Here are a few screenshots from a magazine I loved, but sadly, it seems theyâve responded to those SEO emails, and grabbed the US$50 per post.
I donât blame them, since Google has destroyed the online advertising ecosystem, and they have to make ends meet somehow.
I was in contact with them some years ago, and theyâre really good people.
The top articles on their home page are theirs, and they remain excellent in quality, but scroll down and there are articles that are obviously SEO pieces. What’s the bet that Al Woods and Alexa Wang, with the same initials, are the same person? As a result, I made the sad decision to remove them from Lucireâs link directory.
My feeling is that you accept these SEO gigs at your own risk, and those risks include getting demoted by the search engines as I’m sure they have figured out when you’re part of trying to game the system. They also make the site look like a content mill, despite the great original journalism that’s front and centre, and more visible there.
Our sites are our shop windows, so it’s in our interests to remain visible in the search engines. But everyone has different priorities. And I may be wrong: maybe these pieces haven’t affected that site at all. I’d just rather not risk it.
[Originally posted in Lucire] Toward the end of next week, Panos Papadopoulosâs autobiography, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, comes out in London, with an event in Stockholm following. This is an intimate memoir about Panosâs rise, from childhood poverty in Greece to the âking of swimwearâ in Scandinavia. Not only do I have an advance copy, I collaborated with Panos on it.
Iâm fascinated by autobiographies. When I was a teenager, I read Lee Iacoccaâs one, written with William Novak. I presume Novak interviewed Iacocca, or he worked with some additional notes, and ghosted for him. Whatever the case, it remains an engaging read, and I replaced my well worn paperback with a hardcover one a few years ago, when I spotted it at a charity fair. More recently I bought Don Blackâs autobiography, The Sanest Guy in the Room, and enjoyed that thoroughly.
Panos and I probably had a similar arrangement to Iacocca and Novak, whereby I interviewed and prompted him for some stories, and I wrote from copious notes that he gave me. Thereâs an entire chapter in there thatâs based on his reflections about the time he bought into a football team in Sweden, that he wrote in great detail himself soon after the events took place. Somehow over 10 months of 2021âthough the idea has been floating around for many years beforeâPanos and I created this eminently readable tale, the sort of autobiography I would like to read.
Of course we start in Greece in 1958, and how a young lad, who begins working at age five alongside his mother as she cleaned an office, finds poverty a torment, and vows to get himself out of it. He also cannot tolerate injustice, and attempts to expose pollution, workplace accidents, and corruptionâonly to find himself and his parents harassed. By his late teens, after taking an interrail journey to northern Europe, he finds an opportunity to study in Sweden.
Itâs not âthe rest is historyâ, as Panos works in kitchens, washing dishes and peeling potatoes. He also finds gigs as a prison guard, a parole officer, a rest home carer, and a substitute teacher.
His first taste of fame is for a postgraduate sociology paper, where he examines the importance of clothing in nighttime disco settings, which captures the imagination of major newspapers and TV networks.
Finding dissatisfaction and frustration working in health care for the city of GĂśteborg, he seized upon an idea one day when spying just how drab the beaches were in Sweden: beautiful bodies covered in monochrome swimwear.
Injecting colour on to the beaches through his Panos Emporio swimwear label wasnât an overnight success, and Panos elaborates on his story with the sort of passion you would expect from a Greek native, capturing your attention and leaving you wanting more.
He reveals his secrets about how he lifted himself out of poverty, creating a company given a platinum rating in Sweden, an honour reserved only for the top 450, out of half a million limited-liability companies there.
Read about how he managed his first sales despite doubts from the entire industry, how he secured Jannike BjĂśrlingâthen Swedenâs most sought-after woman, photographed constantly by the paparazziâas Panos Emporioâs model, and how he followed up with securing Victoria Silvstedt, just as she was about to become world-famous posing for Playboy.
