Let’s face it, as a nation, we’re on a bit of a downer at the minute, aren’t we? Where once Britain produced ships and steel and coal, we now produce buy-to-let landlords and website designers and call centre workers.

So, is it any wonder that Tony Blair wants to put some oomph back into the country’s spirits. Sure, our manufacturing industry is in the toilet and, thanks to the Iraq war, we’re a laughing stock on the world stage, but at least we’ll still be able to rain hot, radioactive death down on our enemies for generations to come. As if raining hot, ordinary death on our enemies hasn’t got us into enough trouble in the last few years.

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Are you sick of jokes about OJ Simpson and his musings of ‘If I Did It’ yet? Hell, a legion of newspaper columns and topical comedy routines in the last couple of weeks have been hung on nothing else. Imagine ‘If I Lied About WMD in Iraq’ by George Bush, they joshed. ‘If I Had Actually Had All My Enemies Killed’ by Vladimir Putin, they japed. ‘If I Could Dance’ by the one with a face like a robber’s dog but thinks she’s a sex kitten who got kicked off ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ (we thought last week while heavily drinking to drown out the cacophonous ejaculate that passes for Saturday night television these days).

And now we can add ‘If I Apologised For Slavery’ by Tony Blair. The Prime Minister came so close this week to saying sorry for the forced transportation of 12 million people and the deaths of three million of them. Without actually saying the ’s’ word you have to wonder what possible purpose his stating the obvious - ‘we condemn its existence utterly’ - actually served. He is, after all, a person who *loves* saying sorry for stuff he didn’t do. The Irish Potato Famine killing a million people? Sorry. The Guildford Four wrongfully spending 15 years in prison? Sorry. Until his slippery wriggling this week we’d have bet an apology for the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs was due any day.

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In the future, said British politics’ very own Lawnmower Man, David ‘Dave’ Cameron this week, political battles will be fought in cyberspace. As he strapped on his virtual reality goggles to launch the Conservative’s new down-with-the-kids ‘Sort-It’ website, he declared the ‘internet revolution’ is ushering in ‘a whole new age of political communication and engagement’ where ‘the old answers will not work’.

Now, to run the terrible, if unlikely, risk of sounding less cool than Cameron, we’d like to ask if the ‘old’ ways of political communication and engagement have really had their day. You know, the quaint, unfashionable stuff like going out and talking to people. Obviously, neither Cameron nor Blair like meeting the public face to face in uncontrolled situations because there are too many variables and too many chances they’ll be made to look like idiots. But it’s a problem of their own making.

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In the new James Bond film, there’s a scene where ‘M’, Bond’s boss, goes on national television and declares that she knows who the villain is, where he is, what he’s up to and, furthermore, that her agents are following his every move.

Now, you’re probably thinking ‘what a preposterous load of old bollocks, that’s far-fetched even by the standards of Bond movies’. Ordinarily, we’d agree (we did make it up after all) but that was before we read the speech given last week by head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

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Blimey, what a week, eh? It’s dark when you go to work and it’s dark when you come home. You’re going to bow to the inevitable social pressures and spend money you haven’t got on Christmas. The news is full of how the terrorist hordes are poised to kill every one of us in the most terrible ways imaginable. Why not have a nice calming cigarette to soothe your nerves? Or on the other hand, don’t. Just don’t, alright?

Before he died, the much lamented comedian and smoker Bill Hicks used to berate the non-smoking members of his audiences. ‘You
know what doctors say,’ he would tell them, ‘”Shit, if only you smoked we’d have the technology to help you”. I got all sort of neat gadgets waiting for me, man. Oxygen tent. Iron lung.’

But Bill, as much as it pains us to say it, was wrong. In Britain at least, lung cancer is a one-way ticket. On the express. According to Cancer Research UK, only 25% of lung cancer sufferers are still alive one year after diagnosis. It’s 7% after five years.

Christ, when we read that we were so scared we had to have a cigarette to calm us down.

This cheery little statistic comes via Dr Crippen, the NHS Blog Doctor, who is a vital caution against having anything seriously wrong with you if you want the NHS to fix it. (Read his full diagnosis of NHS lung cancer treatment).

As the good doctor says, lung cancer sufferers in the US and Europe are twice as likely to still be alive after five years. That’s because treatment is better funded and regarded by the governments in those places. In the UK lung cancer is *bad* cancer.

If you do insist on getting cancer, breast is best apparently. It’s sexy cancer. Treatment is better funded by the Government and receives more attention from specialists. Doctors are, as Dr Crippen puts is, ‘nihilistic’ about treating lung cancer - the patient is stuffed so why bother with expensive treatments to prolong his or her life?

