Tripps Clipps

[Tripps]

I've accumulated a long list of cuttings over several years, that have piqued my interest from all over the interwebthingy, and I've toyed with the idea of publishing them in a new thread perhaps on a regular basis. Not in any way to rival Bob Bliss's daily contribution - I wouldn't dare, but just perhaps to add a bit of variety to the site.

They vary in length from a few lines to a long essay. I'll do them in roughly chronological order woth the oldest first.

Let me know when you've had enough. . .

[Tripps]

This wa prompted by Lee Kuan Yew's policy of paying his MP's a good salary so they would not be tempted by bribery. I've removed the rose tinteds, and find that he also said words to the effect that 'if you cross me I will put the knuckle dusters on and wait for you down a dark alley, but which do you prefer Singapore or Cuba or Haiti?

I saved this from a long gone website call www.paki.com. Yes such a site once existed

The Kazi of Bukkur

A story is given about the Kazi of Bukkur who was a judge in the days of Jam Sanjar. This Kazi had a peculiar way of his own, he took bribes not from one party but from both. Jam Sanjar having received complaints sent for him personally and took him to task. The Kazi, although dishonest in his duties, was honest enough to confess. he said, "Yes, I do take bribes. If I could, I would extract money from the witnesses leave the premises before the court closes." The pious Jam could not help laughing. The Kazi continued : "Sire, with all this sin, and with all the hard work of the day, I am not able to keep hunger out of my house, and my wife and children suffer." The Jam took a lesson from this and raised the salaries of his servants. The present British rulers of India ought also to take a lesson from Jam Sanjar. Their lower subordinates often receive too little salary and obviously interpret this as an inducement to take to irregular means of increasing it. The Sumras and the Sammas ruled for two centuries. Their territory extended from the sea coast far into the boundaries of the Punjab. Tatta, their capital, which was a huge city, is not now an important town in Sind, but its vast ruins stretch out for many, many miles, and its Makli Hill still presents many an object of interest and study.
History repeated itself and luxury corroded the foundations of prosperity. The immorality and laxity of the last kings weakened their strenght; and like Dahar of old, Feroz the son of the great Jam Nando, having neglected his duties for worldly pleasures, lost his kingdom and seriously disgraced himself. But so it was destined


PS of course I had to go noseying and found this Makli Hill which I'd never heard of. It supports historically what the piece says. which is pleasing.

[Stanley]

Bring them on as far as I'm concerned David. I found it interesting and pertinent. Could be applied to the present day problem of low pay in the public services.....

[Tripps]

Interesting and a bit spooky that today's phone in topic on LBC was the high rates of pay of Local Government executives, and comparisons with the pay of the Prime Minister - a rather niggardly £165k pa.

I was going to do this in strict chronological order, but find that Clip 1 is so full of potential libel actions -it's probably best avoided -though it's probably largely true.

Right -here goes. Let me know when you've had enough.

