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Marvellous lunacy

A weekly column reproduced from the Bristol Evening Post


Have I got this right? If we refuse to pay over £1 a litre for petrol, then Mr Blah will have to close down all the hospitals and sack all the nurses. And it’ll be our fault.

Hmm. Don’t the French have the best health service in the world? And isn’t their petrol considerably cheaper than ours?

But, hey, you’re all mugs and you’ll swallow anything Tony tells you, right?

The truth of the matter is that Gordon Brown is sitting on several billion pounds with which NuLabour is planning to bribe us in the run-up to the election. Just wait for those surprise pension increases.

And any cash not in Gordon’s coffers has been squandered on the Dome, or on Lord Irvine’s wallpaper, or on Two Jags’ four houses, or on Lord Levy’s travelling expenses. (Over £31,000 for car mileage? Was this man once a journalist?)

The Blah government is now so hopelessly out of touch with reality that even their most blatant lies are getting sillier by the day. Further evidence, if any was needed, came with Mr Blah’s announcement at the weekend that those guilty of yobbish behaviour would be subject to £100 on-the-spot fines.

What marvellous lunacy! Here’s Wayne from Lawrence Weston, full of cider and spoiling for a fight, strutting around the Centre on Saturday night. Let’s fine him £100, officer.

But he’s got no money. And if we march him to a cashpoint, he won’t have anything in his account. That’s if he can remember his PIN number when he’s pissed. And that’s assuming there’s a policemen there to arrest him in the first place. The whole thing is a total nonsense.

Even Blah’s definition of yobbishness – kicking someone’s garden gate or throwing traffic cones around – bears little resemblance to reality. He really should get out more.

Luckily, senior police officers managed to talk Tony out of this absurdity, which, for some strange reason, he announced in a speech at a religious institute in Germany. (Why Germany? Have they taken over already?)

Even dear old Cherie is seemingly unhinged by her hormones. Mrs Blah was at a prize-giving ceremony at Durham’s county cricket ground when she ordered Damien to be fetched from her car where he was being looked after by a nanny. A schoolteacher took a photograph of the two and then sent it off to the local newspaper to be included in the schools’ news round-up.

When the picture was published, the Downing Street press office went ballistic, roughed up the teacher and ordered that the picture should never be re-printed.

So the Prime Minister’s wife, acting in an official capacity at a public event and using her baby as a prop, can’t be photographed? What utter, arrogant nonsense.

And by the way. If Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, has stopped talking to journalists, why are we still paying him £96,000 a year?


Watch out for another outbreak of vegetarianism. With Chicken Run packing them in at the cinemas, I fully expect another generation of silly teenage girls to forgo the delights of meat.

It isn’t big and it isn’t clever, you know. You’ll get spots, you’ll constantly catch colds and all those carrots will gradually turn your hair ginger.

And, as Nanny was always quick to point out, lentils make you fart.


You’ll be glad to know that I did my bit on National Cycle to Work Day.

I climbed into a smelly, Lycra one-piece, drove through red lights and down pavements and hurled abuse at anyone who had the temerity to murmur “tut, tut”.

Yes, of course I was in my car.

– Barry Beelzebub

* The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this newspaper, of anyone who bet on Tim Henman, of the Millennium Bridge architects who blamed its swaying on “the wrong kind of walking”, or of anyone daft enough to pay £2.50 to stand on College Green in the rain to celebrate the Queen Mother’s birthday when she’s 100 miles away having a gin and putting her feet up.

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