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The prime minister was waxing lyrical about ousted England slogger Kevin Pietersen when speaking to BBC Lancashire earlier today. The PM confessed that he is ‘an enormous fan of KP.’ And added: ‘Some of my most enjoyable times have been watching him tonking the ball all over the park.’ Some members of the media pack have been giving the PM flak for this intervention; but Mr S is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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The thing that most surprised me about Scarlett Johansson being asked to cut ties with an Israeli company she was brand ambassador for was that the company in question was Soda Stream. Soda Stream? Does she also work for Betamax and the Atari ST? I had no idea people still drank this 1980s icon, let alone that it was caught up in the world’s most interminably boring debate. For Israelis and Palestinians the quest to find a peaceful settlement in this tiny piece of land, only 1.2 Waleses in size, is a matter of life and death. For foreigners active in the conflict on one side or the other it is an obsession.
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Is there a more tragic tale being played out in the British press than that of heroic Andy Murray and his doting, wispy girlfriend Kim Sears. He caused a stir earlier this week by suggesting that he would marry the poor darling after this year’s Wimbledon, only to reveal that it was in fact a joke. Ha. This comes after a long string of will he/won't he headlines, and lots of breathy concern for poor, sweet Kim. There is a solution to Kim’s pain. It’s a bit zesty. It would certainly slog it to those media pundits who see her as a limp fish: She could ask him to marry her. A radical thought. But women shouldn’t be scared of popping the question. And neither should men be scared of accepting a proposal.
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Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain de Botton. Alain is a genuinely delightful fellow — charming, considerate, wise, modest — but this has made no difference to the degree with which, in some quarters, he remains intensely loathed. This saddens me. There are certainly occasions when I find his utopianism naive, twee, mockable. And, yes, I suppose it’s easy to be jealous of a handsome man with a beautiful wife and a comfortable life which seems to involve nothing harder than pondering philosophically, writing bestsellers and being on TV a lot.
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When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s best-known Canadian. He has acknowledged the occasional use of cocaine and, overall, the response to his foibles has been welcome. The world has been astounded to learn that not all English-speaking Canadians are whey-faced, monosyllabic Americans-on-Prozac. They might also learn that the contiguous metropolitan area of Toronto — now home to about seven million — has a very high standard of living and a low crime rate and is one of the world’s more impressive modern cities. The mayor is an ample and florid man who describes himself as ‘350 pounds of fun’, but he departed from Canadian tradition with his candour.
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If the Faroe Islanders want to eat whale, let them. So says Tim Ecott in today’s Spectator. He argues that the Faroese – who live on dramatic and remote islands in the North Atlantic – shouldn’t be victimised for killing less than 0.1% of the pilot whale population annually for food. There are far more pressing marine issues that we should be concerned about - for example the 100 million sharks slaughtered for shark fin soup, or how the EU has allowed tuna stocks to be decimated. The problem is, many people don’t agree with him. We’ve all heard that whales are highly intelligent, social and family orientated creatures, and that severing their spines isn’t very nice. The Faroese must, therefore, be stopped.
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Jon Snow’s interview in the Standard today makes for perfect post-lunch reading: 'Sex comes into every evaluation of a woman, there’s no doubt about it. It’s there. Once you’ve established a friendship or a working relationship with a woman, it’s parked. But it’s an interesting barrier. When you’ve gone through it and arrived at the other side, it’s never a problem again. Well I’m not saying it is a problem at all, it’s rather a delicious thing really, ‘what might have been?’ or ‘what could be’. It’s a natural animal element of sustaining life.' Mr S has to wonder what Snow’s colleagues and female guests will make of this ‘delicious thing’.
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Much as was the case with Syria, and to a lesser degree Egypt, I wonder if we are getting a true picture of the mood within Ukraine on our excitable daily news programmes. Reporters speak of a ‘revolution’, and certainly there is fury in the capital, Kiev and some other cities in the west of the country, such as Lviv. But what’s happening in the east of Ukraine, and the south? The country’s four largest cities, after Kiev, have been very quiet. A handful of protestors – about 50 - in Donetsk, and vague sounding ‘reports of unrest’ and ‘crowds of hundreds’ in Odessa or Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, one hundred thousand people marched in support of the president in Kharkov. Just, y’know, sayin’.
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Another day, another ‘victory’ in the name of feminism. Jezebel, the feminist blog aimed at women's interests, last week offered $10,000 to anyone who could provide them with ‘unaltered’ images of Lena Dunham’s American Vogue cover story. Within two hours, they received six images from the Annie Leibovitz shoot, which they then published, complete with notations about what had been changed. Vogue, it would seem, had done the dirty: not only had they made Dunham’s chin a bit pointier, and her neck a bit thinner, they’d also removed the bags from under her eyes and nipped her waist a little. Jezebel has never before offered $10,000 for ‘unaltered’ images of Vogue cover stars.
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Well, whatever about the French press, for British papers, the Hollande affair is the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently shored up in the presidential residence in Versailles, Valerie Trierweiler was, it seems, visited by the president on Thursday night, though the visit does not seem to have clarified her situation. It is said that the pair will meet again today. In the blizzard of briefing and counter-briefing that both sides are engaged in, you can either take it that Francois Hollande needs more time to decide what to do about his relationships or that it’s curtains for Valerie. Meanwhile, her uncle Florent Massonneau has said: ‘I think the fact my niece is being cuckolded is disgraceful. Her situation gives us a lot of pain.
