VileBody

Not meaning to be a smart-arse (not too much anyway), but would you prefer a politican with genuinely held but profoundly wrong or offensive opinions, or one whose views you support but who is prepared to be dishonest to achieve them? And before we get too dewy-eyed about "old school politicians", (a.) I think you'll find that politicians have been telling porkies for quite a long time before Benn turned up; (b.) Benn was a member of one of the most bent governments of the 20th centruy under Wilson; and (c.) it's a damn sight easier to stick to your principles once you're a busted flush in politics - as Benn was after Kinnochio's election as Labour leader (cf Heath, Howe, Lamont, Cook etc). If Benn had ever held real power he'd have been about as trustworthy as Alasdair Campbell on a dark night with the keys to the tuck shop.

I thought Holland had already started with your Nazi pillow-biter....

OK, I was lying. I actually work in a shoe shop. "No we haven't got them in brown in a size 8 but we've got them in black in a 7" This does remind me of an appalling joke which mods can (and probably should) delete if it's too OTT A chap wins the lottery and decides to fulfill a life-long ambition to have a pair of bespoke shoes made. So he goes along to a top shoe-maker in Jermyn Street and is shown all sorts of patterns and designs and differrent leathers etc. Finally the assistant brings out a pair in a sort pinky-white leather and asks the guy to try them on. He's amazed. They're the best fitting, most comfortable pair of shoes he's ever worn. In fact they fit just like a second skin. "Well, there's a reason for that, Sir" says the assistant, lowering his voice, "They're actually made from the skin of human babies...". "My God, that's terrible! Mind you they are incredibly comfortable. What on earth do you charge for them?" "£450,000, Sir" "Bloody Hell - I wasn't planning to pay that much...but even so" "I'll tell you what, Sir, if you really like them, we'll do you a pair in black for £2.50"

I shout at IT departments when my email doesn't work. AGAIN!!!!

Don't take it personally, but could you all please pretend you don't work in IT.....

Do you lot mind? I've just had lunch....

What a great idea - however , my porn name is the rather dull Delia Priest (some sort of heavy metal TV chef I suppose) My daughter however is Pumpkin Palmer which would probably put her into a rather niche category of the adult industry if she wasn't 5 years old. Actually, I think it suits her better than her real name...

I thought this was an outstanding list subject to the changes mentioned elsewhere eg bin laden (dead already) and Chirac (sadly not yet...). I also suspect that it will be a long time beofer they scrag Saddam, given the amount of bleeding heart protest there'll be. I reckon he'll serve a token couple of years out of a bazillion year sentence then go to a French hospital for "health" reasons before mysteriously disappearing into exile in some dodgy country like Zimbabwe or Libya. Who is LilMmi? - never seen him/her before

Wasn't there some suggestion that the animal "rights" people crept back to the farm and fed the remains to the guinea pigs.....