By 1996, 10 years into his labelâs journey, and with the release of the Paillot (still offered in the Panos Emporio range today), the press dubbed him âthe king of swimwearâ, but he wasnât done yet.
More high-profile models followed, and thereâs even an encounter with Whitney Houston, revealed for the first time in the book. There are royal encounters, with former King Constantine II, and Swedenâs HM King Carl XVI Gustaf and HM Queen Sofia. HSH Princess StĂŠphanie almost makes it into the book.
There are touching moments, too, such as his heartfelt recollection of his friendship with Jean-Louis Dumas, the chairman of Hermès, and his wife Rena.
Weâve known each other for over 20 years, and from the start he complimented me on my writing, so I have a feeling he wanted me for this task for some time. We’ve both had to start businesses from scratch, and we did them away from our countries of birth. Additionally, he knew I grew up amongst Greeks so I had more than an average insight into his culture. Weâve talked about it numerous times, maybe as far back as 2016, when Panos Emporio celebrated its 30th anniversary. Iâm very grateful for that. There were obviously stories I knew, since I interviewed him about them over the years, but plenty I did not, and they form the bulk of this 320 pp. book, published by LID Publishing of London, and released on May 26. A party in Stockholm follows on May 31.
Technically, the process was an easy collaboration as Panos and I shared notes and written manuscripts back and forth, and I had the privilege to lay it out and edit the photos as well. The whole book was typed out on WordPerfect, which gave an almost perfect re-creation of how the copyfitting would go in InDesign, unlike Wordâfor a while others doubted I could fit the contents into the agreed page length, since they couldnât see it in the same format that I did. Martin Majoorâs FF Nexus Serif is used for the body text. And, while hardly anyone probably cares about such things, I managed to deliver it so the printer could do the book without wasting paper with the right page impositions. I know what it’s like to have printing bills.
My Life, My Odyssey was the working title, but it seems LID liked it enough to retain it for the final product. I wanted to retitle it Panos: Who Designs Wins, but the experts in charge of sales preferred the working title. âWho designs winsâ appears on the back cover, so itâs still getting out there!
Caroline Li, LIDâs designer, did the cover, and I followed her lead with the headline typeface choice; and Martin Liu, who Iâve known from Stefan Engesethâs many books, published and coordinated. Iâm grateful to the watchful eye and coordination of Aiyana Curtis, who oversaw the production stage and did the first edit; she also engaged the copy editor and proofreader, who turned my stubborn Hartâs Rules-compliant text into LIDâs house style.
I see from her rĂŠsumĂŠ that Aiyana had done some work here in Aotearoa, and Caroline and Martin, like me, have Hong Kong roots, so we all probably had some things in common that made the process easier. It was particularly easy to understand Carolineâs design approach, and as someone who had done mock covers while we were trying out potential photos, I will say hers is infinitely superior to mine. Similarly, I understood Martinâs business approach from day one.
The final manuscript was done in October 2021 and weâve spent the last few months doing production, shooting the cover, and preparing for the launch, where LIDâs Teya Ucherdzhieva has ably been working on a marketing plan. Panos himself, never one to do things by halves, has thrown himself into doing the launch, and it promises to be an excellent event.
For those whoâd like to get their hands on a copy, Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble are retailing Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, and a US launch is slated for October (Amazon and other retailers will have it in their catalogues).
During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company thatâs a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasnât personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaintsâ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasnât working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring companies such as Afterpay, followed up via my company feedback form by their senior marketing manager, Rob Walton.
Rob asked me to send them the spam for their investigation, and, after about seven attempts, they received it (ironically, their own server blocked the message on the grounds of it being spam). I confirmed that although I do have British nationality, I had never resided in the UK or had had any contact with Novuna.
He was as good as his word, and after a few days, came back to me to say Experian, a credit reference agency, had supplied my address to them. He also included a web address so I could get make a âsubject access requestâ from the provider, made sure I was off their email lists, and apologized.
