Rod Liddle

I see that the UK’s Lucie Jones has blamed her Eurovision Song Contest failure upon Brexit. Lucie actually came fifteenth, which was substantially higher than either she or the song deserved. Her song, 'Never Gonna Give Up On You', or some such egregious, banal, tripe, was a hugely boring ballad without even the redemption of an interesting chorus. That’s why it came fifteenth – that and the fact that we chose a failure from that anti-musical jamboree, X Factor, to sing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl1GYTg4GmA Lucie is just the latest in a long line of people to blame Brexit for being utterly useless. I might use the Brexit get-out next time I can’t get an erection. 'Sorry love, I just feel bad about us leaving the European Union.

I didn’t see a ferret, reverse or otherwise, during Labour’s campaign launch or after. I heard some quite silly, grandstanding, questions from Laura Kuenssberg. And I heard a Labour leader who sounded a bit like…..well, a decent Labour leader. None of this is to deny the patent catastrophe of Corbyn’s leadership of the party hitherto, or to suggest that I agreed with everything he said. But he spoke from the heart, passionately, with a conviction I do not hear in Theresa May’s frankly automaton repetitiveness. And much of what Corbyn had to say about tax avoiders, inequalities and hardship will play very well with his core vote north of the Wash. I still wouldn’t vote for him and still less for his grim and sinister sidekick McDonnell.

I awoke the other morning to hear Diane Abbott’s brains leaking out of her ears and all over the carpet during an interview with LBC’s excellent Nick Ferrari. You will need a mop and a bucket very sharpish, I thought to myself, as she gabbled on, the hole beneath her feet growing larger with every syllable she uttered. Diane has had the brain leakage problem before, many times, and my worry is that following the LBC debacle there is almost nothing left inside her skull at all, just a thin greyish residue resembling a kind of fungi or leaf mould. This would leave her on an intellectual par with Emily Thornberry, a disaster for Labour. Later Diane explained that she had ‘misspoken’ during the interview — but how were we to know?

I awoke this morning to hear Diane Abbott’s brains leaking out of her ears and all over the carpet during an interview with LBC’s excellent Nick Ferrari. You will need a mop and a bucket very sharpish, I thought to myself, as she gabbled on, the hole beneath her feet growing ­larger with every syllable she uttered. Diane has had the brain leakage problem before, many times, and my worry is that following the LBC debacle there is almost nothing left inside her skull at all, just a thin ­greyish residue resembling a particular kind of fungi or leaf mould. This would leave Diane on an intellectual par with Emily ­Thornberry, a disaster for Labour. Later Diane explained that she had ‘misspoken’ ­during the interview — but how were we to know?

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t remember the BBC running a documentary 100 days into Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost exclusively people who hated him, pouring scorn on his every utterance. They did it this week to Donald Trump, though, and even wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy was interviewing exclusively people with whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t get the chance to put on that famous supercilious expression we all used to love, back when he was good. Shame. With Obama, as I remember, it was a very different approach. The studio floors were still awash with liberal ejaculate well after 100 days of his singularly inept presidency had elapsed.

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what will happen on 8 June — except they declined to be too explicit.