2012
Last year, in an interview with the Today programme, the chief executive of National Grid told the show’s no doubt stunned listeners that they would have to get used to not having electricity as and when they wanted it.
That here in the developed world we should be wondering whether the lights will be going out in a few years time, whether our children will go to bed in the cold or whether we will spend our evenings shivering around log fires is rather amazing. That our political leaders have achieved this — if achieved is the right word — in the face of the shale gas revolution with its promise of cheap and abundant energy for centuries to come is truly extraordinary. How have we come to this?
We all know that climate scientists have said their computer models show that the world is going to get warmer, and catastrophically so. And they are very sure of this. They are more reticent about their models’ almost unbroken record of overestimating future warming but, undeterred by these shortcomings, other scientists then take the model predictions as gospel truth and try work out what this warming might mean in terms of impacts on the real world. Then the economists get involved; they crunch the numbers even further, giving us the economic cost of the theoretical impacts of the hypothetical predictions of the unvalidated climate models. And through all this shuffling of numbers and through the fug of the associated hype and exaggeration, through the crushing of dissenting views and the fiddling of data and the hiding of adverse results emerges a single number, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything: 43.
Forty three — about £30 — that’s the mean estimate of the damage caused by a tonne of carbon dioxide according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Now as an aside I should point out that this theoretical cost is actually expected to fall largely on our grandchildren. Economists broadly agree that climate change will not push the global economy below where we are now until the world has warmed by a further two degrees. With the IPCC suggesting that this will take nearly a century under current emissions patterns, it’s likely that few people alive today are going to live to see it.
In response to this cost being imposed on our descendants — and descendants moreover who are expected to be much, much richer than we are — politicians have put together a series of cunning five-year plans. As with most five year plans, the results seem to owe at least as much to Edmund Blackadder as to Stalin.
The UK plan is to reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2020 — regardless of the consequences. That’s bad enough, but the Scottish government’s bid to out-Blackadder their Westminster counterparts almost defies belief. The idea seems to be that Scotland can turn itself into a Celtic version of Denmark — the Danes generate 30% of their electricity from wind turbines. Scotland is allegedly going to generate the equivalent of 100% of electricity consumption using renewables, exporting much of this power to England.
The idea that this is a plausible future for Scotland relies on that combination of ignorance and wishful thinking that you only ever get at Holyrood. Denmark has make wind power work — after a fashion — simply because of who its neighbours are. Wind turbines works well alongside hydroelectric, so on windy days the Danes export the majority of the power they generate to Norway and Sweden, where the much larger grids can absorb the power surges. When the wind doesn’t blow, they can buy hydro power in return.
It sounds great on the surface, but it is actually an extraordinarily bad deal. The Danes pay top dollar for the hydro power they buy from Norway, but have to almost give away the surplus wind power that they generate. The Danish consumer in effect subsidises the Norwegian housewife.
What is even more remarkable is that all their spending on wind power has made almost no difference to the amount of carbon dioxide the Danes emit: their per capita emission levels are almost identical to ours. But electricity prices are a different story; the Danes pay more for their power than any other country in Europe – twice as much as us in UK. So the Scots who are worried about their fuel bills this winter really ain’t seen nothing yet.
Alex Salmond may want to copy the Danes, but it will simply not work the way he wants it to. The UK could simply never generate enough hydro power to run alongside the wind farms – to do so we would have flood every valley in the Scotland. The bitter truth for Mr Salmond’s brave new world is that if Scotland is going to have wind power, he is going to have to combine it with the only other fuel that can accommodate the erratic output of the wind turbines: gas.
The good news is that the shale gas revolution now provides gas in glorious abundance. The bad news, however, is that wind power and gas don’t work together nearly as well as wind and hydro. As the wind huffs and blows, the electricity supplied to the grid surges up and down like a yoyo. The rest of the grid has to try to fill this wildly fluctuating gap between supply and demand – no easy task.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This can be done, but at a cost. Nuclear power stations and combined cycle gas turbines are in trouble, however. They are designed to give steady output and excellent efficiency, rather than ramping up and down in response to every puff of wind. So you either have either have to run them at suboptimum efficiency or, more likely, replace them with open cycle turbines, which cope better but are much, much less efficient.
So although you might save some carbon emissions by introducing wind power into the system, you can actually end up losing some or all of those gains because you’ve made the rest of the grid inefficient. And if wind turbines end up making nuclear power stations uneconomic, pushing them out of the system altogether, you will actually end up with an overall gain in carbon emissions.
All this inefficiency and subsidy doesn’t come cheap. When you examine the costs involved in meeting the UK and Scottish plans for energy provision, the numbers are truly eye-watering. Gordon Hughes, professor of energy economics in Edinburgh, puts the cost of meeting Britain’s 2020 emissions targets through a mixture of wind turbines and gas backup at £120 billion. We could get the same amount of electricity from gas-fired power plants costing only £13 billion.
Wind power is an order of magnitude more expensive than gas, and you still have to have the gas-fired power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow.
The Institute for Public Policy Research put out a report last week extolling the virtues of windfarms for reducing carbon emissions. Yet when Colin McInnes, another Edinburgh academic, crunched the numbers behind this report he found that the IPPR’s own numbers implied that it was going to cost us more to mitigate the damage caused by a tonne of carbon dioxide than the cost of the damage itself. And not just a bit more, but several times more. The medicine is much, much worse than the disease itself.
Gordon Hughes’ numbers are even more startling. He estimates that even under the most optimistic view of a wind-dominated future, the cost of mitigating global warming would be nine times the cost of global warming itself.
Alex Salmond’s cunning plan bets the house on taxpayers and consumers continuing to fund vast transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in the form of feed in tariffs and subsidies. If he achieves his dream of independence, he will be relying on Scottish taxpayers willingness to subsidise electricity for the English. It all has something of the air of a latter-day Darien scheme about it. Plausible at first glance, but in reality beset with flaws that could lead to its overwhelming Scotland entirely.
We have a latter-day Darien scheme run by a latter-day Blackadder. What could possibly go wrong?
Andrew Montford is the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, a best-selling account of a notorious global warming scandal. He blogs at www.bishop-hill.net.
This article is an adaptation of a speech given at the Spectator debate on the motion ‘Scotland’s energy policy is a load of hot air’. The motion was passed by a majority of 126 to 50.

