It is a shocking indictment of the intellectual abilities of our politicians that the shortlist for the highly prestigious Most Stupid MP of the Year Award has been drawn up and David Lammy is nowhere to be seen. We are now plumbing depths never previously witnessed. Normally Dave would be a shoo-in for at least second prize (a silver tableau of the former Labour minister Geoff Hoon searching for weapons of mass destruction in his garden shed). This year, though — not a chance.
The judges were already making their final deliberations when William Wragg suddenly appeared on the scene with his hilarious penis, having revealed a concatenation of fabulously stupid decisions that have now resulted in him resigning the Conservative whip.
I don’t know how often you post photographs of your sagging and embarrassed old fella to gay websites in the hope that someone will think: “Cor, I’ve got to have some of that! It looks like an infuriated eel!” It is tempting to do so, obviously — and such acts are clearly a much-valued part of the marvellous warp and weft of modern society. In the air around our heads, all the time, as we go about our business, are genitals pinging backwards and forwards from one mobile phone to another.
I would only suggest that for a member of parliament to indulge is an act of such stupidity that you should be barred from ever seeking employment anywhere, apart from maybe in one of our universities. To then accede to the blackmailer’s inevitable demands for the personal details of everyone famous you have ever met gilds the lily with another layer of intense and consuming witlessness.
Wragg is insisting that he is a victim in all of this, but I would argue with some force that his only victimhood is his profound idiocy. What did you think would happen, Willie? Was the urge to disseminate a selfie of your sceptre and orbs so consuming that it drained all the blood from your brain?
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The arrival, unbidden, of the hitherto unnoticed Wragg must have come as a terrible disappointment to the frontrunner this year, the secretary of state at the Department of Science, Innovation, Technology and Intense Stupidity, Michelle Donelan. Michelle is responsible for the last bit of the brief, I think. She has cost the taxpayer £34,000 in legal fees and damages to a hugely annoying lecturer, Professor Kate Sang.
Donelan tweeted that Sang shouldn’t be appointed to a quango because she was a supporter of Hamas. Sang is undoubtedly ghastly, as are a good many of the academics who ply their fraudulent trade in non-subjects with the designation “studies” at the end of their job title. In Sang’s case it is gender and employment studies, and one of her principal concerns is “the management of menstruation in the workplace”. Yay, sign me up for the course right now. But she is not a supporter of Hamas, so far as anyone can tell — and so we’re bailing Donelan out.
Now, I don’t particularly object to ministers being afforded indemnity in such cases by the crown. But what is a government minister doing jabbering away on Twitter? It is a rancid convocation of the demented, the obsessive and the deranged. No politician — and especially not one who has somehow, Christ alone knows how, landed a ministerial post — should be tweeting, ever. They surely have better things to do with their time than pointlessly bigging themselves up to those maniacs.
If Donelan had read the full details of Sang’s background, she wouldn’t have made the accusation that landed her in trouble, incidentally. But that’s the thing with social media: nothing is ever placed in context. There is no nuance, no detail, no real truth out there. To find out the truth you have to undertake that difficult business of reading things that are often more than 280 characters and may even include quite long words.
It was social media of another kind that did for William Wragg, of course. However grim the internet may be — and it is really, really grim — it does quite often provide idiots with lengths of rope sufficient to hang themselves. Third place in this contest looks like going to the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who believes that people responsible for the Covid-19 vaccine programme should be executed for crimes against humanity. I am not sure what form of execution he would prefer. Now I come to think of it, Bridgen got himself trapped down that rabbit hole as a consequence of the lunacy he read on social media, too.
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There seems to be a pattern emerging here, no? I have a suspicion that if we could keep ourselves — and, even more so, our politicians — away from social media, this would be a happier and rather better governed country.
Put that in your pipe, Harold
I was intrigued to learn that Harold Wilson had an affair while in office as prime minister with a reportedly fruity young civil servant called Janet Hewlett-Davies.
We know of this partly because Joe Haines, formerly Wilson’s press secretary, spotted the PM’s slippers underneath her bed at Chequers. A giveaway, in my book, reminiscent of Ian Dury’s observation of marital infidelity when a chap comes home to find “another gentleman’s kippers in the grill”.
Quite where Harold put his famous pipe is not recorded.
Total eclipse of the brain
Reasons for the total eclipse of the sun witnessed in the USA recently? Take your pick from right or left.
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The nutjob alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones introduced an “expert” who said it had been planned by “globalists” who wanted to “inject the seed of every new year with negative energy”. Way to go, Al.
Or perhaps you would prefer the explanation from the air-headed leftie lawyer and TV presenter Sunny Hostin, who suggested the eclipse — and a recent earthquake — had been caused by climate change. Sunny’s best-known book is I Am These Truths, presumably a compendium of firmly held delusions.
Shortly, Sunny and Alex and all their millions of followers will be marching off to the ballot box.
Sex, singing and zombies
Meanwhile, the American Midwest is about to be invaded by billions of sex-crazed zombie cicadas, as two vast broods emerge from underground at the same time. This last occurred in 1803 — coincidentally the year that the US completed the Louisiana purchase, bringing into the union almost all the states cicadas like to live in. The French, I think, were well rid.
The cicadas are zombified because of some predatory fungus and sex-crazed because, well, they haven’t seen any action for 17 years. They will soon be rubbing their legs together and creating a fugue loud enough to drown out even the shrillest screams of abject idiocy from those participating in the presidential race.
Tory crackdown on shoplifting
