Family holidays

According to the ex-boyfriend of Noemi Letizia, the 18-year-old knicker model and would-be member of parliament who refers to Silvio Berlusconi as her 'papi', Noemi was invited to one of SB's villas in Sardinia last summer, along with 30 or 40 other teenage girls, to enliven the emperor's evenings. Noemi and her friend, Claudia, were seventeen, which, in legal terms, is old enough to fuck entertain powerful men and be rewarded for it, albeit with the connivance of the girls' parents, but it would be interesting to know a little bit more about the male guests at the villa. It's hard to imagine SB enjoying all those angelic faces without a little masculine solidarity to make him feel like one of the boys. So who kept him company? Politicians? Businessmen? A clutch of accommodating journalists? Cherie Blair says that SB's jaunty bandana ruined her and Tony's photo-opportunity - or should that be holiday? - some years ago in the same villa, or another: he has so many. I wonder if she knew about the joy division in the bungalows round the back.

ABB

This could mean so many things. I don't know. All buns bleed. Amanda's bulging biceps. Avast brown bear. Able bodies burgeon. Alice B. Boklas. OK, OK. What it actually means is Anything But Blair. Valery Giscard D'Estaing and Edouard Balladur, two French politicians who've covered the waterfront, in Tennessee Williams' memorable phrase, have been talking about the EU presidency and they point out that the ideal man, or woman, for the job should come from a country that's firmly committed to the EU, has adopted the Euro as its currency, does not behave like an over-eager poodle whenever the US says yo and, er, doesn't support the war in Iraq. I wonder who they could possibly not be referring to?

You can find more details in today's Independent here.

Blair babble

Confirmation that Tony Blair has decided to run Europe while waiting for Eggs Benedict to meet his maker (and I'd love to be there when that happens, assuming it ever does) and free up the Vatican CEO slot came yesterday, with a typically vacuous speech made in Paris to Sarkozy's UMP party. Its primary aim may have been to arselick, and upstage, Sarkozy (and I wouldn't be surprised if a bob or two didn't change hands either - Tony doesn't come cheap, even to friends), but it also indicated just how wide his political stance is. Basically he's prepared to boldly go pretty much anywhere that isn't tainted with socialism, as befits his new part-time job as £500,000-a-year adviser to JP Morgan. Not that Tony likes the words left and right; they're old hat, uncool, pas chic, or whatever term he now prefers. What Tony likes are words that don't mean very much at all - touchie-feelie words, buzz words. Words like future and past, as in: "'Europe is not a question of left or right, but a question of the future or the past, of strength or weakness," or today and yesterday, as in: "'It's about today versus yesterday. Less about politics and more about a state of mind; open as opposed to closed." I'm not sure to whom this kind of fatuous waffle is supposed to appeal, but it's a frightening thought that a meretricious warmonger like Blair might actually be allowed to govern the European Union, particularly now that he's sworn allegiance to a small but irritating non-member state that contributes nothing to the continent but seems to feel it has a right to dictate EU policy.

Blair-faced devotion

Well, Tony won't be answering his elders and betters back any longer, I imagine, now that he's finally thrown his mendacious lot in with Vatican Inc. It's only a stone's throw, by helicopter, to Tuscany, after all, and presumably he'll be making himself useful about the place until God makes direct contact. Let's face it, how long can the current CEO hold down the job? By the time Tone's sorted out the Middle East and ditched the bitch (the Sacra Rota, natch), he'll be more than ready to slip on those Prada pumps and get his ring well buffed. And no more foolish promises over dinner, right, Tone? This time it's to the death.

Lies, lies, lies

Leaks from a police investigation into the suspicious bankruptcy of a polling company employed by former PM, Tony Blair, have uncovered evidence that the information broadcast by both the BBC and independent television was deliberately manipulated to present the prime minister and his government in the best possible light. Throughout his period in office, on a daily basis, those responsible for what was seen and heard on five out of the six national news programmes put their heads together and decided what to emphasise, what to spin and what to conceal. Lies were told and facts omitted. Thanks to Blair's financial control over the commercial networks, and his political control over the public ones, this was a mug's game.

Shocked? You should be. Except that it wasn't Tony Blair, the BBC and commercial TV. He never had the chance. It was Berlusconi, the RAI and Mediaset, which belongs to Berlusconi. Still shocked? You still should be. Berlusconi is. He's called the Repubblica journalists who published the story a couple of days ago 'jackals' and accused them of trying to interfere with the process of electoral reform. Next thing you know, we'll be told the RAI is now in the hands of the communists.

