104 days ago
After my mum died we had a series of Warwick University students, mainly from the Classics department set up by my Dad, come to look after us as babysittters. There was one of my heroes in jounalism, the great Neil M. who got his break onto Fleet Street by scooping a sex scandal involving the pop star Howard Jones who, until then, was thought to be rather a wholesome fellow. Classy. I am still in touch with Neil who was one of the 30 folks able to attend the funeral of my father during covid. If only we had been shooting grouse we could have had more. Thanks Boris Johnson you total arsehole.
217 days ago
It was only a couple of weeks ago when the hapless Tory MP William Wragg was exposed for exposing himself on Grindr and then being blackmailed that I made reference to Uncle Chris, the late Christopher Booker HERE. The image from Private Eye of the Court of SuperMac dressed as if for the fall of Rome, which hangs in the downstairs loo at The Old Rectory, is again in my mind. It is as if Tory MP’s get an automatic account with the gay dating app Grindr when they are elected. Again, another Private Eye joke springs to mind.
918 days ago
She is not for the avoidance of doubt, the 4th Tory MP in as many weeks finding themselves in a sex scandal. I am not allowed to say who the latest one, an alleged rapist, is but five minutes digging on the internet will let you know who it is. Sarah Atherton’s shaming is all to do with football.
1305 days ago
Okay that is not a huge number. Despite being behind a paywall my main site, www.ShareProphets.com has achieved almost ten times as many reads in one fewer year. But some might be surprised that my ramblings on rebuilding and living in hovels in Greece and Wales, on life on both, on politics, on jokes and on all sorts of other matters, mainstream and obscure, get any readers at all. So this is a modest landmark. When this website started it was therapy for me at a very difficult time in my life and I’d be lucky to get 30 page impressions in a day.
4191 days ago
It appears that two middle aged senior political figures (both married) have been shagging each other. The affair has now ended. The Daily Mail has the story and knows the names but cannot print them for “legal reasons.” Call Me Dave is said to be shit scared as this is explosive and will apparently blow him off course. Er …what course?
Given that the political class contains a good few closet homosexuals we should not assume that this affair involves any women. A few of the Cabinet, like Sir George Young, are too old to be runners and riders in the great Downing Street sex scandal. But elsewhere who knows?
Cash for questions, back to basics sex scandals it is right back to 1995…all we need now is a new single from Oasis and a battle with the next release from Blur.
Footnote: Apparently there are some heterosexuals in the Westminster village. Iain Dale ( not one of them) assures us that it is a man and a woman involved.
4288 days ago
The Lib Dems are still likely to win Eastleigh. If they do not, given that every councillor there is a Lib Dem and it is a Lib Dem seat then Nick Clegg is in deep trouble. It may well be that the cover-up over the Lord Rennard sex scandal is only a secondary worry although that will get very nasty as well. But at 11/2 UKIP is now worth a flutter. Think the unthinkable: UKIP might just win the by-election caused by Chris Huhne’s imminent fast track to prison.
A Populus poll shows Lib Dem 33%, Con 28% UKIP 21% ( but surging). However that assumes that undecided voters are reallocated on the basis of how the seat voted at the last General Election. That was a whole different ball game. Without that fiddle it is 31 (sex pest party), 26% ( hopeless party of Government), 25% UKIP.
Labour are on the low to mid teens and since the Labour candidate ( the one who supported the Argies in 1982 and wanted the IRA to kill Thatcher) is a prize loon, his vote could well slide far further. Labour voters in Eastleigh are not bourgeois Islington lefties who think the UKIP are unspeakably horrid but traditional working class voters who believe in hard work and have no truck with the EU, unrestricted Romanian immigration etc. They really should vote UKIP anyway and if they see UKIP as a chance to kick the wicked coalition in the goolies they may well switch. No: they are switching it is just a matter of how many more come over in the final few days.
If UKIP can pick up a few more percentage points from Labour ( and it is gaining support from all three parties) then life gets very interesting. It is hard to see the Lib Dem vote hardening in the final few days as the sex scandal widens and deepens and nothing the hopeless Government does these days does anything to attract those who should be core Tory voters. If it is anything the Tory party is meant to be the one that gets the economy right. And on Friday the UK lost its AAA rating as the credit agencies finally twigged that UK public finances are a mess and that things are not getting better.
A separate Survation phone poll has it as: Con 33, Lib Dem 29, UKIP 21, Lab 13 but again if you do not do the reallocation fiddle UKIP is up on 25 with this time the sex pests in second on 26, and the Tories on 29. The same arguments apply here. It is abundantly clear that this contest is a three way battle. Labour support is slipping steadily ( all to UKIP) and Nigel Farage et al must also think that in the next few days they can also pick up Lib Dems and Tories as well.
It will not change the world, but a UKIP win would be disastrous news for both Call Me Dave ( giving credibility to a party which believes in the sort of things the Tory party once believed in) and also for Clegg in that if the safest Lib Dem seat in England is lost what hope does his party have of avoiding electoral wipe-out in 2015.
At 11/2 it is worth a flutter. It might just happen.
And as I noted before, a UKIP vote is in fact the ONLY sane and honourable vote in Eastleigh. .
