[Youngian]

Funniest comment by a Tory MP (can't remeber who) on Twitter observed that Paul Nuttal dresses like a Nazi spy undercover as an English gentleman.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... lege-power

Marina Hyde on form today, taking apart the macho culture in Whitehall.

Here’s another ally on the tough guy’s tough guy: “When we were having all the Brexit battles in parliament he used to compare the remainers who wanted to reverse Brexit to the Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the jungle decades after the end of the second world war. But now he’s the Japanese soldier in the jungle.” Except, hang on, because he’s also the Viet Cong in the jungle. “It’s like the Americans going into Vietnam,” explained another of Cummings’s friends of the government’s attempt to counter him. “They may be able to drop big bombs, but in a war of attrition, the rebel always wins.” Ooooooooh!

Men are wild, aren’t they? I mean, no offence or anything. But let’s face it. Even so, you’re going to have to settle an argument for me. Which are the biggest dickheads: guys in your workplace who like to think they’re in ‘Nam, or guys in your workplace who like to think they’re in the mafia?

[Samanfur]

Marina Hyde being depressingly accurate about Johnson:

A dangerous cult now runs Britain – the worshippers at the Temple of Johnson

[RedSparrows]

Excellent article.

Even more unfortunately, Johnson is aided and abetted by a generation of Westminster-watchers so addled by polling that they have completely divorced morality from politics. I’m frightfully bored of being told things don’t matter because they didn’t “cut through”, or that this or that horror show is “priced in” to the public’s relationship with Johnson, or that something is irrelevant because “voters don’t care about it”. So what?! Voters don’t care about a lot of things that are, nonetheless, properly important. Yet we’re awash with pundits and politicians who can tell you the electoral price of everything but the value of nothing.

This is also really key, I think. I know I'm shaking my fist at clouds, but this absolute vacuum of principle and the curious engagement with the 'average voter' is astonishingly myopic, and also hypocritical: they want the votes and get them by appealing to 'you know best, yeomanry!', obvs, but they also think the voters are morons and don't give a fucking fuck. But as long as someone else looks more like saying that (step up: Corbyn's cult; 'Labour' more generally in the eyes of the Sun readers) than them, it's all fine.

For all the endless bullshit about common sense, straight talking, telling it like it is, so much of the country is captured in a bubble of absolute fucking fantasy.

[Andy McDandy]

Very much the trick of tabloid news, both in print and on screen.

Flatter the punter, but take the piss out of them. Convince the reader/viewer that they and they alone are in on the joke, like the twat watching Bullseye "ironically".

[davidjay]

Marina Hyde being depressingly accurate about Johnson:

A dangerous cult now runs Britain – the worshippers at the Temple of Johnson

[The Weeping Angel]

Nick Cohen on Unite

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... id-workers

Last week, solicitors representing Anna Turley threatened to send bailiffs to the head office of Unite in Holborn, central London, with instructions to carry off everything that wasn’t nailed down. Faced with the threat that Len McCluskey, Howard Beckett and the union’s other post-Leninist apparatchiks would have nothing to sit on but overturned crates, Unite handed over its members’ money. Turley received the final part of legal costs of £1.3m and damages of £75,000, compensation for a libel claim that has cost the union between £2m and £2.5m in total.

Turley is not a traditional enemy of organised labour. Until 2019, she was the Labour MP for Redcar. Because she was a “centrist” or “Blairite” or whatever the far left was calling politicians like her at the time, the union falsely claimed, through the Skwawkbox website, that Turley was a cheat who had tried to join a section of the union reserved for the unemployed on “a fraudulent basis”. If it had corrected the mistake and apologised, it would have likely cost union members a few hundred pounds, if that. As it was, Unite wasted several million hiring a ferocious QC, who said of Turley in open court and in the middle of the 2019 election campaign, “she is not fit to be an MP”. She lost her seat. With Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, it would have gone anyway. But the sight of the most influential union on the left attacking Labour MPs at the moment when Johnson was about to sweep to power says all there is to say about its priorities.

Also last week, for it has been a busy time in the small but vicious world of militant trade unionism, the Labour MP Neil Coyle alleged to the parliamentary commissioner for standards and the certification officer, who regulates trade unions, that Unite was using members’ money to subsidise a string of legal cases. The media picked up his claim that Corbyn had not properly declared financial support from Unite for legal disputes involving antisemitism.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -osaka#_=_

Marina Hyde on Naomi Osaka, and the many, many issues sporting bodies and the media have - not just with mental health, but their entire "Shut up and play some ball, boy" attitude.

