the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The BBC seems to not to just to be wanting to have it’s cake and eating it, but to then also try to convince us that if we so imagined that this was indeed the case, that we were mistaken.

I refer, of course to tonights BBC One ‘Question Time Special’, featuring – according to the BBC at least – the leaders of the four main political parties, The Status Quo, Not Quite as Status Quo as the Status Quo, the Goldilocks version of the Status Quo and The Tartan Status Quo.

One of the problems for me is that the BBC is more than happy to constantly talk up or talk down political parties based on nothing more than opinion polls. Polls which are invariably conducted using a statistically inconsequential number of adults, so inconsequential that they represent the margin of error that might nullify the very thing that the poll claims to prove, yet which to the media are somehow indicative of what the population thinks.

Of more of concern is the ‘bandwagon effect’, which as one might imagine, describes the effect of people wanting to back a winner, especially if that winner is confidently predicted to be winning by everyone. Everyone wants that! Only an idiot would support someone who they knew was going to lose, er like Plonker admitted to doing only this week, when he supported Corblimey in the 2019 general election. 

Essentially opinion polls create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that by reporting on these polls, the media helps inflate out of all proportion.

Which brings us back neatly to the BBC and tonights debate.

Ofcom (the broadcasting regulator) claims the guidance they’ve given to broadcasters is that the most important of all the factors is the performance in the last two general elections of the political parties. But as Farrago pointed out ‘“We haven’t stood in the last two general elections. It’s as if everything in our politics is designed to stop new boys and girls coming in and to keep everything the same.”

I’m no fan of Farrago, but I am a fan of fairness within the democratic process and this isn’t fair. If the BBC have no problem at all with constantly publishing poll results bigging up Reform UK in order that they can report on the Tories ever worsening woes, then shouldn’t be able hide behind some bureaucratic chicanery to deny him a place on tonights debate. 

So according to the latest update on the BBC’s poll tracker at 3.30pm on Thursday 19th June, just over 4 hours away from the start of the debate, The Status Quo are polling at 21%, The Not Quite as Status Quo as The Status Quo are on 41%. The Goldilocks version of the Status Quo is currently at 11% and the Tartan Status Quo is on 6%.

Meanwhile, Farrago and his Not quite as much not The Status Quo as they pretend, are on 16%, so one can understand his frustration at not taking part. Although possibly he’ll use this entire affair to bolster his narrative of him being the victim of an establishment stitch-up.  

The irony is that the debate follows England’s second match in the Euro’s and I can’t help in making the unfavourable comparison between the amount of time, forensic scrutiny and easily comprehensible analysis that has been devoted to the Euro football, against that afforded to the general election. Apart from last Friday, when only the opening game was played, there have been a minimum of eight hours a day – a fucking day! – devoted to this by BBC One and ITV.

It’s not as if England’s result on July 4th is anywhere near as important as the one tonight, is it

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And the problem with reliance on extrapolating the results from from a numerically small number to make a larger point is dodgy to say the least. Yes, the numbers may themselves be accurate, but the way in which those numbers, and the statistics that they then produce, can themselves be all too easily be presented in an eye-catching way, is less than helpful.

Take for example, 10 instance of a thing happening in one year and in the next it happens 15 times. The increase can be expressed in of two ways, either as an increase of 5, which is easily ignored, or as one of 50%, seems alarming. Both of which are correct, but if you were working for a charity that needed a big number to be the headline in a press release, which figure would you use? Knowing that the scarier the number, the greater the likelihood that that press release will be used as a the basis for a newspaper article.

‘Acid offences up 75% in UK but only 8% go to court, data suggests’ was the headline in the Guardian today. 

And just to make it clear, I’m not making light of acid offences in any way, what I am doing is simply proving the truth of Mark Twains observation, ‘That there are lies, damned lies and statistics’

‘The total number of recorded offences last year based on freedom of information (FOI) requests was 1,244 – up from 710 in 2022 – comprising 454 physical attacks and 790 other alleged offences, including carrying corrosives and threats of acid attack to aid other offences such as rape or robbery.’

So whilst technically acid offences, they’re not the sort of crime one normally associates with the words acid offence, not someone throwing acid into the face of someone else. Carrying acid, or threatening to use whilst committing another crime? Er, no. 

Those types of offences, the physical attack ones, the 454 which I hope weren’t all of the Katie Piper kind, make up 36.4% of the total. A bit less scary than 75%, but still appalling.

Nasty, and despicable yes, but did those threatening to use acid actually have the means to carry out their threat, or were they just doing – just doing! – what criminals have always done, which is to terrorise their victims into compliance?