From there, ESB Connect Ltd. also took things seriously. The request came back, and ESB’s CEO, Suz Chaplin, took the time to write a personal email. It turns out that ESB had acquired the details from another company, Datatonomy, who falsely claimed that I had signed up via two websites: Idealo and Great British Offers.
Hereâs the real kicker: it claimed that my name was âMrs Jayne Mooreâ of Liverpool.
Rewind back over 15 years (maybe closer to 20!) and a dodgy spam list doing the rounds in the 2000s saw a lot of messages sent to my email calling me âMrs Jayne Mooreâ. I even have a filter for it in Eudora thatâs been there since the â00s.
Indeed, 10 days prior to Suz getting back to me, I said to Rob: âI do remember one UK-based spam list from the 2000s that had my email address listed against the name âMrs Jayne Mooreâ and those still come. It will be interesting to discover if this is the same source.â
Imagine my surprise to find that a common and badly compiled spam list (obviously my details were erroneously married up with Mrs Mooreâs name, address and date of birth) is still being sold by dodgy parties in the UK, making false claims about sign-ups!
I wrote to Suz: âIt seems you may have unwittingly and innocently purchased a common spammers’ list where such details were mixed up (after all, these people have no qualms) or that you have been duped about the veracity of the opt-ins detailed in your document.â And cheekily, I suggested she should get her money back from Datatonomy.
Suz says she will look into this further as her company prides itself on data integrity. I thanked her, and true to both her and Robâs promises, I havenât received anything like the Novuna spam since. Nor have I seen that many purporting to be from British companies.
Money for Nothingâimage from Amazon Prime, where, as of yesterday, you can watch a presumably cleaner copy than what’s on YouTube.
As a young lad, I enjoyed the Screen One TV movie Money for Nothing (1993), which aired on the BBC in the UK and TV1 here. Not to be confused with the John Cusack movie Money for Nothing (1993).
As someone who started my career very young, I could identify with the lead character, Gary Worrall (played by Christien Anholt), a teenager who finds himself in the adult worldâand in the TV film, well out of his depth in a massive property deal that takes him to New York. Itâs one film where Martin Short plays it straight (and is really good), Jayne Ashbourne does a cute Scots accent, Julian Glover is his usual brilliant self, and thereâs a fantastic Johnny Dankworth score, with his wife Cleo Laine singing. I had the good fortune to see them both perform in Aotearoa in 1994.
Because itâs television, of course the deals that Worrall does at the start of the TV movie work out. And heâs audacious. It was a little easier to believe as a 20-something (Anholt and I are about the same age), not so much in middle age!
I’m still a romantic at heart and the love story that screenwriter Tim Firth added for Anholt and Ashbourne’s characters comes across nicely and innocently.
Thereâs a line, however, between actually having made something or being able to do something, then proving to the doubters that youâre capable (which is where real life is, at least for me); and BSing your way forward not having done the hard yards. As itâs fiction, Worrall falls into the latter group. You wouldnât want to be in the latter in real lifeâthatâs where the Elizabeth Holmeses of this world wind up.
I hadnât seen Money for Nothing for over 25 years, but on a whim, I looked it up on July 27, and there it was on YouTube. Enjoy this far more innocent, post-Thatcher time.
PS.: Only today did I realize that Christien is the late Tony Anholt’s (The Protectors) son.
I havenât done one of these since February, where I look at the COVID-19 positivity rates of selected countries. The arrows indicate the direction of change since that post. Happily, I imagine with the vaccine roll-outs, we are seeing drops, though there is a new wave in Taiwan, contributing to a rise; other territories showing rises are Brazil, India, Germany, and South Korea.
