‘Liz Truss is the Tory speaking clock – having her as next PM is an alarming idea’
The Carry On film that is the Tory leadership farce gets more and more bizarre by the day.
I half expect show-off Liz Truss to do a Barbara Windsor tribute striptease. But no, don’t go there.
Desperate, self-styled underdog Rishi Sunak has come out with the daftest idea yet – a year-long exile to Yorkshire for Whitehall mandarins.
The ex-Chancellor, who found the county on the map while looking for a safe seat in Parliament, thinks civil -servants would benefit from a spell up North. Experience of working in Tykeland businesses would boost the Tory policy of “levelling up” he told a local paper. Sphericals.
Er, can you imagine it? Mr Pinstripe and Ms Business Suit get off the Azuma flyer at Wakefield and ask the taxi driver: “Could you take us to widgets factory in Heckmondwike, my good man?”
“Thawat?” replies the cabbie, without looking up from his Mirror. “Tha closed it years ago.”
(
Getty Images)
One of the few benefits of Johnson’s defenestration from Downing Street is that – apart from his forthcoming defeat lap of the provinces – we will never see Porky Blond Mop again.
He hates the place. They all do. But this lot never fail to entertain.
A new survey finds that most party members would actually prefer failure Johnson to remain in No10.
That fact alone should disqualify them from choosing the next Prime Minister. They believe his lies and forgive his criminality.
And if they can’t keep their lost leader, the Tory faithful want fake Tyke Truss to take over running the country. Into the ground, presumably.
She is the Conservative Speaking Clock. At the third stroke, the time is… too late for sanity in the party that thinks it’s born to rule. That. Is. A. Disgrace, to quote her directly.
*******
I wish Jeremy Paxman well in his long journey with Parkinson’s disease after a 28-year stint compering University Challenge.
He will be a hard act to follow, but his successor, Amol Rajan, shares Paxo’s dearth of shyness. Bamber Gascoigne was in the chair during my inglorious appearance for Nottingham Uni in 1965, so I didn’t have to suffer Paxo’s waspish humour. Losing in the first round was bad enough. He would have humiliated me – never an easy task.
No drought about bonuses
Water companies have “underperformed” according to the privatised industry’s regulator, Ofwat. That must be the understatement of the year.
It’s true, except in one respect: bosses’ bonuses. In that, they overperform.
At my supplier, Yorkshire Water, part-owned by the Singapore government, they shared £3.3million last year, despite failing to fix the leaks. Now, in one of the country’s wettest counties, they’ve declared a drought and are imposing a hosepipe ban on more than five million people.
The industry’s biggest leak is from the cash till into the bosses’ pockets, but they have no incentive to plug that. Off-What? It’s as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
*******
So-called animal lovers in Britain sent death threats to a Norwegian fisheries official and his family after Freya the wandering walrus was put down because the public would not leave her alone.
Hating humans seems to come all too easily to these zoophilist misanthropes – £20,000 has been raised to commemorate 1,300lb Freya in statue form, so that she won’t be forgotten.
