Barmy beyond belief

Is this the No. 1 barmy news story of the year?

How can it not be?

It only begs the question whether Jonah McNutter Brown might like to give it a go, too, on behalf on the Kirk.

Only the biggest brains . . .

Picture a vast brain whirling at higher and higher speeds, neurons flashing faster and faster, connections sizzling and smoking, the whole not just on the verge of total seizure but perilously close to exploding. It's the only explanation I can come up with for this bizarre assertion yesterday at PMQs by Gordo McNutter:

Why does he [Cameron] not admit that as a result of our tax credits, which we opposed ...

Only Gordo can do this! Simultaneously propose and oppose a policy! There is nothing this giant among men cannot do!

The lady's not for turning

Gordo is though.

"I don't think I've been pushed around at all. I have never shirked from tough decisions.”

Ha! Ha! and Ha! again.

Has there ever been a more precise measure of the cowering, simpering bully than his convoluted back-track over the 10p tax rate?

Has there ever been a more precise example of just what Gordo means by 'conviction politics'?

You can understand the rush to buy his book on 'Courage'.

The Bottler on 'responsibility'

Gordon McNutter yesterday speaking – or possibly pleading – to the parliamentary Labour party:

"We can't have a Budget defeated. We have a responsibility to listen, to hear, to understand, but we also have a responsibility – all of us – to unite."

Which translated means that 'listening', 'hearing' and 'understanding' – or at any rate pretending to – are less important than party unity, which in this case means maintaining the Bottler in No. 10. That is all that counts.

So bugger the poor.

The great black hole of 2012

A Labour MP no less – note that: a Labour MP – one Don Touhig, a member of the Commons Public Accountants Committee - has called the budgeting of the 2012 games the "most catastrophic financial mismanagement in the history of the world".

The story, hardly news to those such as your humble Brute who have long been predicting that the games will be an unmitigated disaster, is here.

What is genuinely intriguing about this is why, having knowingly presented an essentially bogus budget in the first place, anyone in the government can still conceivably believe they are not now facing a financial horror show on an epic scale, one that will make the Millennium Dome seem a model of far-sighted and prudent planning, the whole of course played out in the full glare of global publicity.

If McNutter Gordo is still after a definition of the hideous new Britain he so gruesomely presides over, I suggest he might like to consider something along the lines of: When in a hole, keep on digging.

Unknown Labour MP to plead 'not guilty'

You really couldn't make it up.

It's Joe Orton gone barmy.

'The shock move comes over allegations he clambered over the bonnet of a parked van to board a city bus.'

Here are the breaking details.

Overheating Britain

On April 28 last year, the Independent printed an article by Michael McCarthy, then the paper's environment editor, under the title:

Overheating Britain: April temperatures break all records

Will this be the summer when Britain reaches 40°C and the effects of climate change are painfully brought home?

You can read it here.

It began with this statement:

'The possibility is growing that Britain in 2007 may experience a summer of unheard-of high temperatures, with the thermometer even reaching 40C, or 104F, a level never recorded in history.'

Now, as we all know, however freakishly warm last April was, the summer as a whole was anything but, as those affected by the floods in late July can testify only too well. This, of course, despite the fact that the Met. Office in January had predicted that 2007 was set to be the 'warmest on record', a fact faithfully reported by the BBC.

I write this as one of the grimmest, wettest and coldest Aprils unfolds, day after day of shivering temperatures and howling winds. And rain, Above all, lots and lots of rain. There is, moreover, if the forecasts are to be believed, no end in sight to this miserable weather.

I know it is not yet the end of the month but I have yet to read anything anywhere suggesting that these freakishly low temperatures are evidence that global warming is not happening, rather the opposite if anything.

Where is Michael McCarthy when you need him?

Spot the difference

Fabulous prizes on offer for the Daily Brute quiz!

Clues:
Top picture: Britain's minister for families. Bottom picture (no pun intended): Italy's minister for families.
Top picture: Smug git, thug and and twat. Bottom picture: twat.

Extra clue: Take no notice of the lady in black with the knitting.

How to be like a haggis ...

... according to Lord Desai, that is.

Now it's meltdown

For Mr Dreary to lay into Gordo is ... well, astounding.

This is a government disintegration without parallel.

Gordo is toast.

