Two liars, Russia’s defences, new capitalists and dating

3 June 2023

The most extraordinary story this week has been the public enquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. 

It’s being led by Baroness Heather Hallett, a retired English judge of the Court of Appeal and a crossbench life peer, who was praised by Boris Johnson when he selected her to lead the enquiry in December 2021.  “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and I know shares my determination that the inquiry examines in a forensic and thoroughgoing way the government’s response to the pandemic,” he said.

However, as things have progressed, this seems to have been another of Johnson’s bad decisions, for him at least, as the enquiry has demanded his unredacted WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks from the time.  Initially, the Cabinet Office and Johnson both refused to release them but, possibly realising that his refusal made us all think he had something to hide, Johnson had changed his mind and handed the material directly to the enquiry himself.

The Cabinet Office has said that, for the first time in history, there are “important issues of principle” around releasing information that might not be relevant.  Happy to ignore an established, centuries-old precedent, the government is claiming this would set a new precedent that could lead to demands for information relating to serving ministers including – tell it not in Gath – the prime minister.

Goodness gracious!  Transparency of government?  Huh!

(Cynics have, of course, now questioned Johnson’s motives in releasing the stuff.)

The saddest story of the week is about Phillip Schofield, the former co-presenter of a morning TV show.  Schofield was a married man with children who has apparently been conflicted about his sexuality and stayed in the closet until quite recently when he admitted publicly that he was gay.

From then on, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened except that he’s admitted having a sexual relationship with a younger man who worked in the team supporting his programme.  They had first met when the other man was 15 (he’s now 21) but Schofield says they had no any further contact until several years when he admits introducing him to people who gave him the job.

Up to this point, WTF, but the tabloids say Schofield lied to his co-presenter and then lied to quite a lot of people about what had happened.  This was stupid and, unsurprisingly, he left the programme.

Perhaps because nothing interesting was happening in the political world (see above) and people were no longer dying in Ukraine and the American economy wasn’t on the brink of collapse, this suddenly became a cause célèbre that sold lots of space in the media.  Comparisons were made with Jimmy “Paedo” Savile and Donald “I can grab any woman’s pussy” Trump although, in Schofield’s case, only one other consenting adults was involved and the real problem was that he had lied.

In an interview broadcast last week by his former employer, it was obvious he’d lost weight and he looked dreadful.  He seemed to answer direct and painful questions honestly and, on a ‘likely to commit suicide’ scale of 1 to 10, I’d have put him around 9.  He actually said that if his daughters weren’t “guarding” him, he wouldn’t be here today.  I also thought there was some comfort to be found in his ‘betrayed’ family rallying around to protect him.

I didn’t know much about him before all this happened but am now feeling sorry for him because of all the shit that’s been thrown at him.  I hope he survives.

More depressing news is that, as of Wednesday, Elon Musk is once again the world’s richest person.  This is known because Bloomberg produce a daily Billionaires’ Index (though they don’t use an apostrophe) which publishes updated figures for the top 500 at the end of every trading day in New York.  Can you imagine anything more pathetic than people who care about this sort of thing?  “Oh look mummy, I’ve gone up from number 472 to number 468 in yesterday’s list” / “Shut up and deal.”

And, in Russia, some missiles of unknown origin were shot down over Moscow, breaking a window and causing a small fire.  Loosely translated, Vladimir Putin’s response was “They came from Ukraine but we’ve proved how effective our air defence systems are”. 

Ukraine is about 500 miles from Moscow so, if they did come from Ukraine, Russia’s defence systems didn’t spot the things until they actually reached Moscow;  or perhaps destroying them over a field in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have been as newsworthy? 

If the missiles were Ukrainian, we’ve all been shown just how far into Russia they can reach before being detected by Russian defence systems. 

France has one of the highest taxes on cigarettes in the EU with the result that entrepreneurs have set up factories that churn out millions of illegal cigarettes and now, according to research by KPMG, a third of cigarettes smoked in France were bought illegally. 

Tempting as it is to admire these people for following the basic precepts of free market capitalism by finding a new market and making money from it, we need to remember that the only reason the French government is getting upset is that it’s illegal, and the only reason it’s illegal is that the government can’t tax the sales.

Meanwhile, a new development in the ‘hungry singles’ market is the Pear ring*, a turquoise rubber ring that you wear to let other people know you’re on the market or, as the marketing blurb puts it “to show you’re single and open to DMs”.

(Being somewhat out of touch with dating, I decided that Doc Martens wouldn’t be much of a turn-on so I looked it up and gather it now means ‘direct messaging’ on social media, which leaves me wondering how you get a name and contact point so you can DM them and, if it means talking to them, why you don’t just talk there and then and sod the DM?)

*          Pear ring / pairing – geddit?

Entertainment at PMQs, U-turns, body language, disappearances, distorted English and kindness

21 November 2021

This week’s entertainment included Wednesday’s tetchy exchanges during Prime Minister’s Question time.

