How Polish is YOUR plumber?
It's half past three in the morning here, and I've been driven to posting this. In a Bentley, with tinted windows and voice recognition software (it loves my elongated vowels, but - whatever you do - don't tell the mistresses).
Firstly, look at this photograph:
Then, if you don't know what all the palaver is (loosely) about, read this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8649853.stm
He's finished. Even a stalwart performance in tomorrow night's final party leader "debate" can't save him.
Like at least a million other ersatz pundits with their fingers on the political pulse, and a working devotion to knowledge of cutting-edge modern satire, I greeted this story with a cry of, "It's like something out of The Thick Of It!". Well, it is. Armando Iannucci couldn't have scripted Brown's in-limo comments any better, frankly. His 'defence' of misunderstanding Gillian Duffy's question obviously doesn't hold up, and clandestinely blaming an aide, and then not-so-clandestinely the media, for the whole ghastly incident says rather a lot about the man. More than is healthy, perhaps. A million Britons (Gordon's slightly iffy quoted figure) working in Europe was the flipside argument he attempted to broker against Mrs. Duffy's concerns about the influx of East European migrant workers to the UK. Fruit-pickers paid in peanuts, Armenian hitmen, and Greek-Cypriot club doormen and bouncers holed-up in Streatham and Putney didn't figure prominently in the exchange. Of course Gordon loves Europe and the idea of the free exchange of workers sans borders, because he only acknowledges those token Brit architects selling their flawed designs in Brussels and Copenhagen, not the thugs and chancers we're now saddled with, many of 'em on the run from former Stasi operatives, with knock-off Glocks stashed in their jogging bottoms.
You wait years and years for a General Election, and then two come along in the space of a few months. That's a sort of educated prediction, by the way. Asia have got a new album out, so it might as well be the '70s.
Firstly, look at this photograph:
Then, if you don't know what all the palaver is (loosely) about, read this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8649853.stm
He's finished. Even a stalwart performance in tomorrow night's final party leader "debate" can't save him.
Like at least a million other ersatz pundits with their fingers on the political pulse, and a working devotion to knowledge of cutting-edge modern satire, I greeted this story with a cry of, "It's like something out of The Thick Of It!". Well, it is. Armando Iannucci couldn't have scripted Brown's in-limo comments any better, frankly. His 'defence' of misunderstanding Gillian Duffy's question obviously doesn't hold up, and clandestinely blaming an aide, and then not-so-clandestinely the media, for the whole ghastly incident says rather a lot about the man. More than is healthy, perhaps. A million Britons (Gordon's slightly iffy quoted figure) working in Europe was the flipside argument he attempted to broker against Mrs. Duffy's concerns about the influx of East European migrant workers to the UK. Fruit-pickers paid in peanuts, Armenian hitmen, and Greek-Cypriot club doormen and bouncers holed-up in Streatham and Putney didn't figure prominently in the exchange. Of course Gordon loves Europe and the idea of the free exchange of workers sans borders, because he only acknowledges those token Brit architects selling their flawed designs in Brussels and Copenhagen, not the thugs and chancers we're now saddled with, many of 'em on the run from former Stasi operatives, with knock-off Glocks stashed in their jogging bottoms.
You wait years and years for a General Election, and then two come along in the space of a few months. That's a sort of educated prediction, by the way. Asia have got a new album out, so it might as well be the '70s.