There can surely be no way back from this degree of disruption.

Astounding.

Telling the truth

This from McLoonyNutter yesterday:

'I've worked with Tony for years and we are very good friends.'

Why does he come out with such nonsense? It is a lie. Pure and simple. Furthermore, everyone knows it.

There is a sense that, for the Bottler, merely asserting an obvious untruth makes it true. He believes it. Therefore it is so.

It is a precise measure of why he is doomed.

Why Gordo is never wrong

There is a seriously bizarre cast of mind – manifested in its most extreme form by Jeffery Archer and Heather Mills, to take only two examples – in which fantasy dislodges every trace of truth and invented events are presented as fact. Reality is not so much distorted as obliterated, subsumed beneath the speaker's deluded, over-arching ego.

If I can't pretend to understand the convoluted psychological circumstances that impel the likes of these poor, sad sods to come up with such obvious lies, I can at least note them.

And now here, courtesy of the Crown Blogspot, we have another example, McNutter Gordo MadPerson claiming that his selling off of so much of Britain's gold reserves at an historically low price was the fault of the Tories.

What pounds through what passes for his higher brain functions that cannot allow him ever to admit to having been wrong? What deranged misapprehensions make him certain that he is always right? Why are failures always someone else's fault?

There is, properly, something profoundly disturbed at work here.

It prompts two obvious questions. One, just what was going on in that odd manse of his when he was growing up? Two, will his brain actually blow up – smoke, steam, flames, limbs flung outwards, etc, gore and nastiness galore – when the contradiction between what he must believe and what is actually happening finally becomes inescapable.

Stand well clear. It promises to be spectacular.

He is, in short, one seriously fucked up human being.

Shuffling around

There has been a great deal of talk lately of how McNutter hopes to regain the political momentum by a re-shuffle. Here is the Coffee House, for example.

I have never understood how these periodic and pointless exercises work. And in this case it seems particularly senseless. One bunch of useless tossers chucked out and a second bunch of even more useless ones brought in. How can this possibly help?

For one thing, the McLoony cabinet has only been in business for 10 months. What is the sense of chopping and changing it so soon? It can only cause disruption. For another, presumably those appointed in the first place by Jonah Gordo were considered the best men and women for their jobs at the time. So does moving them around mean that they weren't in fact any good? That McGordo appointed the wrong people? That he made a mistake?

Even more to the point, does anyone seriously imagine a reshuffle is going in some magical fashion to help transform Gordo from a spectacularly inept thug into an all-wise statesman? Self-evidently not. It will, rightly, be seen as a desperate and futile attempt to revive his political fortunes.

In other words, a total waste of time.

It would interesting, too, to know how much these exercises, entirely party political, cost.

In short, the only reshuffle that could be of any conceivable use would be if the Barmy Bottler were to reshuffle himself off into the distance. And there is not much chance of that, needless to say.

The mighty McIlvanney

If I could just once produce a sentence as exactly perfect as this, I would, I promise, die happy. This from the sumptuously wonderful Hugh McIlvanney in today's Sunday Times:

Perhaps the only adequate way to convey the labyrinthine magnificence of the mess the rulers of English rugby have made of implementing their determination to give Martin Johnson total control of the national team is to say that it threatens to outclass anything produced by the Football Association at the zenith of their capacity for dithering ineptitude.

You can feast on the rest of his column here.

Balls

It is an exact measure of the bizarre dislocation from reality that characterizes not just Jonah McGordo but the vile Balls that either could seriously imagine the latter not just as leader of the Labour party but as prime minister.

Balls has the electoral appeal of a turd for the simple reason that, contrary to his own heroic view of himself, he is near universally loathed. It is instantly obvious even to the only semi-sentient that he is properly nasty.

So how appropriate that the ever-barmier Bottler sees him as his natural successor.

Bullseye from Parris

The Bottler precisely skewered today in the Times by Parris.

That Gordo is a dead man walking, certain to be forced out of Downing Street by a party horrified at the electoral humiliation he is so magnificently engineering on its behalf, goes without saying.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't extract every ounce of malicious pleasure at the prospect of the utter ruin of 'the cleverest prime minister in living memory'.

Still, at least he will be able to boast that he never lost an election as leader.

Balls vs Straw: seconds out

This made my day.