Brazil 34¡67% â
Sweden 10¡06% â
India 7¡43% â
Spain 7¡20% â
USA 6¡84% â
France 6¡21% â
Italy 5¡98% â
Germany 5¡85% â
Russia 3¡68% â
UK 2¡26% â
KSA 2¡23% â
South Korea 1¡48% â
Taiwan 0¡67% â
Singapore 0¡47% â
Australia 0¡15% â
New Zealand 0¡12% â
Hong Kong 0¡07% â
This is also a good time to remind people of a Toot that was liked and shared quite a few times on Mastodon. For me, itâs a record.
As Umair Haque put it (original emphases):
Its creators â researchers â pledged to make it open source, available to manufacture and develop anywhere. After all, this was a global pandemic. And yet â with some helpful intervention from Bill Gates â the Oxford vaccine was privatized. Given exclusively to AstraZeneca, Britainâs key pharmaceutical corporation.
So instead of vaccinating the world â or at least helping the world get vaccinated â Britain engaged in the stupid, selfish game of vaccine nationalism. It kept its newly privatised vaccine for itself. It prevented even Europe from having the Oxford vaccine. What was being selfish about a vaccine going to do? Breed vaccine resistance. In India, meanwhile, there werenât enough vaccines available. So Covid mutated and mutated, until new mutations could âescapeâ the vaccine, by altering the shape of the âspike protein.â If all that sounds like gibberish to you, donât worry â the point is simple. By keeping its vaccine to itself, all Britain did was ensure that variants resistant to it would breed at light speed, in the worldâs worst hit countries â like India.
You can read the rest of his post here. Donât point the blame for delta at India. Itâs been British policy since day one to use the UK as a COVID-19 mutation petri dish. And now it wants to export this tactic to other places. Their friends are getting rich off this. Reminds me a bit of what happened in Zimbabwe when Mugabe and his cronies took everything while tanking the country.
Iâve bought Don Blackâs The Sanest Guy in the Room, which is a great readâyou know that itâs piqued your interest if you can do 110 pages in a single sitting. Thereâs more to go, and itâs entertaining learning a bit about the backgrounds to his songs, âBorn Freeâ arguably his best known. (I do know there are insurance commercials with the song, so I hope he, and the families of John Barry and Matt Monro are getting decent royalties from themâthough itâs pretty bad I have no idea which company itâs for. I assume itâs a successor firm to AA Mutual.)
Don has been very humble in this book and in one part, excerpts his favourite lyrics that others have written. In my mind, however, Don is the top man in his business, and it seems right that I highlight a few of my favourites out of his extensive repertoire and honour him. These come to mind, in no particular order. Many show a good use of rhyme, and all evoke imagery. The repetition of a root word is also clever. And theyâre âsingableâ. As someone who works with the English language professionally they appeal to me for their ingenuity and, in some cases, brevity. Surprisingly, by the time I chose 10, I realized I had not included any of his James Bond lyrics.
Any errors are mine as I recall the songs in my head.
But how do you thank someone
Who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
(âTo Sir with Loveâ, from To Sir with Love)
Youâve been dancing round my mind
Like a bright carousel.
(âIf There Ever Is a Next Timeâ, from Hoffman)
While your eyes played games with mine
(âOn Days Like Theseâ, from The Italian Job)
This way Mary, come Mary,
While the sun is high,
Make this summer the summer that refused to die
(âThis Way Maryâ, from Mary, Queen of Scots)
Walkabout,
And as you wander on
Reflect and ponder on
The dreams today forgot to bring.
(âWalkaboutâ, from Walkabout)
The me I never knew
Began to stir some time this morning.
The me I never knew
Arrived without a word of warning.
You smiled and you uncovered
What I had not discovered.
(âThe Me I Never Knewâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
Most people stay and battle on with their boredom
But whatâs the sense in dreaming dreams if you hoard âem?
(âI Belong to the Starsâ, from Billy)
Love has no season,
There are no rules.
Those who stop dreaming are fools.
(âOur Time Is Nowâ, from the Shirley Bassey album The Performance)
Main attraction, couldnât buy a seat
The celebrity celebrities would die to meet
(âIf I Never Sing Another Songâ, as originally performed by Matt Monro)
Thereâs so much more for me to find,
Iâm glad Iâve left behind behind.
