Rod Liddle

There’s a lot to commend in the Lord Adonis proposal for a high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. Trains, it is said, will cover the distance in 49 minutes, at speeds of up to 225mph. The opposition cavils that Labour would be better off spending money improving existing, dilapidated, commuter line seem to me wide of the point; the railways have needed a co-ordinated, high profile government directed initiative to capture the imagination of the public and revitalize the network. You might argue we have needed a co-ordinated high profile government initiative since about 1835; railways have ever been starved of planning and cash. But what, exactly, will it do, demographically?

This is Sarah Pirie, a ballet teacher and television actress, who is accused of abducting a fifteen year old boy and having sex with him at various hotels in Lancashire. How desperately awful it must have been for the lad, who was allegedly subjected to three months of this sort of treatment. I can only thank the Lord that I was never abducted when I was fifteen by, say, my old chemistry teacher Miss “Pobbles” Johnson - who had done some modeling work I believe, to supplement her meager teaching income - and subjected to three months of absolutely relentless, demeaning, illegal, sordid sex in various hotels. I would have been absolutely bloody devastated. But she never did, she never did. Thank the lord. She never did.

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap. You will all have had your epiphanies long before me, I suspect, reading the smug drivel of la Toynbee and Gary Younge and Monbiot, or its pathetic attempts via The Guide to be down with the kids on the street (perhaps the worst written, most cringe-inducing, supplement in Fleet Street).

So now we know the full extent of the Prime Ministerial bullying. Did he whip, flay or pummel his staff? Did he pick on them relentlessly, or spit at them or try to force them to have sexual intercourse with him while he growled about having saved the world? Did he swear at them in a nasty manner? Nope, according to the latest revelation Gordon Brown was responsible for the following outrage: he pushed past a civil servant with his arm on the stairs while saying “get out of the way” in a rather brusque manner, once, when he was in a hurry. Doesn’t this make you worry about the sorts of people we have as civil servants these days? Meanwhile an opinion poll has suggested that the bullying accusations have had not the slightest definitive impact upon voting intention.

When the Pope arrives here for his state visit, should he not be arrested for his views about buggery? Or at the least be interviewed by the old bill? The Pope has called homosexuality a “moral evil” and that saving mankind from sodomy is as important as saving the rainforests. Further, homosexuality could lead to the “destruction” of the human race. In January 2006, the then boss of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, was interviewed by police following much milder comments about homosexuality which he, perhaps unwisely, gave vent to on the BBC PM programme. The filth were alerted under the terms of the 1986 Public Order Act, which makes it a crime to whip up hatred against the gays.

I’m not an enormous fan of “giving money to charity”; I prefer to spend my spare cash on holidays, consumer durables and alcohol. But somehow, for the last five years, I’ve been paying a monthly stipend to Amnesty International. I really don’t know how that can have happened. Obviously, it should now stop, seeing that they have suspended the head of the organisation’s gender section, Gita Saghal, for having the temerity to suggest Amnesty was being “damaged” by being nice about the Taliban all the time.