If the charity which compiled the data and out out the press release, Acid Survivors Trust International, wanted people like me to take the issue as seriously as they do, then possibly not choosing the most media friendly way of printing that data might be a good place to start.

It always baffles me how the protesters from Just Stop Oil manage to avoid serious injury when attempting to draw attention to a problem, a problem that most people are quite content to remain a problem.

Their latest stunt involved throwing some powder at Stonehenge today to make some point or other about keeping oil or coal in the ground. About how much more needs to be done, with much more urgency and of course, much more guilt about living in a society where these boons to humanity have become commonplace.Bizarrely, no-one has ever lamped one of these fuckers and because of that, it emboldens them to commit even greater follies in pursuance of a goal as unlikely to be achieved as Scotland winning the Euro’s.

Do people care about the planet, yes of course they do! But they care about heating their homes a lot more.

Do they want more renewable energy, yes of course they do! But they also want the certainty that when they turn their light switch on in January – when the sun doesn’t shine – or in the summer – when the wind doesn’t blow – it’ll work.

Do some people agree think that electric cars are the future, of course they do! But most question their affordability and practicality.

Why don’t the protesters just sue their parents for committing the unpardonable crime of having had them in the first place, and further compounding that sin by doing so in a time and place which indulges their performative posturing?  

If only their Dads has kept it in their pants!

I must confess to being a tad confused by the media’s seemingly insatiable appetite for using opinion polls to manufacture stories out of at election time, when recent previous history has proven time and time again just how wrong they can be.

My opinion of opinion polls hasn’t been helped by their disastrous misreading of the 2015 election, one that was only eclipsed by their failure to accurately predict the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Mind you, that was only eclipsed by their utter failure in predicting the outcome of the 2017 election. So, improvements were urgently needed, as every newspaper and media outlet said in 2015, again in 2016, and er, in 2017 and yes finally some things changed and they got it a bit right in time for the 2019 one.

I’ve long been of the belief that the use of opinion polls should be seriously limited during an election campaign. This would be positive thing for democracy, not a negative. Yes, by all means, let the parties conduct their own polling for their own private use. How much support do they enjoy as compared to the other parties and therefore which policies are proving popular – or not – with the electorate, and what demographic of the electorate should they focus on. That sort of thing, for their eyes only, to be analysed by anals in pointy hats and not be used otherwise.

Lest there exists a situation whereby an opinion poll can that give rise to a story one day, is apparently contradicted the next, and for the same newspaper to report on both of these stories in a state of blissful ignorance that they’d ever published the one that they’ve just contradicted. And this also gives the false impression that x per cent of the population thinks’ this, as opposed to the more accurate – but less newsy – observation that x per cent of statistically insignificant number of the population thought this.

In yesterday’s Independent there appeared this headline, ‘More than half of voters want Jeremy Corbyn back in the Labour party, new poll reveals.’

Wow! That certainly was something, although what exactly that something was, and even how likely it was to become that something, was not discussed. There’s a poll, don’t you know, and polls tell us something, which in this case was that,

‘More than half of all voters believe that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn should be allowed back into the party if he is re-elected as an MP in his constituency of Islington North.

Exclusive polling for the Independent by Techne shows that while 56 per cent of all voters say he should be re-admitted, this number is much higher among Labour voters, with 8 in 10 saying that Corbyn should be allowed to rejoin the Labour Party’

Seeing as how I’m brain damaged and get easily confused, I tried to make sense of it. So, people were asked a question predicated upon the notion that something that hasn’t happened yet does happen and creates the necessary conditions for that question to be asked? Hang on, didn’t Chris Morris do a sketch on Radio 4’s ‘On The Hour’ back in 1992 based a this exact premise.

But maybe, because of how I’m brain damaged, possibly I’m being unfair, maybe their methodology was sound, Oh the results were based what 1,624 adults said, it says. That can’t be right, especially if a newspaper is making such a bold claim in the middle of an election campaign based on such a small number of respondents.

Then I saw this opinion poll result based bollocks in The Independent today,’ Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson set to win seats in new Ipsos MRP poll. Ipsos projection also shows Jeremy Corbyn at high risk of losing his Islington North seat’

I thought that people liked him. Isn’t that what you said yesterday, and even if you didn’t explicitly say that, you certainly gave that impression. But lets not dwell on that because,

‘The model also projects that Jeremy Corbyn may lose his seat in Islington North after 41 years of being an MP. Labour is estimated at 54 per cent of the vote in the constituency, with candidate Praful Nargund, while Mr Corbyn may be at just 13 per cent.’