Home Secretary John Reid never misses an opportunity to remind us that he’s the only thing that stands between us and the aforementioned terrorist hordes. How many people has al Qaeda killed in the UK this year so far? Zero.

Back in 2004, he said that for some people, notably the Great Unwashed on their sink estates, ‘the only enjoyment sometimes is a cigarette’. He was against a smoking ban. He was also Health Secretary at the time. Really. Now, how many people does smoking kill in the UK *every year*? Around 114,000 (that includes passive smokers for any of you non-smokers enjoying a quiet moment of non-coughing satisfaction).

John Reid: far more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden. QED.

Now, pass that crack pipe, would you?

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

Update: Jesus Christ. I smoked my last ever cigarette yesterday. (via, again, Dr C.)

The stench of death and defeat that’s now hanging around George Bush’s presidency is reminiscent of downtown Baghdad on a hot day. There are bodies all over the place. And just as Saddam, the architect of Iraq’s pre-war abattoir got notice of his come-uppance this week (a long drop and a short stop), the architect of its post-war slaughter was also pushed from his perch (with an admittedly softer landing, cushioned, no doubt, with lucrative job offers from the defence industry).

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Who knew that the morale of our troops in Iraq was in such a parlous state? Despite our boys being, as Tony Blair said last month, ‘the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for’, the Government, it seems, is extremely concerned that the lads are close to breaking point.

The reason the Government has dug its heels in and refused this week to hold a public inquiry into the Iraq war is because it would ‘undermine’ our troops, the poor, fragile things.

Here we have ranks of men, trained to fight, to kill and, sometimes, be killed. Hard men, in other words. And yet we’re expected to believe that an inquiry into the events that sent them there will destroy their morale. Clearly the British army is collectively on the point of mental collapse, needing only one more setback to reduce it to a parade of blubbing nancy boys.

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Human rights are British. Human rights are as British as the Beatles. As British as the BBC. As British as bitter.

That was the Lord Chancellor, Charles Falconer this week, the man responsible for our legal system, finding an unlooked-for lyrical alliterative outlook in his unelected and illiberal largesse. You have to wonder how much it cost the tax payer to come up with such patronising and transparently contrived nonsense.

Ah, the evergreen Fab Four, our world-renowned broadcaster and the upstanding British pint. Of course, our championing of human rights around the world fully deserves to stand in that glittering pantheon. The thing is, the Government doesn’t perceive human rights in the same way the rest of us do. For them, our core of humane and decent values isn’t so much one of cast iron as one of warm plasticine to be shaped and moulded as they see fit. And like plasticine when you mix all the colours, human rights in this country right now are starting to resemble a shitty brown mess.

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Torchwood, BBC4’s ‘adult’ ‘Doctor Who’ spin-off was launched to a record UK digital television audience on Sunday. If you weren’t able to tune in and watch the television event of the year then - please - pity those of us who did.

Oh God, where to start. We say ‘adult’ although, apart from the odd splash of blood and some gratuitous sex scenes, it would have insulted the intelligence of a six year-old.

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‘Climate change: *Our* green paper’ sneered The Independent’s front-page headline yesterday in its familiar supercilious greener-than-thou style. It offered ‘a more radical’ alternative to what’s expected to be Tony Blair’s ‘toothless’ upcoming climate change legislation.

‘Set annual targets for emission reductions’, ‘Curb road pollution’, ‘Step up the drive for renewable energy’, and ‘Reduce industrial emissions’ were just some of the laudable targets set by the newspaper. But what’s this? ‘Rethink aviation policy’?

‘Unless action is taken to curb the rise in the number of flights,’ it fretted not unreasonably, ‘all other national efforts to reduce emissions will be cancelled out by 2050′.

The thing is, just two clicks of the mouse away from the front page of The Independent’s website, are offers for cheap holidays (flights included) to Naples, Seville, Prague, Barcelona, Budapest, Nice, Monte Carlo, Venice or Rome.

Not as crass, we’ll admit, as the time the Independent’s front page screamed of a possible three degree rise in global temperatures putting ‘100 million at risk’ while offering the chance to win air tickets to New York (have a look) but showing, nonetheless, the same kind of joined up thinking that says you can liberate countries with cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

May we be forgiven for what we are about to admit. We abjectly throw ourselves on your mercy in advance. Oh God. Here we go.

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When you consider what he got up to the last time he was at a low ebb, you do have to wonder whether Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary, was the right person to be the public face of the Mental Health Media Awards this week.

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(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

Erm, right. Welcome to ‘David “Dave” Cameron: Elegant Slumming’. Look out, Private Eye, we’re coming after you. Ha ha! Just let us finish putting our smalls through this mangle and eating our spam butty. Oh, look. A small child. Hang on, young person, just let us finish typing this. If only we’d known you were going to be reading this, dear reader, we’d have finished the chores and put the children to bed.