(âIâve Never Been This Far Beforeâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
I have a problem with blackface and yellowface, generally when there are more than capable actors who could have taken the role, but I make exceptions in some situations.
Take, for example, the news that Little Britain and Come Fly with Me are being removed from streaming services because of what are now deemed racist portrayals. Matt Lucas, who plays half the roles in each, has even said that the shows were right for the time but theyâre not what he would make today. Yet I donât find myself being troubled by his and David Walliamsâs characters, since in both they are equal-opportunity about it, even going so far as to address racism head-on with Come Fly with Meâs Ian Foot, a clearly racist character.
I always viewed everyone from Ting Tong to Precious as caricatures viewed through a British lens, and it is through their comedy that they shine a light on the nationâs attitudes. Matt and David might not like me grouping their work in with Benny Hillâs Chow Mein character, who, while offensive to many Chinese, tended to expose the discomfort of the English âstraight manâ character, usually portrayed by Henry McGee. I canât think of one where Mein doesnât get the upper hand. I like to think these characters all come from the same place.
Sometimes, especially in comedy, you need people of the same race as most of the audience to point to their nationâs attitudes (and often intolerance)âitâs often more powerful for them as itâs not seen as preaching. Where I have a problem is when characters are founded on utterly false stereotypes, e.g. the bad Asian driver, the loud black man.
And can you imagine the furore if every character portrayed by Matt and David in Come Fly with Me was white? They would be sharply criticized for not being representative of the many cultures at a modern British airport.
I donât turn a blind eye to brownface in Hong Kong (Chinese actors playing Indians) or the mangled Cantonese used to dub white actors, but the same rules apply: if it shines a light on a situation, helps open our collective eyes, and make us better people, then surely we can accept those?
I Tweeted tonight something I had mentioned on this blog many years ago: Vince Powellâs sitcom Mind Your Language, set in 1970s Britain, where Barry Evansâs Jeremy Brown character, an ESL teacher, has to deal with his highly multicultural and multiracial class. The joke is always, ultimately, on Mr Brown, or the principal, Miss Courtenay, for their inability to adjust to the new arrivals and to understand their cultures. Maybe itâs rose-coloured glasses, but I donât remember the students being shown as second-class; they often help Jeremy Brown out of a pickle.
Importantly, many of the actors portrayed their own races, and, if the DVD commentary is to be believed, they were often complimented by people of the same background for their roles.
Powell based some of his stories on real life: a foreign au pair worked for them and brought home her ESL classmates, and he began getting ideas for the sitcom.
However, at some stage, this show was deemed to be racist. As I Tweeted tonight, âI loved Mind Your Language but white people said the depictions of POC were racist. Hang on, isnât it more racist to presume we canât complain ourselves? Most of the actors in that depicted their own race.
âI can only speak for my own, and I didnât find the Chinese character racist. Because there were elements of truth in there, she was portrayed by someone of my ethnicity, and the scripts were ultimately joking about the British not adjusting well to immigrant cultures.
âWhich, given how Leavers campaigned about Brexit, continues to be true. I get why some blackface and yellowface stuff needs to go but canât we have a say?
âTonight on TV1 news, there were two white people commenting on the offensiveness of minority portrayals in Little Britain and Come Fly with Me. I hope someone sees the irony in that.â
However, if any minorities depicted by Matt and David are offended by their workâTing Tong, Asuka and Nanako are the only Asiatic characters they do that I can think of, so east Asians arenât even that well representedâof course I will defer to your judgement. I canât pretend to know what itâs like for someone of Pakistani heritage to see Mattâs Taaj Manzoor, or someone with a Jamaican heritage to see Precious Little. However, unlike some commentators, I do not presume that members of their community are powerless to speak up, and they are always welcome on this forum.
You couldnât make this up.