A quick visit to both websites, Techne who produced yesterdays opinion poll, an Ipsos, who produced today’s one, proved that there’s no such thing as a load of old bollocks that can’t have more bollocks added to it, with the help of some computer bollocks and impressively sounding sciencey bollocks.

At Techne, I found that whilst an impressive sounding 18,252 had been invited to take part in the survey, the overwhelming majority of these – 16,616 –  had either declined or else had not properly completed the survey in some way. I also discovered that interviews were either conducted using CATI or CAWI.

Both baffled and intrigued by these acronyms, I decided to investigate. CATI turns out to stand for Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, whilst CAWI is Computer Assisted Web Interviewing, and despite both having the pro’s and cons, the main pro is that they are cheap. 

Then over to Ipsos. While they make all manner of highfalutin claims about how sciencey based their poll is, its still basically a load of old bollocks. 

‘Multi-level regression and post stratification (MRP) is an advanced modelling technique that estimates the likely vote share for main parties in each constituency by using a national survey with a large sample size. Data on how people say they will vote (and if they will vote) is analysed by a wide range of factors to see how different types of people, in different areas, are likely to act.’

Clever bollocks but still bollocks none the same.

‘For example, it estimates the probability that a woman, aged 25-34, with a degree, living in a Lab/Con marginal, who voted Labour in 2019 will vote for each party running in that constituency. These estimates are then applied to the differing profiles of each constituency to estimate vote counts for each party.’

Ah estimates, basically guesswork with a dash of optimism and a tiny bit of bollocks.

‘Nevertheless, this is just a snapshot of people’s current voting intentions, and there is still time for things to change.  As with any survey and any model, there are uncertainties to take into account, such as margins of error, the impact of unique local dynamics, and sensitivities to the data that goes in.’

Yeah, we know its bollocks, and this covers us when it does indeed turn out to be bollocks, but as no one will actually bother to look behind the story and check out our website, we’ll be fine.

My eyes are hurting a bit after having looked at a computer screen for so long, so I think I’ll take a break for today, and maybe tomorrow as well.

When in a previous post I suggested that Plonker didn’t give me the impression that he had of a fundamental, non-negotiable core belief that informed his entire way of political thinking, one that would be discernible in all the policies Labour would implement if elected into government, I thought it mattered.

And that I found it almost impossible to think of any principles he truly believed in – other than that he wants to be PM and will say or do anything to achieve that goal – and that because of that, that he only stands for two things, and one of them is the National Anthem, and this too concerned me.

I now realise that his lack of principles is irrelevant, largely because there are many, many more people in his party who do have principles, very deeply held principles that they want us to share, regardless of whether we want to share them or not. The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP)  – the MP’s at Westminster whom he notionally leads – underline this truism. They all have their own particular interests and causes to champion. And whilst in opposition they will have kept quiet about them and maintained party discipline so as not to scare the electorate and ensure election, once that is achieved, the gloves will really come off.

And if elected, the larger his majority is, the less of a problem for him the PLP will be, because more means less of an influence they have. So as most people understand it, among the things being in government might entail would be choosing what the priorities in a legislative agenda are , granting concessions or amendments in the policies aiming to become legislation or quietly ditching policies altogether. Not easy, but made less difficult with more MP’s to play each other off against.  All told, it’s like trying to do a Rubik’s cube that’s fighting back against you. 

But difficult as all that may well be for Plonker, it is as nothing when compared to laborious process of deciding what exactly is the process in the first place.

If you really want to know how its all done, here’s a guide done by the BBC, but honestly!. That Rubik’s cube analogy? Add being blindfolded and being constantly shouted at as you did it,  having it snatched away from you and jumbled up repeatedly and if you did somehow manage to complete it, being criticised because of the way you did it.

Basically the PLP doesn’t decide what Labour policy is, committees do. These committees are made up of MP’s, trade unionists and others. But not before other sub-committees have decided on what it is those committees can decide on. And just to make this process even more complex than it already is, sometimes these motions or policy idea’s that the subcommittees can refer upward will have first been proposed and adopted at the Labour Party conference. 

Now remember how Corlimey got elected as Labour leader in 2017? The sudden influx of people joining the Labour Party on £2 membership expressly so they could vote for him? Many were young idealists and some remained after Plonker replaced Corblimey as Leader seeing Labour as a vehicle that might deliver the changes they thought Britain needed. More joined for the same reason, better to promote their idea of progressive politics.