There. Hopefully you feel a little warmer towards us. Now you know that we’re regular guys who do regular kinds of things, just like you. Isn’t that great? We’re just like you!

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(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

Last year, after Tony Blair’s Labour Party conference speech, we said one or two nasty things about it. To be honest, it was tempting to cut and paste them here again this year. Tony did pretty much the same thing with his conference speech this week and he seems to have got away with it.

So, let’s get the perennially obvious out of the way first. Here’s the checklist of vital ingredients for a Blair conference speech as we’ve wearily come to expect them.

The. Halting. Delivery. Like a. Camp. William. Shatner. So that. Journalists. Can record. His. Every. Word. For. Posterity.

Check.

The strange, verbless sentences. Elevated to tedious cliché. Used again. This year. Oh, God. Again.

Check.

The weird make-up that makes him look like Data the android from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, only not as lifelike.

Check.

Admit it, when it comes to the battle of presentation against content, Tony’s always been more Lionel Blair than Eric Arthur Blair.

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(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing. See also Charlie Brooker: Supposing … Subversive genius Banksy is actually rubbish)

Prankster and guerrilla graffiti artist, Banksy, got himself into trouble this week when his painted live elephant - the star of his ‘elephant in the living room’ art installation in Los Angeles - was ordered to be hosed down by the Los Angeles department of animal services.

The thing is, right, the ‘elephant in the living room’ is a metaphor, yeah? It’s a figure of speech for a subject that nobody wants to talk about. The deconstruction of that metaphor says what exactly? Other than that you’ve got the balls and resources to paint an elephant red?

In a TFT exclusive, we can reveal what Banksy has planned for his next exhibition…

- Demonstrating the cavalier attitude to human life displayed in the liberation of Iraq, Banksy paints the faces of Iraqi civilians on a load of eggs and then makes an omelette with them.

- To highlight the scandal of terrorist suspects being held without trial, Banksy holds a robin while two others, dressed in tiny orange jumpsuits, call out from inside an effigy of the US president.

- Banksy forces the Leader of the House of Commons and his family to climb, one by one, aboard a dromedary with ‘DEMOCRACY’ painted on its side. The last one to manage it before the unfortunate animal’s spine gives out is declared the winner.

- Banksy gets Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein, Anthony Worrall Thompson, Gary Rhodes, Ainsley Harriot, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Ken Hom, Nigel Slater and Delia Smith to make soup in a pan with ‘THE WAR AGAINST TERROR’ painted on it. Banksy tastes it and declares it to be crap.

- Banksy researches his family tree to see if his mother’s brother really is called Robert.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

We were pretty sure that the last vestiges of this country’s dignity and standing in the world departed, like the friends and courtiers deserting Glenn Close at the end of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, after the Blairs gave this mind-scorching interview to The Sun on the eve of the last General Election:

Cherie: Oh come on Tony, strip off. Let’s see that fit body we’ve been talking about.

Tony: You can keep your hands to yourself, Cherie!

The Sun: So how fit are you Tony?

Cherie: Very!

The Sun: What, at least five times a night?

Tony: At least, I can do it more depending on how I feel.

The Sun: Are you always up to it?

Cherie: He always is!

Tony: Right that’s enough - interview over…Come on woman, time to cook my dinner!

(We didn’t make this up. Honest.)

You wonder, fleetingly, if their drinks had been spiked. Just why the public didn’t go on a rampage of disgust like they have in Hungary this week, we never quite fathomed. Perhaps there was something good on the telly that night.

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Come on, be honest. You’d have loved to see Tony Blair’s farewell tour, wouldn’t you? You’d have laughed yourself sick, bought the souvenir t-shirt, and had a big dumb grin on your face every time you had a cup of tea out of your ‘Never Apologise, Never Explain Tour 2007′ commemorative mug. Admit it, part of you is sad that the plans were leaked to the Daily Mirror this week because it’s now unlikely the event of the century will take place.

We’d urge you to read the Daily Mirror’s report on the leaking of Tony’s ‘Farewell Memo’ - you’ll smile for days. ‘He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore,’ was a particularly nice sentiment. If only they’d made that rhyme work properly, it could have been put to a squealing rock soundtrack (we’re thinking the theme from Thundercats) to be played as he strides on stage at each of the carefully picked venues.

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Let’s face it, if we got a nice, fair, humanitarian government tomorrow, huge swathes of people would have a lot less fun. Maybe not Muslims trying to go on holiday, Iraqi civilians or Britain’s underclass but it’s a good bet that many a blogger, newspaper columnist, protester and weekly email comment sheet would be bereft. Railing against the current incumbent scumbags is such a joy.