Fortunately for us all, RussInCheshire on Twitter has summed up Cumgate, or whatever itâs being dubbed in the UK.
No matter how bad our politics could get, I think we should be pleased that we have not followed the UK, and that we have dealt with COVID-19 far better than they have. Given the behaviour of their government, perhaps this is no surprise.
I donât know how to combine the lot in one embed, so I hope Russ will forgive me for quoting his Twitter thread in full. The original may be found here.
The week in Tory (Cummings special):
1. Dominic Cummings, one of the few men to have ever been found in contempt of Parliament, moved onto contempt for everything
2. When the story broke, and he was accused of doing things that look bad, he said he didn’t care how things looked
3. Then ministers said press outrage meant nothing, only the opinion of the people mattered
4. Then polls showed 52% of people wanted Cummings to resign
5. So Cummings decided to show the public some respect, by turning up 30 minutes late to make his explanation
6. He began by saying he wasn’t speaking for the govt, which must be why he was in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street
7. Then the self-styled “enemy of the Islington media elite” said his wife, who works in the media, had been ill in their house in Islington
8. But she was only a bit ill, so he popped home, got himself nice and infected, then went back to Downing Street for meetings with lots of vitally important people in the middle of a national crisis
9. But then he got ill too, so then it was suddenly important
10. Sadly he couldn’t get childcare in London, even though 3 immediate relatives live within 3 miles of his London home
11. So because he was carrying a virus that can cross a 2 metre distance and kill, he immediately locked himself in a car with his wife and child for 5 hours
12. He then drove 264 miles without stopping in a Land Rover that gets maybe 25 MPG
13. Then the scourge of the metropolitan elites made himself extra-relatable by describing his family’s sprawling country estate, multiple houses and idyllic woodlands
14. He explained that he’d warned about a coronavirus years ago in his blog
15. Then it was revealed he actually secretly amended old blogs after he’d returned from Durham
16. And anyway, if he’d warned years ago, why was he so massively unprepared and slow to react?
17. Then he said he was too ill to move for a week
18. But in the middle of that week, presumably with “wonky eyes”, he drove his child to hospital
19. Then he said that to test his “wonky eyes” he put his wife and child in a car and drove 30 miles on public roads
20. Then it was revealed his wife drives, so there was no reason for the “eye test”, cos she could have driven them back to London
21. Then it was revealed the “eye test” trip to a local tourist spot took place on his wife’s birthday
22. Then cameras filmed as he threw a cup onto the table, smirked and left
23. And then it emerged his wife had written an article during the time in Dunham, describing their experience of being in lockdown in London, which you’d definitely do if you weren’t hiding anything
24. A govt scientific advisor said “more people will die” as a result of what Cummings had done.
25. Boris Johnson said he “wouldn’t mark Cummings ” down for what he’d done.
26. The Attorney General said it was ok to break the law if you were acting on instinct
27. The Health Minister said it was OK to endanger public health if you meant well
28. Johnson said Cummings’ “story rings true” because his own eyesight was fine before coronavirus, but now he needs glasses
29. But in an interview with The Telegraph 5 years ago, Johnson said he needed glasses cos he was “blind as a bat”
30. Michael Gove went on TV and said it was “wise” to drive 30 miles on public roads with your family in the car to test your eyesight
31. The DVLA tweeted that you should never, ever do this
32. Then ministers started claiming Cummings had to go to Durham because he feared crowds attacking his home. The streets were empty because we were observing the lockdown.
33. And then a minister finally resigned
34. Steve Baker, Richard Littlejohn, Isabel Oakeshott, Tim Montgomerie, Jan Moir, Ian Dale, Julia Hartley Brewer, 30 Tory MPs, half a dozen bishops and the actual Daily Mail said Cummings should go
35. The govt suggested we can ignore them, because they’re all left-wingers
36. Then a vicar asked Matt Hancock if other people who had been fined for doing exactly what Cummings did would get their fine dropped. Matt Hancock said he’d suggest it to the govt
37. The govt said no within an hour. Cummings’ statement had lasted longer than that
38. And if the guidelines were so clear, why were people being stopped and fined for driving to find childcare in the first place?