They’re the ones who’ll bother to go to constituency meetings on a cold Wednesday night. They’re the ones who’ll do the unglamorous work outside of an election campaign.

They’re also the ones who’ll get elected onto constituency committees, in order that they can go to Labour Party conferences and propose motions to be discussed by the various committees I mentioned earlier. They’ll also be the ones using social media to put pressure on those committee members to ensure those motions become policy.

They’re also the ones who’ll use social media to lambast any MP who says or does anything they don’t approve of and they’ll also be very vociferous about what they perceive as either a watering down or new addition to a policy that they do or don’t like. And if that doesn’t work, they’re the ones, who because of being on those constituency committees, who’ll try to initiate a de-selection process for an MP to prevent them from standing for re-election as a Labour candidate.

They’re the one’s who wield the real power, not the leader, the MP’s or trade union leaders, but the activists who know not just how the system works, but to make it work to their advantage. They know it and so does everyone else. Both the main political parties are vulnerable to this type of insurgent activism but when Labour has a leader like Plonker, a man who stands for only two things, and the other is when he’s having a piss, you can hardly blame them. 

That’s why it is ultimately of no importance what Plonker does or doesn’t believe in.

Told you.

I predicted that this would happen, although I didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly. The media, never having been entirely at one with the idea of English football fans being granted the benefit of the doubt, have been quick to denounce them as hooligans.

So just now, and ahead of Englands first match in the tournament against Serbia, the Daily Telegraph invited us to; ‘Watch: England fans involved in violent clashes with Serbians ahead of Euro 2024 opener…A group of fans attacked others with bottles before throwing chairs and toppling tables. One set of fans then chased the other group down the street as riot police followed’

Not to make light of it or anything but exactly how violent were these violent clashes. I mean, if rival sets of fans attacked each other with bottles, you’d expect numerous injuries to have resulted, some serious, yes?

Er, no, because as this report of the same incident in The Guardian makes clear, ‘One man, said to be from Birmingham, was left with heavy wounds to his head as he was caught up in the fighting. He was seen receiving medical attention including heavy bandaging to the head. A plain clothes police officer was also treated for a head wound.’

But the clashes were violent because The Daily Mirror has said they were, ‘England vs Serbia: Fans clash in violent bar fight as chairs thrown and police intervene’

But buried deep in the article was this less than helpful eyewitness account, “It was nasty but small fight. But it ended up with a chase before the police finally calmed it.”

But for really being unhelpful in promoting the idea that being an England fan is a euphemism for being a drunken violent thug, was this article in The Metro, which dryly observed that, ‘Conflicting reports say fighting began between Albania and Serbia supporters, and that some English fans were caught up in it. It was initially reported the attack in the western city of Gelsenkirchen was carried out by English fans.

But German police at the scene said the brawl was between supporters from Serbia and Albania, according to Sky News. The UK football policing unit, which has travelled out to Germany to assist, also said only Serbian nationals have been arrested so far following the brawl.’

Its all so very confusing, not least whilst reading the articles, I couldn’t help but notice the number of similarities common to all of them.

But what isn’t confusing is that former crisp salesman turned Britains immoraliser-in-chief, Gary Hammas, will be once again be resuming his part time gig as a commentator on football, a subject in which he does at least have some expertise.

There’s a fundamental paradox of modern British politics that lies at core of British politics – and I use lies in both meaning of the word – and that is the patently absurd notion that tax cuts are somehow compatible with the effective functioning of good quality public services.

Modern politics now appears to be obsessed with this nonsense, as Penny Lessthan wonderfully proved during Thursday nights ITV shouty lie fest, by constantly claiming that Labour would raise taxes whilst the Conservatives wouldn’t.

Since the mid-eighties it seems to me, the British electorate have been more than happy to enter into a diabolical Faustian pact with politicians, one that denies not just the reality of their own experience, but also denies that there is indeed such a thing as society and that they are just as much a part of it as anyone else.

And nothing better illustrates this doublethink more than at election time, when ironically enough politicians all compete to prove just how honest they are. This they do by the blatantly dishonest means of bullshitting the electorate. And credit where credits due, to must takes incredible skill, nerves of steel and absolute self- belief to bullshit so brazenly, so convincingly and for so long.

About things that the electorate have to know are to be bullshit, not least because many of them work in the public services that are the victims of this bullshit. And that the rest of them will likely have had some first-hand experience of the effects of this bullshit, but despite this, they remain quite happy to be the bullshat.