I think the problem is that it appears to be a classic "Causa Belli". The U.S. decided it wanted to invade Iraq and came up with the reason later. And yes I do believe that Blair knew Iraq had no WMD. Apologies but am going to go off-topic again because I was just thinking about the war last night watching some of Blair's speech. I think the problem with Blair is that he is actually capable of complete self-delusion and has great difficulty with any self-perception. You'd have to be a shrink to work out why he does it - I suspect it's because he's not actually very good at anything, other than a certain ingratiating charm. One could point to his very ordinary career at the Bar and subsequent decision to go into politics, presumably at the prompting of his Head of Chambers (and later Lord Chancellor) Derry Irving. You then note that Blair has changed his mind on virtually every topic from unilateralism to state ownership and gone with whatever tide is necessary to stay in power. Hence the utter dependence on a gang of unscrupulous propagandists to "spin" the truth for the press. I think Blair is effectviely blind to this and genuinely convinces himself that he believes whatever he says or is told to say. Domestically this has simply led to doing very litttle other than implementing a lot of cluttering regulation. This has restricted growth a bit but given lots of opportunity to be seen to be "doing something". Unemployment has been kept down by shoving the dismal products of state education into non-degrees and then soaking them up into an ever expanding (and Labour-voting) bureacracy. At some point this pyramid-scheme approach to running the country will come unstuck when nobody can be bothered actually to produce anything any more, but Blair will be off on his multi-millions lecture tour by then. Iraq is, of course, different, but the question of self-delusion is the same. Having achieved some success by intervention in Sierra Leone or Kosovo - where it is virtually impossible to see any national interest being served - and having convinced himself that turning the IRA into a sort of "Mafia-in-government" and getting Ulster out of the papers was the same as bringing "peace", I believe he convinced himself that removing Saddam was some sort of moral duty which, with the US, he could fufill. All of this was helped by a lot of nodding and grinning with Bush who made him feel respected and sincere in a way that no one did in the UK. God only knows what combination of neo-con assumptions, huckstering and personal pique went into Bush's decision to take out Saddam, but Blair was easy to flatter and cajole into stepping up alongside. Thereafter the spin-machine in the UK was activated to deliver the new policy and all facts were shuffled to fit the WMD line - which was, of course, the only one which most British people would swallow as an acceptable causa belli. And then only in the general (and fairly plausible) context of Saddam supplying something unpleasant to some Islamic fundamentalists. The problem Blair has faced since the start was that he never thought he could get popular support for his moral crusade, so, as in so many other areas, just looked the other way while his staff told a pack of lies to get it accomplished. Interestingly, the US has always been a lot more vague about why it went to war other than a general part of the "War on Terrrr". I think the plan in response to 9/11 was basically to pick the most objectionable Arab countries (Taliban Afghanistan and Iraq) and give them the most almighty smack possible. This would demonstrate that Clintonian appeasement was over and the US wasn't going to put up with any more S**t from anyone in the region, whether it was a government or a bunch of stone age crazies in caves. Not attractive but at least consistent with national self-interest - in the short term it would protect the oil flow and the longer term might lead to emergence of stable Islamic democracies on the lines of Turkey. We will have to wait for some time I think to see whether it works. As regards Blair, however, and to bring this over-long and off-point meandering to a conclusion, I would quote T.S Eliott "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason." I'll get me coat...

I entirely agree with the above - there's no place for democracy in a primitive society. My vote goes for benign dictatorship...er...oh booger....

Just before we embark on another orgy of "aren't real Lefties the salt of the earth etc, innit", can I quote from a conversation between Benn and the Chinese First Secretary which is mentioned in Benn's diaries: "I said how much I admired Mao Tse-Tung, or Zedong, the greatest man of the 20th century." Now if this was part of the collected ramblings of a student union leader in the 60's, we would hardly be surprised. The entry in fact appears in June 1996 when Benn was 71. Mao is estimated to have directly or indirectly murdered over 70 million people. Can anyone who wants to post rubbish about how Benn is a jolly old pipe smoking buffer who "stuck to his principles" remember that within the last ten years he has endorsed the worst mass-murderer in history. More generally those "principles" were the same as those in whose name Mao and Stalin acted. The man is an old lunatic and apologist for homicidal regimes (a la Galloway, incidentally). He'd have been sent to a Gulag in 2 minutes if he'd not had the good fortune to live in country where we let people come out with any old bollocks. That said I wish him a full recovery, since his idiocies are now part of the national fabric and can certainly provide a good laugh.

Feed it to the hamster.

I think alll the latest stuff is because The History Boys is being made into a film and he's also published a book his mother's treatment for depression. I think he's fine, given age and subject to returning cancer risk.

Perhaps this thread could be combined with the Euthanasia one since we sound like a lot of mad old biddies in the rest home "What happened to so-and-so?" "Ooo i don't know, dear, I think he's passed on - I'm 87, you know, and my Alf fought at Gallipoli" "Young people today, eh? Have you done your lottery yet?" "I'm 87"