War criminal bombs in China, seeks refuge in Vatican

If you've seen a British newspaper in the last couple of days, you can write this post yourself.

If you haven't, just google Blair + China + Catholic.

And then move on. After all, isn't that what Jesus would have done?

Vade retro, empiricism

One of the few areas in which fundamentalist Islam seemed to offer a less obscurantist view of the world than fundamentalist Christianity was that of evolution. Alas, no longer. An article in today's Independent reveals that a bunch of Turkish nutters calling itself, without intentional irony, the Science Research Foundation (BAV) is spearheading creationist claptrap in the Middle East. Not content with that, the group recently mass-mailed its Atlas of Creation (never mind the evidence, feel the weight: 6 kg of lavishly illustrated tosh) to schools and scientists in Western Europe. They're also building creationist theme parks museums, along the lines of the one in the States. Who knows where all the money is coming from? Even more worrying is the fact that Turkey's education minister publicly supports 'intelligent design'. What price EU accession now?

It will be fun to see if the ID cranks in the States and, increasingly, in the faith-friendly Britain created by Middle East envoy and peacemaker to the stars, Tony Blair, will jump into bed with their new Islamic brothers-in-codswallop.

To catch a thief...

Questions of honour

In a country that sees fit to knight Cliff Rìchard, the decision to give a gong to Salman Rushdie, if only as a nod towards the idea that fiction has at least as much value as Summer Holiday and a brief affair (ahem) with a female tennis player, is a welcome one. Of course there are writers I’d prefer. It would have been good, for example, to see Penelope Fitzgerald damed (to coin a verb) before she died, or Sybille Bedford. Basil Bunting might have enjoyed a knighthood, though I doubt it. Ian Hamilton Finlay certainly wouldn’t, but it would have been fun to offer him one, just to see. Of living writers, James Hamilton-Paterson deserves far more recognition, although possibly not from the queen and Yo! Blair, who barely read, or, in the latter’s case, write. And what about J.H. Prynne, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or Stewart Home? (OK, my little joke.)

But it isn’t welcome to everyone. I’ve always assumed that fatwa is short for fatuous waffle, on the grounds that any statement produced by a celibate sclerotic in a long black frock is unlikely to have much sense to it. The problem is that fatuous waffle hurts, and can even kill, as some of Rushdie’s translators and collaborators could attest if there really were the life beyond.

Maybe it’s time we came up with some sort of death threat we can fling back. The targets, as holy books have it, are legion. Some Muslim, for example, who said that Rushdie deserved to die a thousand times after the publication of Satanic Verses, coincidentally my favourite Rushdie novel, and has since been knighted, a man whose name I shall not seek out for the benefit of this post because it would do him too much honour (honour on honour). Or Shirley Williams, one of the thousands of anxious appeasers to superstition. Or all those people, including Jack Straw, who say that Rushdie is unreadable, as if that were the issue.

Yo! Benedict!

The Vatican hierarchy is notorious for being morally supine in the face of wealth and power. It buried Pinochet with honours and encouraged the Albanian pain fetishist, Mother Teresa, in her quest for photo opportunities with the likes of tin-pot dictator Marcos and the adulterous Princess Diana. So Tony Blair probably won’t have that much difficulty in persuading Eggs Benedict to fast-track him in. But wouldn’t it be nice if he found the holy door barred to him as a warmonger, abortionist and proponent of gay adoption? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the hurt on his duplicitous little face as he spreads his blood-stained hands and wonders, once again, what Jesus would have done?

Tired of the same face, the same voice...

Further proof of woolly thought and self-delusion from Bush's poodle.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Mr Blair was asked why the public was disenchanted with him even though the economy is sound. He replied: "I've won three elections and what happens when you're in power for a long period of time, people get tired of the same face, the same voice. It's just the way it is. I know people say this is all down to Iraq and so on, but that's not true. From the moment you start in these jobs, you're taking decisions people don't like. If you survive for 10 years, you're doing well."

It's the and so on I'd like to have explained. What on earth could he mean? Other irritating little wars perhaps? Or maybe he's thinking of embarrassing house deals or arse-licking episodes in Sardinia? After all, they're all much of a muchness, aren't they, Tone? All part of the job.