39. Then a new poll found people who wanted Cummings sacked had risen from 52% to 57%
40. Cummings is considered the smartest man in the govt
41. And in the middle of all this, in case we take our eye off it: we reached 60,000 deaths. One of the highest per capita death rates worldwide.
42. We still face Brexit under this lot.
43. It’s 4 years until an election
44. And it’s still only Wednesday
The Hon David Clark MP is not a story in this context. Though the former opposition leader’s 1,000 km round trips are.
As a dual national, I hope thereâs some exaggeration or selective quoting in the Bristol Post about its report of former police officer Mike Rowland, whoâs stuck in Auckland with his wife Yvonne. Apparently, New Zealand is in âpandemoniumâ and he feels like heâs in âAlcatrazâ.
As we are most certainly not in pandemonium, the British Crown may have to ponder if it needs to reopen some of the cases Mr Rowland was once involved in due to unreliable witness testimony. Then again, if it can keep a foreign national like Julian Assange indefinitely and subject him to psychological torture as well as the risk of COVID-19 infection, perhaps it wonât need to ponder a thing.
Mr Rowlandâs not a fan of our breakfast television, either, saying that it makes Piers Morgan a âgodâ. There actually is some truth to the quality of our breakfast telly depending on which channel he has come across (I wonât name names), and I recommend that he switch to another. Go a bit further up the dial, and Aljazeera English has a whole variety of ex-BBC presenters speaking in RP that might make him feel less at home.
And Iâve my own stories about the inability to get answers from the British High Commission, so I sympathize on this note.
But given the choice between being stuck in Aotearoa and being amongst the control group that is Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where the governmentâs sense of British exceptionalism meant that it delayed locking things down, so much so that the PM himself has COVID-19, I would be quite happy to be in the land Down Under.
Mr Rowland may have missed the (disputed) Murdoch Press (which usually leans right) report that suggested that Boris Johnson’s senior adviser said it was ‘too bad’ if ‘some pensioners die’, consistent with Mr Johnson’s own position that Britain would pursue a strategy of herd immunityâand consistent with what the British government initially announced, with sycophants in full agreement.
I admit Iâve called our government âa bunch of Blairitesâ but Iâd take them over their lot, including their Mr Johnson who does less convincing prime ministerial impressions than Neville Chamberlain. Their mass U-turn had to happen as it appeared the British people figured out their lives were being put in danger and forced the government’s hand.
I realize he misses the comforts of home and I would, too, in his shoes, though equally Iâd be grateful to be alive, in a country where even he acknowledges that food is readily available and we havenât suffered the extent of panic buying that the UK has seen. If only Alcatraz were this pleasant.
Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.)
Ken Clarke nails Boris Johnson's oh so transparent strategy 👏
1. Set conditions which make No Deal inevitable
2. Make sure blame is attached to the EU & Parliament
3. Fly a flag waving general election before the consequences of No Deal become too obvious pic.twitter.com/hoNKc9hysv
Subsequently, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lives in a dream world detached from understanding others, inspired even more rebellion, and with the PM’s speech, it played out exactly as Clarke predicted. Not predicted: Iain Duncan-Smith picking his nose.
Johnson is acting like the schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework and is trying to hide it in a myriad of excuses. The UK doesn’t even have a negotiating team, according to former Chancellor Philip Hammond, and the PM’s claims of ‘progress’ are a mystery to those in Brussels. There is only so much nationalistic bluster will get you if you don’t actually do the workâeven if you voted leave, you would expect this government to have advanced your interests even slightly. It appears that that was never its aim. It feels a bit like the last days of Mao: keep it messy in a hope to hold on a little longer.