Poor, poor Polly

Here she is writing in today's Guardian, her subject, as ever, Gordo; her tone, for the first time, dismayed.

'The mystery of this premiership deepens with every day,' she writes, 'perplexing some who thought they knew Brown best,' the 'some' quoted here presumably being Polly herself.

She continues:

'Most dismayed are those who toiled for him for 10 long years, drinking midnight toasts to the king over the water, plotting and obstructing, singing the old Gordon-is-my-darling songs, and telling any of us who would listen that when the bonnie prince sails home, the egregious sins of opportunistic unprincipled Blairism would be expunged. But now the prince is here, his leadership is a pale shadow of what they promised. Inept generalship looks in danger of leading the Labour clans towards their Culloden - and they can see it coming.'

Perhaps for the 'dismayed' Polly, portraying the Bottler as the self-aggrandizing, self-pitying drunk that was Bonny Prince Charlie is the only way she can come to terms with the 'pale shadow' of Gordo's leadership and his 'inept generalship'.

She attempts a rally of sorts, however, claiming Gordo 'is certainly the cleverest prime minister in living memory,' thus booting Harold Wilson off the top spot of the bigger brains rostrum. But the tone is downbeat, depressed, 'dismayed' indeed throughout.

'The Wizard of Oz stands exposed, the emperor has no clothes, the box of secrets is empty,' she sobs ... 'Even some erstwhile closest confederates are at a loss - and many feel cheated.' Is that you again, Polly?

Thus even the faithful Polly turns against the Bottler. Happy, happy days.

And needless to say, the comments are near universally anti Gordo.

Oh dear.

Peking or bust

Poor old Gordo has passed into the realms of the half-life. It is surely the only explanation.

Even the simplest decision now seems to involve him in a series of (Gordian?) knots and tangles from which, squirming and twisting, tie and hair askew, grin resolutely forced, lower lip juddering uncontrollably, he invariably extracts the worst of every possible world.

And the faster he commands the Downing St. spin machine to turn, creaking, groaning and heaving, the revs visibly in the red zone, threatening at any moment to expire in a spectacular explosion, parts flung outward from its disintegrating centre, the more, absurdly, preposterously, laughably, he pins his dwindling hopes on it.

Never has the clunking fist been more clunking.

His latest 'sophistry' that attending the Bejiing Olympic 'ceremonies' – of which there are precisely two, please note: the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony – always made clear he would only be at one – the closing ceremony – would shame a 10 year old. And he expects people to take this seriously?

There is a silver lining, however. Two actually. First, that if Jonah McNutterBrown is not present at the start of the Olympics, those British athletes who might otherwise have feared his inevitable curse would mean only a succession of British disasters, injuries, falls and other ignominies have at least been spared.

Two, that if he is only at the closing of the games, he can only inadvertently set off the sprinkler system at the Olympic stadium – more probably set the whole thing on fire, burning it to the ground – when it is too late to matter. The Chinese may be breathing signs of relief already.

Nothing up top?

Goodness, I must stop going on about this.

Nonetheless, just one final thought – I promise – re the perfumed Rachel S. in the Telegraph today and the implosion of Gordo's loony dreams. She quotes Rory Bremner (good on Geoff Boycott, a lot less reliable on NuLab). She writes:

As Rory Bremner, who used to be a fan, put it yesterday: "It's like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed at the bottom of the garden for 10 years… you look through the window and there's nothing there."

On the contrary, there is only too much there, the precise product of Gordo's 10 years of resentful brooding and late-night slobbering as he plotted his vengeful triumph.

What there is is a huge, hulking and very angry out-of-control Frankenstein-type monster (looks very much like Ed Balls, in fact) that is about to burst out of the shed and indiscriminately lurch about, smashing through buildings and swatting aside anyone unfortunate enough to be in its way.

Then, primitive wiring already aflame, limbs lumbering and pressing what passes for its hand to its short-circuiting brain, mumbling and groaning 'My brain hurts! My brain hurts!', it will explode ...

KABOOOM!

... taking a great many innocents with it.

Best of British, Gordo!

Someone's lying

Now here's a funny old thing.