Waldheim was a member of the Association of Nazi Students, the SA (the Brownshirts) and the SA Cavalry Troop - before the war. These were specifically Nazi organisations dedicted to its ideology. This is not the same as "joining the Nazi Party, which everyone did". Incidentally, from memory I believe about a third of the German population managed to resist even that alluring temptation without material consequences. The good Lieutenant was a junior staff officer (a translator) in Yugoslavia and was undoubtedly fully aware of numerous atrocities committed in the (admittedly very brutal) war with Tito's partisans. Worse, he would have been fully aware of the liquidation of the Salonika Jews. In 1986, when word of his record came out, he claimed that he had not heard of any misdeeds by the German armed forces in the Balkans or Greece until he read the newspaper accounts published during the election campaign. The man was not a Mengele or a Hoess - he was a grubby little mediocrity-on-the-make with an infinitely accomodating conscience. Fortunately for Hitler, both Germany and Austria had enough Waldheims to run the Nazi regime for 12 years without any significant internal opposition. I hope he and the rest of them rot in Hell. Waldheim won the Presidency in 1986 with the support of nearly half of the Austrian electorate in the first round. This was not something that happened "a long time ago", or "to another generation". Most of those voters are still alive and chose to ignore Waldheim's past. Many, I would guess, did not actually give a damn and recognised the comparable behaviour of themselves or friends and relations. I hope that if I were Austrian I'd have the humility to think about the craven and morally bankrupt political behaviour my country had inflicted on the world in the last hundred years, which includes the Serbian Ultimatum of 1914 (the real trigger of WW1); producing and then welcoming Adolf Hitler; and electing a proven Nazi-sympathiser as president. I hope I'd have the decency to keep my self-pitying opinions to myself and not come on here bleating about it all being in the past. You could have shown that it was in 1986. Instead you made him head of state. What a great country.

I had a great dirty weekend at the Lanesborough once. You get your own butler and they bring your bird a change of stockings in the morning. Fantastic. I dont' think I want to know who finally chooses the list - would remove the sacred mystery of it all.... But if they DON'T put Larry Hagman on again this year I'm going to be v pissed off!

...it's amazing what can be done with a fairly unsophisticated photo editing program. It would be amazing if I managed to do it...even with a bloody sophisticated one...

I thought we did that anyway via people's pee. Thank you for sharing that....

Probably - try the English Tourist Board. My grandfather got himself preserved by Welsh Heritage as a coal mine.

Thanks for that, old chap - (ge)hakt/haggis sounds pretty close... To be fair of course, I don't give a monkey's what the plural of haggis is, but if it diverts this dismal thread away from a bunch of illiterate adolescents wittering on about the merits or otherwise of some D-list druggy who will undoubtedly be working in local government by the time he's 35, I feel we'll have performed a valuable service...

Presumably if it's a Third Declension noun (haggis, haggis (n?)) then the nominative plural is hagges. On the other hand it's probably not a Latin-based word. Ah - No it isnt - apparently it's thought to come from the Middle English hagese which may be linked to haggen meaning "to chop". "Haggle" comes from the same root. I suppose if that's right, then the plural is "hagesen" or "haggisen" if I remember my ME plurals correctly - do our Cloggy correspondents have any input? Dutch is pretty damn close to ME.

Yeah - gas everyone at 60 unless they're entirely self-funding. And you might has well do deformed babies too - like ones whose parents wear Burberry for instance. Actually, a mate of mine who's a psychotherapist reckons most of society's ills could be solved by putting Prozac and the Pill in the water supply...

Well, obviously not, but I can tell you she's a journo at one of the papers who were approached. I don't have any explicit details of what they got up to or for how long - other than that it lasted "a few months". I must say I took a lot of convincing (not least because of NSS's well documented pillow-biting activities) but I think the context of Maggie's MI5 briefing sold it to me. I would have thought that the whole mystique for him of doing it with "her" would go quite beyond tawdry matters like sexual orientation. And yes, I love the photo and caption - presumably from Private Eye?

He was Lord Mountbatten's son in law and he lost a son and mother in the same tragedy that killed Mountbatten Tragedy is hardly the right word. Murder by a bunch of sick f**ks might be nearer the truth. Tell me - if a serial killer broke into a family home and killed the mother, one of twin sons, their grandfather, crippled the other son and mutilated the father, how many people think they'd ever be let out? The guy who put the bomb on Mountbatten's boat was released by Tony Blair in 1998. Nice one, Tony. Hope you or your kids don't get the chance to regret that in your retirement. Oh but don't worry, the IRA are diasarming today. Yeah. Right.