Rod Liddle

Remarkable story about our top civil servants: they are all using the ‘private company’ loopholes to avoid paying the correct rate of tax, and have been doing so for some time. At least two thousand of the monkeys and that’s before you count the same level of management bureaucrats in the NHS and of course local government. The cost to the exchequer for the two thousand alone has been put at £30m. You can look at it two ways, I suppose. Either you argue that people are entitled to use whatever legal scams they can to protect their own incomes — a recourse which is not morally acceptable for a Labour politician, I would suggest. Or you believe that people should pay the amount of tax, at source, that the country intends them to pay.

Apparently, pensioners with the highest life expectancy live in the Somerset village of Hinton St George, while those with the lowest live in Bootle, Merseyside. Much fuss was made of this survey in the newspapers, and I daresay that hundreds of old folk in Bootle are now scurrying down the M6 on their mobility scooters before the grim reaper catches up with them. But it is surely nothing to do with geography and all to do with income, isn’t it? Hinton St George is affluent and Bootle isn’t. It’s a bit like saying that pensioners have the longest life expectancy if they live in Sandringham and the shortest if they live under a piece of tarpaulin on a slip road just off the M18.

The problem with us men is that we are too trusting and, also, maybe, not particularly bright. Plus we compartmentalise parts of our lives, which we fondly believe is the rational thing to do. And we don’t always think things through. Take this excellent example from the newspapers this week. A Polish chap called Marek Olszewski dumped his girlfriend, Anna Mackowiak, who is a dentist. A few days later, suffering a bit of a twinge in a molar, he took what you might consider the risky step of turning up at her surgery for treatment. Anna explains: “I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions. But when I saw him lying there I just thought: what a bastard.

Good stuff from the TV naturalist Chris Packham, who is usually sound on most issues. Firstly he disputes the reports of urban foxes attacking people in their homes. Don’t believe it, he says. No, me neither. We will be reading more of these crazed psychotic fox attack reports in our newspapers now that summer is almost upon us. My suspicion is that all of them are made up. Packham also said the following: ‘Over 200 million animals are killed each year by domestic cats. If you keep them in at night it reduces that figure by 50 per cent. I love cats, I think they are beautiful, a wonderful predator. But what’s the point of feeding birds in the garden if you’re feeding them to your cat?’ Quite.

Well, most of you lot should be all right if Anders Breivik gets out of prison and decides to recommence his killing spree here. Or at least I assume you will. I haven’t actually met you in the flesh, I’m just guessing. Apparently, Breivik decided against shooting one bloke on the island of Utoya because he ‘looked right-wing’. The spared individual was Adrian Pracon, the son of a Polish immigrant. ‘This person appeared right-wing,’ Breivik explained, ‘that’s why I didn’t fire any shots at him. Certain people look more right wing than others.’ Mr Pracon’s blue eyes were apparently a crucial factor.

Excellent news arrives that Britain’s cats are going mental. Apparently, increasing numbers of them are being struck down by some contagion which renders them robot-like, stiff and deranged in the head. When I say ‘increasing numbers’ that could mean, of course, just two cats. According to the Daily Mail it’s actually ‘a staggering 21 cases’, which is still a bit on the low side for my liking. Some veterinary experts have suggested that the problem might be something to do with poisons being put down for the local rodent population. I assume the poisons are intended to kill the rodents and leave the far more injurious cats alone.

I see that the rightish writer John Derbyshire has been sacked by the US conservative magazine for which he wrote, National Review. This is because of a piece he wrote for a different conduit, Taki’s Mag — an online publication run by The Spectator’s own Taki Theodoracopulos. Mr Derbyshire’s article was a response to 'The Talk' which, apparently, is something black parents give to their children to help them cope with growing up in a bitterly racist country — such as be humble and polite to police officers or you might get shot, that sorta thing. Mr Derbyshire wrote 'The Talk: Nonblack Version', which he said was a distillation of the advice he had given to his own white children growing up in the USA.

Interesting stuff on The Guardian’s front page about the newspapers which have made potentially illegal requests to private investigators to track down phone numbers and addresses of people they were stalking. The Daily Mail used a private investigator 1,728 times between 2000 and 2003, which is close to the total amount for every other newspaper combined — and with the Mail on Sunday, much more than the total amount. The News International stable is scarcely represented. The Guardian’s glee, of course, is probably even greater as a consequence of the money spent by its despised brother, The Observer – which used a PI 201 times. Now we need to know whether those ‘potentially illegal’ inquiries were, actually, illegal.

Excellent blog by James Delingpole in the Torygraph on the vexed question What Has Happened To The Archers? Under the aegis of someone called Vanessa Whitburn, the long running Radio Four serial has been turned from an amiable soap about rural people and the gentle inconveniencies with which they battle, into a vision of the countryside as a bien pensant North London tw*t would wish to see it. Hence the sudden profusion — in a village of 200 people — of hordes of ethnics, drug dealers, homosexuals, Green Party activists, children of mixed race and so on. It now has the same relationship with reality as that enjoyed by the saccharine children’s programme Balamory. I don’t mean the children are saccharine, I mean the programme is.

I suppose in time we will all come to terms with our grief over the removal of Dame Liz Forgan as boss of Arts Council England. Although, of course, it will be a great struggle. The Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt has said Dame Liz’s tenure will not be renewed because he wants the council ‘to be led by someone who isn’t part of the smug public school Guardianista-BBC liberal establishment, those awful self-satisfied people who are on the boards of almost every bloody quango in the country, despite never having done a single thing of consequence in their North London Sancerre-swilling, hummus and flatbread chomping lives.’ Well, actually, that’s not quite what he said. He said he wanted someone who knew about digital technology, or something.