La belle Rachel S. wrote this morning in the Telegraph (see post below) that she was 'reliably informed' that Balls and Straw had as good as squared up to each other, Prescott-style, during a Cabinet row over who was 'responsible' for 'youth crime'. (This doesn't mean, or at least I think it doesn't, that there is a government department charged with promoting youth crime, at any rate not yet, and that each was seeking to take the credit for it, or more probably to deny the other credit for it.)

On the other hand, the dinky Ben Brogan of the Mail has since written that the claim has been comprehensively denied by No. 10, who, upholding the highest of the Civil Service's high-minded, disinterested standards, have dismissed it as 'total b******s'. Brogan asserts that by 'Westminster standards' – code for standards not out of place in most sewers – this amounts to 'a fairly comprehensive denial'. Meaning Rachel's dead wrong. She's been sold a pup.

Just how 'reliably' Sylvester was 'informed' is impossible to say.

Just how impartial the No. 10 press office is is much easier to say.

So was Sylvester being led up the garden path? If so, by whom? And why? Labour 'insiders' bent on doing down Gordo? Surely not!

Or is No. 10 simply hoping to bluff this one out (code for 'lying')?

Place your bets.

Rachel Sylvester repenteth

Evidently tired of being nobbled by No 10, the fragrant Rachel S, writing in today's Telegraph, lays into Gordo with real and welcome venom.

Particularly interesting is her claim of a bust-up between Jack Straw and the repellent Balls in a Cabinet meeting no less, after which Straw claimed 'he had never been spoken to so rudely by a colleague in public and that he was not going to put up with it'. Straw 'threatened to punch Ed Balls'.

To say it rings true is an understatement. Being deliberately offensive is a calculated element of Balls's plan to take over the Labour party before having himself proclaimed world leader. It is needless to say one lifted wholesale from his (temporary) boss.

Welcome back Rachel.

Cold is the new hot

The mighty Mr Eugenides has discovered a magnificent quote from the Met Office which repeats, yet again, the intriguing belief that lower temperatures mean the Earth is getting hotter.

You can read him here.

It's clear that even were we all to be encased in ice thousands of feet thick while woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers raged around the snowy wastes, for your average eco-nutter the Earth would still be well on the way to be being turned into a man-made crisp.

Think how much trouble Capt. Scott could have saved himself if only had brought his bathers to the South Pole. Silly fellow.

Politics and sport

The scenes yesterday in London as the Olympic torch was hustled through the streets shielded by what looked like half the capital's police and a gang of Chinese heavies were astonishing, a precise comment on the semi-police state Britain has been reduced to under Blair and Brown.

Forget the talk about sport. This was an explicitly political event, designed both to cosy up to the Chinese and to celebrate what the Labour party, more out of touch than ever, still hasn't realised will be a disaster entirely of its own making, to wit the 2012 games.

That Gordo somehow thought he had not been contaminated by these sordid scenes because he had not touched the torch himself was utterly pathetic.

Simon Jenkins sums it all up precisely here.

Brown and the great EU sell-out

This from the Coffee House should plastered over the front of every newspaper in Britain and lead every news bulletin.

It is a precise flaying of Brown's lying over the EU Constitution/Treaty.

In the short term, it will be his devastating combination of economic mismanagement and cack-handed deviousness that does for him.

But in the longer term, I am sure that his great sell-out over Europe, an outrage of staggering proportions, will be what finally seals his reputation as Britain's worst – as well as nastiest – prime minister, the man who made Harold Wilson seem a paragon of principle.

Gerry Sutcliffe: new brain needed

'My comments do not accurately reflect my views.'

Thus a member of Gordo's dysfunctional government of all the talents speaks.

Summed it up exactly, I'd say.

Headline of genius

From the BBC, 'Global warming dips this year'.

Anyone spot the logic gap?

The temperature 'dips' yet it still constitutes global warming. In other words, as the world gets colder, it heats up.

I am not sure I get this one.

Promoting Cretins

What is this preposterous Progressive Governance Summit? Why does it have such a dainty, twinkle-toes, listhping name? Why 'governance'? What is wrong with 'government'? And can even the most deluded of its delegates really believe it is 'promoting prosperity'? (Note hyper-cool alliteration). 'Promoting expense claims' is surely nearer the mark, though I would settle for 'promoting self-importance'.