[MisterMuncher]

In terms of British press sympathy, I can't recall much given to any sportsperson over their mental health issues outside of Tyson Fury (when it was offered as an excuse/reason for him saying some fairly horrible shit) or Gazza.

I just can't qwhite work out why it's different for Osaka.

[Bones McCoy]

In terms of British press sympathy, I can't recall much given to any sportsperson over their mental health issues outside of Tyson Fury (when it was offered as an excuse/reason for him saying some fairly horrible shit) or Gazza.

I just can't qwhite work out why it's different for Osaka.

I give you Marcus Trescothick, whose case caused one of Geoffrey Boycott's stopped clock / woke moments.

[MisterMuncher]

I admit a rather large blind spot re: Cricket.

[Samanfur]

Marina Hyde weighs in. Also featuring Laurence Fox and Tim Martin:

If this is how they react to taking the knee, please keep politicians out of sport

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... zon-virgin

What's better than firing a billionaire into space? Firing THREE billionaires!

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... g-surprise

John Crace on yesterday's PMQs, Hancock, and the latest Cummings revelations.

Boris doesn’t care that people know he’s lying, because even his own MPs seem happy for him to do so. A liar’s gotta do, what a liar’s gotta do. The Tories knew what they were buying when they chose him as leader and, as the Cummings blog shows, he’s not about to have a personality change. The irony is that the same MPs are outraged at perceived breaches of faith from other parties and countries, yet are blind to the more obvious failings of their own man.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -interview

And on the Martin Bashir affair, which seems to be descending into utter farce:

Three people had submitted their CVs for the job of religious affairs editor from within the BBC and all three had been rejected as unsuitable.

The Beeb had then advertised externally and had received 18 applications, only one of which – Bashir’s – had been deemed worthy of an interview. Then one of the internal applicants who had already been rejected was invited to go for an interview along with Bashir and to nobody’s great surprise Mart was offered the job. To add to the sense of the surreal, Bashir made only six appearances during his five years as religious correspondent at a conservative estimate of £40K per outing – he spent more time on air in The X Factor: Celebrity during that period – and was allowed to freelance for ITV. Nice work if you can get it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... h-virology

And finally, Marina Hyde takes aim at Gillian McKeith and various other anti-lockdown twats, because face it, we all need a laugh.

Gillian seems somehow to have re-emerged, but this time as a rallying voice against pretty much any of the scientific consensus on a global pandemic. Here she is on an anti-lockdown march, and here she is this very week sharing the video of the BBC Newsnight journalist Nick Watt being hounded through the streets by aggressive and menacing anti-lockdown protesters on Monday. Gillian’s brothers and sisters in arms in this include the likes of Right Said Fred, distracted actor Laurence Fox, rapidly unspooling quackademic Naomi Wolf, GB News baby blimp Dan Wootton and the photographer Laura Dodsworth, whose pandemic book A State of Fear is 1. a bestseller and 2. a load of old conspiracist cobblers.

[davidjay]

I'd like to see Marina Hyde doing something more suited to her talents, like ruling the world.

[Samanfur]

Marina Hyde on the "hopeless" Hancock debacle:

Why it suits Boris Johnson to have a cabinet of all the hopeless

These days I have taken to spending a lot of time in the MailOnline comments section (present but not involved), and down there the strongly prevailing view of Cummings is that he is a complete rat and so disloyal as to render anything he says immediately discountable. Outside the Westminster bubble that he’s so fond of pricking, these outpourings from the god of mischief are currently being roundly ignored. Or to put it another way, the public don’t want to be told they need their eyes tested by the little boy who cried eye test.

[Watchman]

Mail readers are a fickle lot, when everyone brought into DomCum was the genius behind Brexit, and his “hard rain” threat against the Civil Service, he could do no wrong and they lapped up every utterance

[Bones McCoy]

Mail readers are a fickle lot, when everyone brought into DomCum was the genius behind Brexit, and his “hard rain” threat against the Civil Service, he could do no wrong and they lapped up every utterance

My favourite was when Dom started threatening the Army general staff.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -isolation

Marina looks at football, and the inconsistency behind isolation rules, elite sporting events, and how you're treated depending on your wealth.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ry-hookups

Marina Hyde on Hancock. Skewers the little bastard.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... esignation

John Crace imagines how the meeting between Johnson and the queen went. Much better than most "Columnist imagines..." pieces.