it is not just homosexuality that all the major religions label immoral. They also say that any sexual intercourse outside of marriage is immoral too. So, the adulterers who sneak away to a seaside hotel for the weekend are also offending religious beliefs of the owner, and could be denied service on this basis. For the sake of consistency, we would expect that the same hotel would also ban a couple with children who were not married.

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I wanted to run into the street, without even pausing to wipe, and hurl myself, boggle-eyed, at passers-by, flapping the magazine around, screaming: “HELP! WE’VE LOST OUR MINDS! I HAVE PROOF! I HAVE PROOF.”

But I didn’t. I stayed put; pooing and afraid.

And I thought: Our leaders lie, and we know they have lied, and there is war in our name, and the world kicks and boils itself to death and we do nothing but stare into the tiny grinning faces of people we don’t even know; faces that are, apparently, more “fast, easy and practical” than language itself.

I give us six years, tops.

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Policy is replaced by narcissism. So, we stay in Iraq, not because we think we can win, but because it shows our enemies the kind of people we are. We scream about the War on Christmas, not because there is one, but because it’s a cipher for our thoughts about immigration. We fight a war on drugs, not because it’s winnable, but because it paints society’s disapproval of narcotic intoxication. We battle “benefit fraud”, not because it’s a sound strategy, but because we disapprove of people sitting on their arses all day at our expense.

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