[Stanley]

All worthy stuff David but too long for general consumption. They simply won't read it.

[Tripps]

too long for general consumption. They simply won't read it.

That's always an option of course. It's not compulsory, and if no one does then I'm not really bothered. I aim the content at a modest single figure audience, but I shan't give up after just one post. . . .

***************

Heard years ago from an after dinner speech by senior trade unionist Vic Feather. Found due to the miracle of Google.

Judge: "Is your client familiar with the principle of Nemo dat quod non habet
(nobody gives away what he does not possess)?”

Counsel: Indeed, m’lud, they speak of little else.”. . . . in Barnsley!

[Stanley]

That was the polar opposite David! I liked it though......

[Tripps]

One thing this thread won't be is predictable. Tell me when you've had enough though won't you?

Ed note. Jim Greenhalf is a retired correspondent and author, lately of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. I would recommend his book 'Salt and Silver' which tells of the founding of the Saltaire Mill gallery. I asked his permission to put his account of Titus Salt's funeral on here and got an email back from him which just said "Yes".

Thursday, 13 September 2012
Make Mine a Jameson's
News of the death of former Daily Star and Daily Express editor Derek Jameson occurred on the same day that the findings of the independent inquiry into Hillsborough were made public.

As I watched the news reports of the latter unfold the scale of the cover-up connived at by South Yorkshire police, I recalled a television interview I saw years ago featuring Derek Jameson and the late Ronald Gregory, at the time of the interview Chief Constable of West Yorkshire.

It followed the capture - by default - of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, by South Yorkshire Police in 1981. Mr Gregory, treated respectfully by interviewers, was torn to pieces by Derek Jameson, who refused to let him waffle about his force's repeated failure to nail Sutcliffe - a man they had interviewed nine times mostly for minor offences or to clear from their inquiries. These days we are used to seeing politicians ritually Paxmaned on television. Back then it was rare that to see a very senior civil servant such as a chief constable held to account so publicly.

The current Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, David Crompton, made the expected apology for Hillsborough on behalf of the force which, he said, had made "grave errors". Given that up to 41 of the 96 Liverpool fans who perished on that afternoon in April, 1989, could have been saved had police and ambulance communications been adequate, Mr Crompton's metaphor was ill-judged, though only old pedants like me are likely to feel that way about the word "grave" in the context he used it.

This morning I heard part of a radio programme, complete with sobbing and piano music (always a give-away), in which the presenter asked whether, after 23 years, the pursuit of those responsible for the cover-up, the doctoring of evidence and years of deliberate obfuscation, would achieve anything. Oh well, I thought, airbrush the Nuremburg War Crimes trials from history, forget Simon Wiesenthal and the pursuit of those who perpetrated the Holocaust. The presenter was doubtless playing Devil's Advocate. Nevertheless, I thought he struck the wrong note.

But then the whole ghastly Hillsborough story is being tipped another way in light of what the inquiry revealed. From being for blamed for the horror, Liverpool fans are now being sanctified into victimhood. But at the time, four years after provoked Liverpool fans had gone after Juventus fans in the Heysel Stadium, when 39 Italians died, the general consensus was that bad behaviour outside the Hillsborough stadium may well have presented South Yorkshire coppers with a problem they could not handle. The late Brian Clough, manager of Nottingham Forest, Liverpool's opponents in that FA Cup semi-final, said as much at the time, I believe.

Looking at the TV pictures from that afternoon, I have to wonder at the determined rush into the Leppings Lane end, where Liverpool fans were gathered, after police had foolishly opened the gate late on. I say this as one who has been known to get off trains in face of commuters pushing and shoving their way on. Why would anyone, even with a ticket, want to join a crush of people when others were clearly trying to extricate themselves by climbing into a nearby grandstand? I would have turned and fled. People in the mass are unreliable. Avoid crowds massing in confined spaces at all costs - anything can happen.