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Roy Greenslade has set the hare running with his claim that Alexander Lebedev and his mini-mogul son Evgeny are looking to offload the Independent titles. The ‘viewspaper’ is understood to be haemorrhaging cash. ‘This is not new news,’ one insider tells me; although, as Greenslade reports, ‘the official line’ is that Independent Print (which makes the Indy, the Sindy and the i) ‘is merely seeking new investors.
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Francois Hollande, was framed by a set of panto-esque red curtains as he attempted to conduct a gigantic U-turn on fiscal policy while simultaneously fending off interest in the identity of the First Lady of France. The President wanted to sound and appear dignified; but it seemed to Mr S that his make-up had been painted by a malevolent clown. The leader of the Fifth Republic puckered his tiny, baby pink lips and proceeded with his economic statement. My filthy Anglo-Saxon mind made it seem that the spiel began with a procession of double entendres. ‘We're talking about going faster, going further, going in more depth,’ he promised. ‘We must produce more. We must produce better,’ he conceded.
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There was a moment when it looked like French Closer had done President Hollande a favour. His poll ratings have been abysmal and the economy has tanked. What better distraction than a little ooh la la? Scandals such as these reveal the character of a nation and its politics. If a British minister had dispatched his chauffeur to fetch post-coital croissants, there would have been delirious uproar about the misuse of taxpayers’ money. But the French have never really cared about politicians wasting their money: National Assembly Deputies take home the equivalent of £211,000 in pay, and enjoy completely unaudited expenses. Most Parisians seem more surprised that the much derided president had it in him. After the initial tittering, the story began to take darker turns.
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The BBC made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting public concern about immigration, Nick Robinson has said. This is the latest case of BBC self-flagellation. (Now I think about it, a sort of Maoist-themed programme in which Beeb executives denounced themselves would make great TV.) BBC bias is a subject I know a bit about, having written a pamphlet on it last year. I thought that, while the BBC is a much-loved institution, it must carry at least some of the blame for the mistakes most people feel were made over immigration under New Labour.
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It’s right, isn’t it, that the storm we’ve just had was far, far, worse than the Worst Storm In A Million Years © we had a month back and which was trailed in advance by the Met Office and all the news programmes? And as others have pointed out, while there was far more damage done to the country and more people were left without electricity this time around, public transport – and especially the trains – were nowhere near so badly affected. We are back, slightly, in Mandela territory; blanket coverage and predictions of an apocalypse on the news programmes seems to have affected the train companies more deeply than did the actual storms. When the country isn’t whipped up into a fury in advance, the companies seem to struggle by.
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Rod Liddle’s observation about the death of Nelson Mandela, cut off, alas, at the age of 95, hardly needs supplementing but I was struck by one aspect of the blanket coverage, viz, its quasi-religious character. The Mirror, the day after the sad event, observed that Mr Mandela was as near as we get in this fallen world to a saint. And this morning, the Today programme brought the thing to its logical conclusion when one presenter, Justin Webb posed the question (1.15): given the moral example of Nelson Mandela, 'why is the world not a better place?' So it was over for an answer to former US president Jimmy Carter, a member of a group known as the Elders, who travel the world to spread the Mandela message. This was the question: 'Some people have compared Nelson Mandela with Jesus.
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Look; I’m sorry Nelson Mandela is dead. It happens quite often to people in their 90s who have been very ill, even famous people, but I’m sure that doesn’t lessen the sadness for many of us. I never met the man but, on balance, I came to the conclusion that he was a force for good rather than ill. I think I came to that rather banal and broad brush conclusion twenty years ago, or maybe fifteen. So, I’m sorry he’s dead, I wish it were otherwise. But for Christ’s sake BBC, give it a bloody break for five minutes, will you? It’s as if the poor bugger now has to bear your entire self-flagellating white post-colonial bien pensant guilt; look! Famous nice black man dies! Let’s re-run the entire history of South Africa.
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Westminster Christmas party season is in full swing. Half the Cabinet dropped by the Sky News bash at the Intercontinental last night. Mick Hucknall was also there, which was odd. The big news of the evening came when the head of Sky News, Jon Riley, confirmed that all three party leaders have now officially agreed to TV debates at the next election. Details were sparse because there appears to be deadlock over formats, timings and even the number of debates. The debates are on, though. Officially. In some form. It was a busy old evening for political-ornithologists. Tim Yeo lurked in the corner, looking glum. Chris Bryant refused to ‘twerk’ with Guido Fawkes.
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Green shoots were visible in Newbury on Saturday for the 57th Hennessy Gold Cup. While brandy cocktails warmed the punters in the Fred Winter Suite, Rob Brydon and Martin Clunes chatted up Joan Collins, who, despite being the most famous person in the room, was wearing a name badge. Myleene Klass displayed a lack of class when posing for a photograph with Princess Anne. And Tinie Tempah might want to have a word with his tailor: the rapper’s trousers were cut off half way up his shin and he must have been freezing without any socks on. Mr Steerpike feared that he might have had one too many nips of the Paradis Imperial when he saw the diarist from the Times singing a duet of Memory with Elaine Paige. But I’m reliably informed that this actually happened.
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Absolutely fascinating double page spread in The Observer yesterday which suggests that the UK is ‘sleepwalking’ towards an exit from the European Union. My only quibble with the piece is that the source of this narcolepsy was not explained: is it drug induced, or have we perhaps become zombified? Either way, we don’t know what we are doing, according to The Observer. This is the usual recourse of the left when the rest of the country makes the grotesque mistake of thinking differently to what the bien pensants want. The feature was based upon a poll which suggested that only 14 per cent of Brits consider themselves ‘European’, which is a rather higher figure than I’d have thought, unless it’s simply pedantic geographical determinists.