Try again Harriet

It was heartening to hear Harriet Harman, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, trying to shed her image of po-faced sanctimoniousness by essaying a witticism at the expense of the Treasury Secretary by calling him "one ginger rodent who would not be welcome in Scotland". It was disappointing however to hear that she felt she had to apologize almost immediately afterwards, and even more disappointing for her when her victim came back with the immediate riposte that he was proud of being ginger and didn't mind being a rodent, who was busily engaged in clearing up the mess left by other people!

But Harriet was right, squirrels can be a blinking nuisance. Our neighbour has a thatched roof and a family of squirrels are busily engaged at present in chewing away most of the electric cables in his loft. They come for lunch to our house, eating whatever we put out for the birds now that they've stripped the hazelnut bushes and the walnut tree. In other words the Treasury Secretary won't be satisfied until he's had your nuts, and then he'll rob your bird.

I'm not sure though why people should think its an insult to be called ginger. I've heard people say that the most unbelieveable part of the Harry Potter films is the claim that it features 'a ginger' with two friends, but I think most chaps would have been very friendly indeed with the Pre-Raphaelite beauties, if they had the chance. It sounds to me as though this 'gingerism' is yet another regrettable '-ism' which we should strive to combat. After all people with no hair already suffer from 'baldism', brown-haired people from 'boring mouseyism', black-haired people are called spicks (in USA) or half-caste (in UK), and we all know about blondes, although it never worried Dolly Parton because, she said, she knows that blondes are really smart and she knows that she's not really blonde.

And I understand that red hair is already well established in Scotland, and the Celts may not like the epithet ginger rodent.

So, nice try, Harriet, but 'nil point'.

Damned with faint praise

When I spoke about lunatics in California the other day (Is anybody out there?) I did not of course intend to slight the worthy citizens of the good old U.S.of A.

Even if I had so intended I couldn't possibly compete with the American comedian Rich Hall (he's the one that scowls lugubriously at everyone in the TV quiz show Q.I.). In his book 'Things Snowball' (ISBN 0349115109) he describes the denizens of Las Vegas (whom he earlier calls "fish-faced fossils") in these terms:-

'To walk the teeming pavements of this town is to battle a tide of slack-jawed human rodentia: a never-ending parade of grifters, drifters, alcoholics, hookers, scam artists, Prairie scum and California detritus, clutching their plastic cups of slot nickels, staring in bovine awe at the monuments of stucco and neon built for their Neanderthal amusement. Men in backwards-worn baseball caps, belt-buckles the size of bin lids, half-buried beneath cascading beer guts. Jiggly-arsed women with permanently toasted tumbleweeds of hair, frizzed out, teased up, bedecked in gold rope, their protoplasmic corpulent manatee-shaped bodies sheathed in shell suits...', and so on.

Gee-whiz, I'd love to hear him describe people he didn't like very much.

The fly-leaf of his book says that he now resides in London. I should think that's very wise.

Buy his book, we don't want to lose him.

A Parliamentary Bestiary

Speaking of journalists and political insults involving dead sheep, as we were on July 1st and 2nd, prompts me to mention an article by Max Davidson, in yesterday's Telegraph, in which he discussed the standard of personal insults expressed by various Members of Parliament.

The rudest and crudest, as you might expect was an Aussie, Paul Keating, a former Prime Minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, who tended to describe his opponents as 'mangy maggots', 'intellectual rust buckets', 'gutless spivs', 'foul-mouthed grubs' or 'little desiccated coconuts'.

They had more style in the old days, especially in the Mother of Parliaments. Benjamin Disraeli for example said the Earl of Aberdeen had 'the crabbed malice of a maundering witch'. Maundering? I didn't know either, but apparently it means dreamy or rambling, as in opium addict (as it was in those days, though I believe there are now more modern substances).

Our recent chaps have kept their end up though. Michael Foot compared Norman Tebbitt to 'a semi-house-trained polecat' and Tony Banks said that Terry Dicks was 'living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can be elected to Parliament'. Banks also boggled my mind by claiming that Mrs. Thatcher had 'all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor'. I was left wondering how exactly he knew about the boa constrictor's sensitivity and which bits he tested, but nothing M.P.s do in their spare time would surprise me.
The winner for my money though was Vince Cable, when he hastened Gordon Brown's departure by pointing out that he had been transmogrified by recent events from Stalin into Mr. Bean.
Max Davidson's article was of course prompted by Simon Burns' recent description of the revered Speaker of the House of Commons as a 'stupid, sanctimonious, dwarf '. How rude! In my opinion that robbed Mr Speaker of his dignity just as if he'd picked his pocket. How could he stoop so low?
I like dwarf jokes though, especially when they're made by dwarves. Ronnie Corbett highlighted his frustration that he is not tall enough to play James Bond, but he's too big to be adopted by Madonna.
One can only speculate as to why Bernie Ecclestone married such a tall girl. Did one of his friend put him up to it I wonder?