Boris Johnson got so upset he asked Sir Keir Starmer questions and had to be reminded by the Speaker that, “whether we like it or not”, the purpose of PMQs was to let other people to ask him questions.  Then Johnson asked another one and the Speaker said “Prime Minister, sit down. I’m not going to be challenged.  You may be the Prime Minister of this country but in this House I’m in charge” and summoned him to his study after the debate.

He also rebuked Starmer for calling Johnson “a coward, not a leader”.  Starmer withdrew the accusation of cowardice but repeated, rather grumpily, that “he’s not a leader”.

It’s nice to imagine that, afterwards, the Headmaster said something like “Johnson Minor, form 4C may think you’re funny but we’ve heard both your jokes before and, in my house, you will act like the gentleman we hope – albeit without much conviction – you’ll become when you leave your adolescence behind.  Now, put on this dunce’s cap and go and stand in the naughty corner.”

Later that same day, Johnson admitted to the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers that he’d “crashed the car” on a straight, open, empty road with his crassly mishandled attempt to cover up for the sleaze / corruption that led to Owen Paterson’s ultimate resignation, when he whipped his MPs into supporting his proposals to support Paterson before pulling the rug from under them with yet another of his infamous U-turns.

This has given Labour something else to bite on and, at long last, Starmer seems to have got the bit between his teeth (the ‘bit’ concerned being Johnson’s jugular);  and there’s more to come with widespread discontent on the government’s back benches about how his proposed cap on care costs will disadvantage the poorest and his cancellation of the HS2 extension that would have ‘levelled up the North’.  We’ll give Leeds some trams instead of a trans-Pennine link, he said.   (Weren’t King George V’s last words supposed to have been “Bugger Bradford”?)

It also transpired that the route for the cancelled HS2 eastern spur was fixed from out-of-date maps and would have required the demolition of a new housing estate of 212 houses in Mexborough rather than an electricity sub-station the planners thought were there.  British craftsmanship ain’t what it used to be when we built the best penny-farthing bicycles in the world.

Still, a new railway line between Okehampton and Exeter did re-open during the week, almost 50 years after it was closed, so not all is lost.  Except in Bradford.

Johnson’s body language a delight to watch during PMQs because it’s so uncontrolled.  When he gets angry, his face turns puce, he shouts, leans forward and jabs his finger forwards, symbolising the sword he wishes he was thrusting through his opponent’s aorta.  The trouble with such aggression is that it’s hard to keep it up if his target doesn’t fight back.  If his target responds aggressively, they feed off each other’s energy and fight while, if the target doesn’t respond and continues firmly and calmly – and, having trained as a barrister, Starmer is quite good at this – Johnson has to wind himself up all over again.

His head touching is even more revealing.  Putting a hand onto the back of one’s head can also symbolise aggression, as if reaching over the shoulder for Maxwell’s silver hammer and … well, we all know what Maxwell did with his hammer.

Tousling the hair may go back to his childhood.  He probably decided that scruffling up his hair made him look cute when he’d been caught doing something stupid.

For example, he was probably tousling his hair when he arrived (late) for his first wedding, to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, so the audience wouldn’t notice he wasn’t wearing any trousers.

Talking of Maxwells and Johnsons, Boris’s sister Rachel recalled in an article she wrote for the Spectator that she once saw Ghislaine Maxwell (who she describes as a “shiny glamazon”) resting her high-heeled boot “on my brother Boris’s thigh”.  She doesn’t say whether said brother was wearing any trousers at the time.

Maxwell’s own trial started last week in New York, where she’s charged with sex crimes, conspiracy and perjury.  She disappeared in 2019 at about the time when her close friend Jeffrey Epstein was charged with sex-trafficking offences and killed himself in a prison cell.

She wasn’t found until July 2020 when she was arrested at her estate in New Hampshire.  Her lawyers are now claiming she wasn’t hiding, she just didn’t know people were looking for her and it was pure coincidence that she changed phones and email addresses and ordered deliveries in a different name.  (I wonder if, when the police knocked on her door, she tried the old defence of “There’s nobody here but my cleaner”?)

Another disappearance, this time in China, is of the tennis champion Peng Shuai just after she’d posted an online accusation of sexual assault against the country’s former vice-premier.  The post disappeared within half an hour, removed by Chinese censors.  One post, saying “… everything is fine …” has since been posted to her account and a couple of videos that could have been taken anywhen have been released by Chinese state media to prove she’s still alive.

The Women’s Tennis Association isn’t convinced by their authenticity and have threatened not to hold any more matches in China.  Still, at least we now know you can speak truth unto power in China.  They’ll lock you up for it and you’ll never be seen again but you can speak truth.  Just the once.

Back on what’s left of planet Earth, one report this week said the Los Angeles police had used fake social media accounts to surveil civilians.  Why not say ‘spy on’?  (‘Surveil’ apparently only appeared for the first time in the 1960s, a backformation from ‘surveillance’.  Yuk.)