But now, after the latest damning report, I daresay all this will appear in bad taste. That's usually the way of things when one very serious wrong has been partly righted. As to why justice takes so long, ask the families of those killed in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday and Omagh in 1995; ask those framed by the police who were jailed for acts of violence they did not commit. The fact that the Crown Prosecution Service exists is down to the proven unreliability of police evidence against the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.

Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 09:06

[Stanley]

"People in the mass are unreliable. Avoid crowds massing in confined spaces at all costs ... anything can happen."
That'll be right.....

[Tripps]

Daly Telegraph August 2012
Bolton policeman......

Inspector ****** is currently suspended on full pay from his post after being arrested in May 2011 on suspicion of unrelated allegations of corruption and fraud. He was cleared of any wrongdoing on duty but was charged with six offences of fraud and three offences under the Proceeds of Crime Act relating to insurance and mortgage fraud.

It is alleged he exaggerated insurance claims following flood damage at his house and secured a mortgage at a lower rate by failing to disclose that he was buying to let.

He will "strenuously" deny all charges and is awaiting trial.

[Stanley]

"He will "strenuously" deny all charges"
He would say that wouldn't he. Do we know what transpired?
What struck me was the fact that guilty or not, he has had 15 months paid holiday up to the date of the report. Nice 'work' if you can get it.

[Tripps]

Do we know what transpired?

No - I saw no follow up. I redacted the chap's name in case he was found not guilty. Unlikey though I'd have thought.

********


The problem with quotes on the internet is that many are not genuine." - Abraham Lincoln

[Stanley]

[Tripps]

A longer one today from Jim Greenhalf of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus - Monday, 19 July 2010
With commendable Yorkshire directness.

Making Burqas of Ourselves

France and Syria plan to ban the public wearing of the burqa, Spain is thinking about it. But in Britain, liberty-loving columnists have been deprecating the idea that the state should encroach on personal freedom by telling people what to wear.

Okay then, when can I expect to see a woman in burqa and niqab - the mask that covers the face up to the eyes - taking tea with the Queen at a Buck House garden party? Will one be invited to pose with David Cameron and Caroline Spelman, the Energy Secretary who seems to believe that walking around the streets of Britain like a black ghost is empowering.

When I was a youth women proclaimed their empowerment by showing off their bodies and burning items of underclothing. Now the same generation, grown older but not wiser, is proclaiming the reverse is true - for some. Ms Spelman bases her conviction on a visit to Afghanistan, where I thought our soldiers - 321 of them to date - are dying for freedom and democracy. Whatever gave me that idea? They are dying so that women can exercise the right to be invisible in public.

Next thing you know, our brave columnists and Government ministers will be defending grooming, abduction, forced marriage and honour killings as legitimate expressions of cultural diversity.

Perhaps Caroline Spelman's GP is a female Muslim who wears both burqa and niqab. Perhaps her children are taught by women who go about in this get-up. Presumably, she would support the woman who refused to go through an airport security system because to do so would have meant removing her niqab.

I wonder what Pope Benedict thinks about the subject. According to PB, women should not be allowed to wear full body robes because they might be mistaken for priests, bishops even, God forbid. Only men can dress up in papal burqas, embellished with expensive embroidery and crosses of silver and gold.

As everyone knows, of course, the Pope has put the word out that the ordination of women is an abomination. Personally, I have always thought that enforced celibacy was an abomination, far more unnatural than a woman celebrating mass, for example. While Christ's disciples were cowering in and around Jerusalem or having doubts on the road to Emmaus, women went looking for Him.

So why didn't Christ make women his disciples? Probably because they would not have stood a chance in a world in which, under Jewish law, women were considered to be the subjects of men. Menstruating women were sent into purdah - they were obliged to sleep on the roof.

Just as the keeper of the keys of St Peter bases his argument on two millenia of Christian doctrine, so the defenders of the burqa and niqab quote the authority of the Koran. As memory serves the Koran advises women to dress modestly; it does not prescribe the niqab, nor the burqa. And where in the New Testament are women forbidden to preach the word of God?

Religious books evolved from what had gone before. The Koran, for example, borrows heavily from the Torah and the Old Testamant. The New Testament is a dramatic playing out of prophecies in the Old Testament. And so it was with religions. Christianity borrowed from Greece and Rome; but whereas Greeks and Romans had women priests and female oracles, the early Christian fathers made sure they kept women - the purveyers of original sin - out of it. Is that why Roman Catholic priests bugger little boys, do you suppose, to get their rocks off without falling foul of the old Adam?