Best of all, however, is that it instantly fell victim to the Curse of Gordo in coming up with a barely disguised swastika as its logo. Nobody doing the vetting noticed this? It beggars belief. We are permanently assured that Gordo's new Mr Big Cheese, Stephen Carter, is a PR big-shot of genius. I can understand Gordo – he is blind in one eye, after all – not spotting it, however 'towering' his vast intellect. But Carter?

And how much did it cost? I think I might ask for my money back.

Bugger off Balls

Ed Balls's attempts to deflect criticism over his department's numerous, near limitless, shortcomings by seizing on the charges levied, or attempted to be levied, by a tiny handful of 'faith schools', as we now have to call them, on parents of prospective parents is an exact measure of the nastiest instincts of this endlessly repellent man. And this odious bully seriously believes he can be PM?

Every classic NuLab smear technique is pressed into action. 100,000 children are denied their first choice of secondary school? Instant agenda switch required, new victim urgently sought. Answer: put on smarmy, fake concerned voice and lie.

It's called 'seizing the agenda'.

You'd laugh if it wasn't so unbearably depressing.

Education, education, education?

If only.

Nastiness, nastiness, nastiness is the reality.

And fuck the schools, fuck the children.

So what?

Climate change 'underplayed'

This lot are nutters.

Clearly, some people will only be satisfied with a return to the Stone Age. Or, better still, the elimination of all humans.

Harman at PMQs: Not many dead

There's been much chit-chat across the blogosphere about Fatty Harman's performance at PMQs today. The consensus is that, far from have been rent to shreds as had been widely predicted, she more than defended her corner.

Cuddly Iain Dale called it 'a high score draw'. The Spectator's Coffee House was equally flattering. 'Harman holds her own at PMQs', it asserted. Even Guido weighed in on Harman's side, declaring that 'she gave as good as she got.'

They key here, not yet picked up by any commentator so far as I know, is not just that she did better than expected – which is far from saying that she shone - but that, compared to Gordo, she appeared almost human. And that, I strongly suspect, is Gordo's No. 1 big problem as he struggles to assert himself as the 'towering' political figure he so obviously considers himself to be.

The miswired, ranting, wierdo Gordo was replaced by someone you could almost identify as a human being. True, she ducked all the hard questions about tax and the economy. Likewise, she dug herself a couple of holes, in particular defending a decision by NICE not to approve a certain drug by saying that NICE's decisions were based on 'evidence-based ... er ... er... '. Evidence, Harriet? Even she recognised the folly of that. So, findings, maybe? Results? Conclusions? She settled in the end, stumblingly, for 'process'.

In much the same way, her repartee gave every sign of having been learned by rote. Her delivery was wooden at best. Words were stumbled over. She consistently stuttered. There was a significant sense that, however well briefed, at key moments her notes swam before her eyes, tantalisingly, tauntingly beyond her semi-panicked reach. She was, in short, no natural, let alone galvanising, Commons performer.

But at least it looked as though a sentient human being was speaking.

So is she, in short, a serious contender as the next leader of the Labour party? Is she a figure around which an increasingly demoralised Labour party can assemble? Even more to the point, will Gordo now accordingly do his best to demote her?

Admittedly, the competition to replace Gordo is hardly strong. But compared to the misfits and creeps who cluster round him (and the Cabinet table) she surely makes a strong case.

On the whole, bad news for the great Scottish odd-ball, the 'world leader' currently mixing it in Bucharest with his fellow NATO big-wigs.

Harriet less-than-bullet-proof Harman

Not the least amusing aspect of Harriet Harman's bizarre PR blunder in waddling around the streets of Peckham in the company of the police in a bullet-proof jacket – the kind of blunder you can be sure what never have happened in the happy days of Alastair Campbell – is her incoherent and batty defence of herself on the Today programme. I am not sure I have ever heard any government minister make a more staggering fool of themselves.

You can listen to it here.

Note her preposterous claim that in printing the picture the Daily Mail was guilty of malice, this despite the fact that the picture was already on her own website, itself a joyful confection of lies and empty-headed propaganda. Here it is in fact.

Note also the progressive spelling of 'presents' for 'presence' in the second paragraph.

Jolly well done Harriet!

Looking forward to PMQs tomorrow?

UPDATE: Is Harriet watching me? The misspelling of 'presence' on her wonderfully witty blog has now been corrected.