Rod Liddle

Anyone got a shovel? We’re cut off from the world, here in north Kent, a foot and a half of snow in the garden, the lanes impassable and no sign of respite. The only answer is to get pissed, I suppose. That’s usually the answer. But sooner or later I will have to walk four miles to buy fags. The Met Office predicts that this will have been easily the coldest November since 1993, and perhaps beyond. This will, in turn, mean that Autumn will have been slightly colder than the mean, or around about average at best. December is projected to be colder than usual too. Last winter (Dec-Jan-Feb) was 2 degrees colder than the mean, and the coldest winter since 1978/9. Spring was 0.2 degrees above the mean for 1971-2000, summer 0.6 degrees above the mean.

1. Prince Andrew is an arrogant berk. 2. Vladimir Putin is an “alpha dog” 3. Medvedev is his puppet. 4. David Cameron is lightweight. 5. Prince Charles commands next to no respect. 6. Angela Merkel is the only strong European leader. 7. Berlusconi is feckless, vain and ineffective and likes parties. 8. That Argie babe, Kirchner, is hysterical and should be on medication. 9. Sarkozy is ‘orrible. 10. Colonel Gaddafy is a bit odd. I know it’s a bit embarrassing to have this stuff out in the open and, probably like most of you, I find the Wikileaks man Julian Assange a self important and potentially dangerous gimp.

I had just got to the stage where I quite like the Royal Family. Especially Phil. It’s been a gradual thing, over the last fifteen years or so. I sort of ideologically don’t approve but they annoy so many awful people that it seems churlish not to give them one’s support. And it is true that if it were not for them, we would have some time serving over-promoted humourless bore like Baroness Ashton as President. But this conversion to monarchism is now under threat: we are about to have a Royal Wedding. I saw my wife last night watching an hour of the most vapid, pointless shit imaginable about Wills and Kate, or whatever they are called. Geordie Greig (who he, ed) explaining that Kate helped William to relax. Howja know that, you Bagpuss faced scullion?

Remembrance Sunday was observed scrupulously at football grounds across Britain, except of course at horrible Celtic, where the fans did their usual anti-British spite and venom and held aloft banners saying that we “shamed devils in hell,” etc. And then there’s Airdrie. A mate spotted their programme for the weekend’s home fixture against Livingston. I THINK they meant well.

If you fancy a laugh, and have the time to spare, check out the website for REVOLUTION, aka Permanent Revolution, the Trot group some of whose members smashed up Conservative Central Office this week. You might also check out Workers' Power, the Trot group from which REVOLUTION split a year or two back for the usual Pythonesque ideological reasons. Both are, I think, members of the Fifth International, unless they’ve already split from that too. Of course they are committed to overthrowing the oppressive capitalist system by force and handing power to the worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkiing classs. Their members are called Laura and Emily and James and and Giles and they have never ever met anyone from the working class.

It is time we started a campaign to free the Meedhuffushi One, a victim of government persecution. Hussein Didi was arrested and faces prosecution for the crime of having officiated at a hotel ‘wedding’ ceremony on the tiny island of Meedhuffushi in the Maldives. You may have read about his unorthodox benediction to the Swiss couple who paid £830 to have their right to fornicate endorsed fraudulently while they sipped cocktails out of a coconut shell in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Or you may have watched the video online. Either way, it is worth reacquainting ourselves with some of the details, especially those not reported in the press.

Sorry – been away, up in Middlesbrough working on a feature and haven’t had time for the usual bloggin’, scurrying between dole office and lovely North York Moors. A brief return to last week’s story about Harman and the gingers. Nonvexatious, in the thread below, insists that there have been no reported cases of red or ginger-haired people successfully claiming discrimination on account of reaction to their unfortunate colouring. Well, of course, there have. One of them is Sarah Primmer who, back in 2007, successfully screwed £17,618 out of an employment tribunal because her colleagues and bosses kept making remarks about her ginger hair.