And so for two thousand years Christians slaughtered one another over differences of opinion, defending what they could neither see nor prove with psychopathic dedication. Some said faith counted more than good works; others said without good works faith counted for nothing. Some said grace could be earned; others said it could only be granted by God - though how they knew what was in God's mind they didn't say. Some said Latin was the language of God; others said God's Word should be understood by all and not just scholars, priests and aristocrats. Now, in the 21st century, Pope Gregory XVI, has reportedly justified spiritual apartheid.

He's over here in September. I shan't be watching as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and sundry mullahs ingratiate themselves with His Infallibleness.
Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 14:50

[Stanley]

I agree with much of what he says. Well-written, I could hear his voice in my head.....

[Tripps]

Well-written, I could hear his voice in my head.....

If that's the test - I'd say you had the gift as well.

Next on the list - nothing if not eclectic. . . .

LORD BRYNER CONGO WAR LYRICS

It is sad but it's exiting,
When I read the newspaper.
About what's happening
In the western province of Africa.
Everybody's fighting,
to get the fortune and fame.
But it is amusing,
When I read all the bosses names.
Such as Kasavubu,
and Antoine Gizenga
Fighting to gain power over Katanga.
Colonel Mombutu
and Justin Momboko
rivaling Tshombé
to be boss over the Congo.

My father made me to know
that my great great gandfather
Came from the Congo in the Western Province of Katanga.
But I can't remember his name,
because it was too long.
and if I called the name
I might have to bite me tounge.
All like Kasavubu
and Patrice Lumumba
Fighting to gain power over Katanga
Colonel Mombutu
and Justin Momboko
rivaling Tshombe to be boss over the Congo
Oh Congo bawa wa mojique berle
arre baba arela ah roqo di mole,
Mojique berle Congo,
eh uwah Kosu.

Now for no extra charge the number itself. I have it on an LP record bought in Woolworths, Blandford Forum,Dorset, for 7/6d the late 1960's. Seems the genre is 'Ska'.

[Stanley]

David, the test of whether a writer was competent being whether they had a clear voice is advice given to me many years ago by John Pudney and I have never forgotten it.
Today's clip is a bit too esoteric for me David. I can't match your appreciation of 'eclectisism' (If there is such a word)

[Tripps]

WASHINGTON—A new report from the Food and Drug Administration has found that breakfast, once considered the most important meal of the day, has now slipped to sixth place, below brunch and just above midnight snack. "Significant gains by lunch and dessert badly damaged breakfast's standing in the late 1990s," culinary analyst Myron Jeffries said. "Add to that the blockbuster debut of second-breakfast in 2007 and a renewed interest in leftover-pizza pre-lunch, and breakfast is in a downward spiral it may never recover from. Especially considering the popularity of super-brunch." The makers of Eggo frozen waffles reportedly expressed no concern at the news, as waffle-dinner is still holding strong at number three.

[Stanley]

waffle-dinner is still holding strong at number three.
All I can say is no wonder so many Americans suffer from obesity and '20th Century Syndrome'! (They put Maple Syrup on their bacon as well!)
My rule about breakfast is do something to earn it before you have it. After that two hot meals at regular times does the trick.

[Tripps]

Bertrand Russell’s quip:

“the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cock-sure, and the intelligent are full of doubt”.

[Stanley]

Undoubtedly true and we should always factor it in when making assessments. The problem is that it requires differentiation between stupid and intelligent and that's a judgement that can go wrong at times.

[Tripps]