I also tripped over this sentence in this morning’s Observer:

“The judge responsible, Sir Andrew McFarlane, must, if he wasn’t acting purely out of servility, have concluded that transparency would be riskier to royal wellbeing than the public appetite for disclosure he has, with a flair worthy of a 19th-century serial novelist, preferred to stimulate.”

It is grammatically correct if you re-read it but it’d have been so much better as two sentences.  Where are the subs when you need them?

And finally, some kindness from America:  in 2016, Wanda Dench texted an invitation to her grandson to her Thanksgiving dinner but sent it to the wrong person.  A reply came from Jamal Hinton who said “You not my grandma. Can I still get a plate tho?”

Dench replied: “Of course you can. That’s what grandma’s do … feed every one.”  And they’ve spent Thanksgiving Day together every year since.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Hybrid cars, planting trees, dinosaur parasites, religious persecution, apostrophes and commas

15 December 2019

I saw an ad for a new BMW X3 hybrid so, out of curiosity, I looked on the BMW website to see what they claim for their hybrid.  (We actually have a BMW which is 13 years old and, by a significantly uninteresting coincidence, exactly the same age as our older dog).  Their website said this:

“Capable of reaching 62 mph from a standstill using both the electric motor and TwinPower Turbo combustion engine, [the new BMW X3 xDrive30e] plug-in hybrid SAV is injecting new life into on road adventures.”

Is something missing after “standstill”?  “In second gear”?  Or “downhill” perhaps?  It makes a Morris Minor seem attractive.

It also claims “an all-electric range of up to 31 miles”, which would get us to our nearest town and back while a trip to my older son in Dundee would require 17 recharging stops if one wanted to do the whole trip on electricity.  Then another 17 stops on the way back …

Energy storage is, of course, a problem generally but more so if you have to carry the storage containers around with you and batteries that are efficient enough to power cars are very heavy.  It was therefore interesting to hear recently about some research at Texas A&M University* into using the bodywork of the car as a battery.  The trouble is that the materials used in batteries are very brittle and powdery.  However, mother of pearl is made from calcium carbonate, which is also brittle and powdery but becomes much stronger than the sum of its parts when layered with chitin sea shells.  They’re now looking for an effective binding agent.

More work is obviously necessary but it’s encouraging to see lateral thinking at work.

Incidentally, when paper tax discs for cars were abolished in October 2014, the government said this would eventually save the DVLA about £7m a year.  The actual total loss caused by vehicles not being taxed at all in 2019/20 is estimated at £85m.

Another interesting thing I picked up this week is that one should always plant trees in square holes, not round holes, even round holes with soil that’s been loosened round the edges.  This is basically because roots curl as they grow and, in a round hole, they can just knot themselves into a spherical lump of root mass;  but they can’t cope with right-angles so they have to head off into the virgin soil around the hole, providing a wider root base for the tree.  Any proper sort of gardener of the Mr Harding kind (this reference is for Maggie Holland and/or June Tabor fans) knew this already but I didn’t.

Nor did I know that Dinosaurs had lice.  Scientists who spend their days peering through microscopes at bits of amber have discovered pieces of ancient amber containing dinosaur feathers riddled with louse-like insects.  (Yes, feathers.  You can imagine a tyrannosaurus rex in a turquoise feather boa asking for the canapés, can’t you?)  Dr Chungkun Shih, a visiting professor at Capital Normal University in China, a co-author of the research published in Nature Communications, said the amber had originated in Burma and could be 100m years old.  Now it’s called Myanmar, the lice are in government and prey on the Rohingya.

Following the xenophobic precedent set last year by Israel that excluded non-Jews from voting, the Indian government’s lower house last week passed a law that will grant citizenship to all religious minorities from neighbouring countries including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians fleeing persecution, but not Muslims.  “This bill is in line with India’s centuries-old ethos of assimilation and belief in humanitarian values,” spake Narendra Modi, the prime minister, having clearly misunderstood the meaning of ‘assimilation’ and ‘humanitarian’.

In Texas, the Houston police chief, Art Acevedo, got very angry after one of his officers had responded to a domestic violence call and was shot dead.  He tore into the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and two Texas senators saying they were intentionally stalling the Violence Against Women Act because they “don’t want to piss off the NRA”.

It seems a pity that the Apostrophe Protection Society has closed, probably realising it was supporting a lost cause.  Somebody recently passed a blackboard saying “Asparagu’s” outside a greengrocer’s shop so they went into explain;  the greengrocer freely admitted the mistake but said it was surprising how much their sales had increased since the sign went up and people came in to point out the error.

Commas also needed to be treated properly as Lynne Truss exemplified with the old joke involving the difference between a panda that “eats shoots and leaves” and one that “eats, shoots and leaves”, and even one that “eats shoots, and leaves”.

 

*          The A&M originally stood for Agricultural and Mechanical when it was founded in 1876 but, as its syllabus broadened in the 1960s and it became more inclusive, they dropped the Ag & Mech and the A&M doesn’t now stand for anything.