Blair's last whinge

Am I the only one to have noticed just how appallingly written Blair's whining attack on the press is? (Read it here, if you really must.) I'm not saying that grammatical manners maketh man, a la Lynne Truss, but should we really have put the fate of not just one country, but several, into the hands of someone who can't punctuate, who can't write a sentence in which the subject and verb concur, who can't express a thought with clarity? Don't these things matter? Doesn't their absence suggest an alarming woolliness and confusion in the mind of the person responsible? If I'd been given this speech by a student, I'd have covered it with red ink.

Slowly slowly

Anyone who's thought about humiliation knows that people can be brought to commit the most degrading acts if they're taken to them stage by stage, little by little, chipping away at their self-esteem until there's no trace of it left to protect them. Until what they still consider to be their self esteem has been utterly transformed into self delusion and abasement.

So maybe, after years of fawning around the rich and famous and powerful, not all at once of course but, as Liza Minnelli put it, man by man, from Ecclestone to Branson to Bush, ex-PM and ongoing lapdog Tony Blair will be ready to accept the new job he's being offered: Dean at Berlusconi's brand spanking new international university in Rome. Free bandanas supplied with every mortarboard.

Of course the place doesn't exist yet, but hey! it'll be handy for the Vatican. Something to keep him busy, in other words, until the next big job comes up.

Bye bye Eggs. Hi there Tony!

No, no regrets...

This cartoon is a wonderful example of the way in which the nature of what we understand when we see something can be gradually transformed by a series of minuscule shifts in representation. If you could find anyone in the enviable position of never having come across Bush or Blair in what’s fondly termed real life, I wonder if they’d recognise from photographs these wonderful caricatures that, to us, are such strikingly accurate portraits of the two mean vicious little men they represent. They’re accurate because we’ve been brought here, step-by-step, distoirtion by distortion, by Steve Bell, for me the most visually inventive political cartoonist working in Britain. It would be instructive to trace the history of Blair the poodle from his first appearance, some years ago, to this appalling creature panting slavishly beside his impatient master.

Blair leapfrogs new boss

Alexander Chancellor, in today’s Guardian tells an amusing tale about Tony Blair being reprimanded by Cardinal Hume for taking part in mass at his wife’s church. Hume pointed out that Blair, as an Anglican, had no right to his sanctimonious nibble of the Lord’s transubstantiated body. Blair apparently reacted thus: ‘I wonder what Jesus would have said.’

Of course, he didn’t wonder at all. He knew. But Chancellor continues by remarking that Blair, assuming he soon becomes a catholic as predicted, will have to accept that the direct line with the Saviour he’s enjoyed up to now will have to be mediated by his new main man, Eggs Benedict.

If only this were true. The fact is that the catholic church is tough with the weak, but historically supine with the strong. Mother Teresa, the poison dwarf of Calcutta, may have disapproved of analgesics for the poveri cristi in her detention centres care centres, but she made an exception for Diana Spencer, Pinochet, etc. Why on earth should Ratzinger adopt a different policy in his dealings with Blair?

145, and counting...

The cover of today's Independent. In case you can't read it, the text says:

This is Kingsman Alan Jones. He was killed, aged 20, in Iraq this week, just one of the 145 British soldiers who have died in this ill-conceived conflict. His death went largely unnoticed in the bloodiest month endured by British soldiers - another grim statistic, another coffin sent home, another grieving family, another young man who died in vain.

Insults: Taliban style

Daniele Mastrogiacomo, the Repubblica war correspondent captured by Taliban forces in Afghanistan almost three weeks ago and released on Tuesday, has written a long, informed and moving account of his time as a prisoner. He had a particularly gruelling time of it, both physically and mentally, though not as rough as his driver, who was beheaded after having his throat cut.

The most salient parts of the article were translated by Peter Popham and published in yesterday's Independent. One detail though, is missing from Popham's edited version: the term used by the Taliban to insult the Italian journalist.

Tony Blair.

Air guitar? Air head?

You many have seen a photograph of Tony Blair, taken during his time at Oxford. Most commentators have focused on the gesture he's making with his right hand, offering a variety of interpretations, from the vulgar (masturbation) to the pathetic (air plectrum).
But nobody seems to have remarked on the look of utter open-mouthed vacuity and, surely, smugness on his face.

Has it ever been slapped? If not, why not?

Blair yes, Zapatero no

It's odd that whenever people want to attack the idea of 'gay marriage' the stick they use to beat it with bears the smiling Bambi head of Zapatero. The fact that civil partnerships have also been introduced to England under Tony Blair is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Maybe Blair's work in other fields, such as warmongering, has exonerated him.