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We’re not saying some members of the Government are fat, but road protesters are once again taking to the trees and digging tunnels to prevent a bypass being built around the Cabinet’s meeting room. John Prescott is now so large that spacetime curves around him and small objects cannot escape his gravitational pull. He’s orbited by a set of rings - like Saturn - made up of pork pie crumbs, brown ale bottle tops and stray peanuts that missed his slack, stupid gob. Between him and the Lord Chancellor Charlie ‘Accidentally Locked In A Tuck Shop As A Boy’ Falconer, Gordon ‘chocolate fudge’ Brown and John ‘that’s what you get for packing in the fags’ Reid, cabinet meetings are now cheek by jowl by jowl by jowl with Tessa Jowell.

Needless to say, a slender government minister - the newly-designated ‘Minister for Fitness’, Caroline Flint - was wheeled out this week to tell Britain to get off its collective arse and get some exercise. Although the mental image of Prescott, Falconer, Brown and Reid shame-facedly attempting to launch a fitness campaign on national television is an immensely pleasing one, unfortunately there are limits to hypocrisy that even New Labour can’t break.

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It took long enough but finally, after 200 years, the last drop of wit and intelligence was squeezed from political debate this week. From John Wilkes’ ‘That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress’ (in response to the Earl of Sandwich’s assertion, ‘egad sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox’) to John Prescott referring to George Bush as ‘crap’.

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‘You don’t give a damn! You don’t even know about the Palestinian families! You don’t even know that they exist! Tell me the name of one member of the seven members of the same family slaughtered on the beach in Gaza by an Israeli warship. You don’t even know their name. But you know the name of every Israeli solder who has been taken prisoner in this conflict. Because you believe, whether you know it or not, that Israeli blood is more valuable than the blood of Lebanese or Palestinians. That’s the truth, and the discerning of your viewers already know it.’

That was George Galloway raining fire down on a hapless Sky News interviewer this week. (Watch the full spectacle here) It’s about time someone went on the telly and got all shouty crackers about what’s going on in the Middle East. Just a shame it had to be him, really.

The thing is, he has the uncanny ability to be both spectacularly right and mortifyingly wrong, often in the same breath. He can make a rousing, stirring call to the humanity in all of us with speeches like the one above while calling the deaths of Israeli soldiers ‘a bloody good hiding’. He calls for a just settlement of the Israel/Palestine/Lebanon bloodbath but insists that Hezbollah - while it’s firing rockets into civilian areas - isn’t a terrorist organisation. He’ll speak truth to the buffet of turds that is the Murdoch empire and whore himself on ‘Big Brother’. God knows it’s hard to find a consistent position on the Middle East, but George will say something that makes you punch the air in righteous delight one minute and have you with your head in your hands the next. It’s like he’s buying a round while drinking *your* pint.

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Tony Blair’s very pleased with his shiny new ‘arc of extremism’, isn’t he? After testing it at the G8 summit in July he used the conflation of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah no fewer than three times in the speech he gave in Los Angeles this week.

Something was clearly needed to replace the ‘axis of evil’, Iraq having left the group with nervous exhaustion and not being due to rejoin for the reunion tour until its second breakdown has really taken hold. The ‘axis of evil’ rolls off the tongue, the ‘axis’ part summoning images of the World War II’s Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy. The ‘evil’ part metaphorically dresses Iranians, North Koreans and Iraqis in stormtrooper uniforms making it morally easier to shoot, cluster bomb and waterboard them.

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There’s been a bit of a flap of late about the rise to prominence of a handful of British bloggers. Some in the old school media worlds have had their ivory towers, not to mention their future career prospects and inflated salaries, shaken by the thought that there are legions of web-savvy people out there willing to put intelligent, well-researched articles in the public domain for nothing.

An article in the Guardian this week said there are nearly seven million bloggers in the UK. That’s one in four Internet users and one in nine of the entire population. Some of the cream (and some of the shit, naturally) is starting to float and is getting noticed in wider circles, challenging the mainstream media particularly in the area of political commentary.

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The - clearly shitting bricks - Labour Party floated another ‘Get Cameron’ strategy this week. After the craptacular ‘Dave the Chameleon’ campaign died on its arse - it turned out that the public, and Cameron himself, quite like the computer-generated lizard who wears hats, rides a bike and changes colour - Labour’s finest minds decided enough was enough: Time for gloves off and knuckle-dusters on.

What’s the new idea that will demonstrate only a mother could love the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition? Depicting the Tory leader, according to the Sunday Times, as a ‘floppy-haired estate agent’, that’s what.

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The Prime Minister felt the hand of history on his shoulder once again this week. Take a look at this photograph from Wednesday’s
Independent.

There he stands, inspecting an offshore windfarm in Kent, every inch the concerned statesman.

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