Feb 23 2010


This is from Mary Ann Sieghart's column in today's Times. I think it is fair to say that John Prescott got more than he bargained for.
It's not every day that the Deputy Prime Minister announces himself to you as a buffoon. This was just weeks after the 7/7 terrorist attacks and John Prescott was - supposedly - running the country while Tony Blair was away. I had written a column headlined “Prezza the buffoon should simply not be left in charge”, which asked why we indulged him when he was so blisteringly incompetent.
The next day, my phone rang. “I have the Deputy Prime Minister for you,” said a female voice. “It's your buffoon here,” came a more familiar male one. He harangued me for half an hour, saying that what I'd written was “bloody disgraceful” and that I was just a snob. “I'm crap at syntax,” he conceded finally. “I don't even know what the word means.” Then he demanded that I come in and see him.
That turned into the encounter that Prescott referred to on Tuesday in his Radio 4 On the Ropes interview with John Humphrys. I haven't written about it before, because I respected Prescott's right to talk to me off the record. Now that he has brought it up himself, though, I can at last tell the tale.
Signing in at Admiralty House, I heard a click-clack on the marble floor behind me. It was Prescott. I turned round to greet him, but he sailed past, saying gruffly to the security man, “She's with me”. At the lift I caught up with him, smiled and put out my hand, as you do. He scowled and refused to shake it.
He took me up to his vast office and let me stew there for 15 minutes until he came back with a couple of lackeys and a briefing file on me an inch thick. I knew his people had been asking questions about me. In a voluntary capacity, I was then vice-chair of a local regeneration programme, North Fulham NDC, which came under his department. A very senior official had e-mailed the programme director asking how committed I was, what decisions I had taken, which projects I had opposed. Prescott was clearly looking for ammo.
He launched into a tirade. His face reddened, his finger jabbed, he held up dog-eared pamphlets that he had written in the 1980s which apparently proved that he had a good brain. He boasted about his achievements in transport and local government, some of which I disputed. Once he began on regeneration, I asked whether he had managed to dig any dirt up about me on the NDC. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he blustered.
“I think you do,” I retorted. “Your officials have been asking questions about me and you've got a chapter heading there on your briefing pack: ‘Mary Ann Sieghart's involvement with North Fulham NDC'.”
Luckily it was close enough for me to read upside down. Caught red-handed, he pretended not to be able to find the right page. More bragging followed, until he demanded: “So admit it. You were wrong about me.” Given his emotional state, I thought it wise to be diplomatic. I said I was glad to have had the chance to hear his side of the story. “Why don't we leave it at that?” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “I want you to admit that you're wrong.” He was determined to bully me, and I was determined to resist.
“I'm not prepared to,” I replied. “I'm afraid you haven't persuaded me.”
“Right then,” he shouted. “I want you to justify every single word you wrote.”
“Are you quite sure?” I checked. This was going to be embarrassing. So I took a deep breath and began. “Well, you punched a voter and you stuck two fingers up in Downing Street. That shows that you lose your rag too easily - as evidenced today, in fact.”
“AS EVIDENCED TODAY?” he bellowed, his face by now beetroot, his fists clenched.
“Yes, I've been talking perfectly calmly while you've been shouting and jabbing your finger at me. I don't think that's appropriate behaviour in a Deputy Prime Minister.”
My column had gone on to disparage his performance at Prime Minister's Questions. “I know PMQs are very hard,” I admitted. “I'd be useless at them. But then I'm not Deputy Prime Minister and you are.”
The final straw was his inability to string a sentence together. “I've not had the fine education you had,” was his justification. “You're just a snob.”
“I'm not,” I retorted. “I have no problem with Alan Johnson or John Reid or David Blunkett. They all come from disadvantaged backgrounds, they didn't go to private schools and they still manage to articulate what they want to say. It's nothing to do with snobbery and nothing to do with your education.” If a man couldn't speak clearly, I said, it was a sign that he couldn't think clearly either.
That was when he finally lost it. “So what you're saying is I'm too thick to be Deputy Prime Minister?” he yelled at me.
His two apparatchiks stiffened. “Well, yes, I guess I am,” I said in a small voice.
On the pavement outside, I found myself shaking. I couldn't believe what I had just said to Prescott, but nor could I believe how bullyingly he had behaved.
He, meanwhile, raced off to No 10 to see Blair. I later heard that he said, “I've just had that Mary Ann Sieghart in”, to which Blair replied, “That's nice”. “No it wasn't,” said Prescott, still furious. “She told me I was too thick to be Deputy Prime Minister.” Blair did the worst possible thing and laughed. “Well, she's not the only one who thinks that,” he chuckled.
Oh well, at least he didn't hit her. Or try to [that's enough - ed]

[Stanley]

That was interesting.... A clash of cultures!

[Tripps]

That was interesting.... A clash of cultures!

Looking like the next DPM Angela Rayner (if she survives) will continue the tradition.
They say she's doing PMQ's next Wednesday. That's very brave I'd say -and will be worth a look.

Nearly forgot today's clipp due to the site drama etc - mercifully short - memo to self really.


You “refute” a statement, when you show it to be in error.

You “deny” a statement when you merely assert that it is incorrect

[Stanley]

Never thought about that David but I can see that it may be correct. I think I just 'reject' which I think covers both circumstances.