That there exist yet more ‘efficiency savings’ to be had, that ‘cutting red tape’, ‘streamlining services’, ‘better use of technology’ ‘ being more focused on outcomes by concentrating on our core function’ aren’t predictably grim euphemisms for the same thing. Namely, another round of funding cuts which inevitably means that public services will have to do more with less.

Sometimes events will briefly intrude upon this symbiotic relationship and the electorate, normally because of a scandal or tragedy that’s an inevitable consequence of the reality of lower taxes, will purport to be outraged that such a thing has been allowed to happen. To act all innocent, all ‘nufifnk to do wiv me guv, honest’, as opposed them thinking that maybe, just maybe, it does have something to do with them after all. 

But, to the relief of all concerned, normal service will quickly be resumed, once the electorate and the media have had their fill of demanding heads must roll, that something be done and that lessons must be learnt. Think of how wise parent will patiently let their toddler have its tantrum so as to exhaust them and thus ensure a ten hour sleep. Same thing.

For me most sickening manifestation of this Faustian pact was evidenced by the whole ‘Clap for Carers’ obscenity that took place during the first lockdown. You remember that? You probably joined in, to express your sincere thanks to a NHS that despite having repeatedly endured government funding cuts and ministerial interference, rose incredibly well to the manifold challenges that Covid-19 presented. Challenges that they had to face without adequate PPE so that sometimes they had to wear bin-bags instead. Their reward for all of that?

People clapped at their front gates for a minute for a few Thursdays as a thank-you. Fuck-a-doodle-dandy!

Not for a decent pay rise, something tangible that the medical staff who were performing such heroics could use for, I don’t know, maybe buy food, pay bills, or even have a week-end break. Not extra funding to allow more people to qualify as doctors and nurses. Certainly not having an educational system of sufficient a standard to enable people to get the qualifications to allow them to train as such in the first place.

And most definitely not for people to have voted in sufficient numbers and consistently for a political party that when in government wouldn’t have allowed the NHS to get into the such state as it was when Covid-19 happened. 

And if politicians can’t be honest with electorate about tax, which is both a comparatively simple issue relative to the others this country faces, and yet the issue that will determine if those others to can fixed, then what else can we not trust them on? As I’ve made clear on this blog, simplistic reasons are for simpletons. Issues have many interconnected, some invisible but all complex, factors to them.

So again, who is worse? The person who bullshits, and knows it be bullshit – the bullshitter – or the people who believe the bullshit even though they know it be bullshit because it saves them some money, -the bullhsat?

Today is the start of another instalment of The Great Diversionary Spectacular, better known to all as the European football something. Anyway, England, much to everyones delight, are competing and nowhere will this delight be more keenly welcomed than in 10 Downing Street. 

For the longer that the English team remain in the competition, the happier the incumbent of that house will be, because football – more than any other sport – fulfils many functions in a society, but the primary one is one of distraction.

Because from now until England get kicked out – traditionally after just managing to escape elimination from the Group stage – this will be the main issue pre-occupying peoples minds. If your ears should be bedevilled by a sports phone-in between now and then, you’ll hear a bewildering array of opinions on what the teams tactics should be, what the manager is doing right or wrong and how these might affect the teams success or lack thereof. 

The media will only be too happy to do perform their usual cheerleading role, to either dress it up as some non-jingoistic and non racist patriotism or to trumpet it as a superb celebration of a diverse, vibrant and modern multi-cultural society. To show not just the matches, but also the pre-match build ups, the post match analyses. News items about the matches, the players, their wives and girlfriends, the fans – be they harmonious and in good spirits or drunken hooligans on a violent rampage, will be reported on, and those reports will be reported on.

This also has the added benefit of eating up time that could be put to much better use discussing actual news and to act rather like a shiny object might distract a small child. Because if one can understand football enough to have an opinion about it, one can understand politics 

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

And anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated thing, not the people hoping to have it simplified for them. This isn’t, I believe, accidental, because in the same way one teaches a toddler to walk, once the basics are mastered, progress is rapid.

The more that the media use jargon, quote endless statistics, baffle us with with talk about GDP, the RPI and the OBR. The more that they fixate upon the narcissism of small differences, – the lack of any real ideological gulf between any of the main political parties, – the more they distract, confuse and ultimately alienate the electorate.

And sport because costs less to cover, the more sporting organisations will charge for the broadcast rights to these events because they know that the cost will be cheaper per minute for a broadcaster than the cost of say a drama.

Consider the amount of airtime both the BBC and ITV will devote to this nonsense, how it will lauded over and fetishised out of all proportion relative to its actual importance. Football – or indeed any sport – provides a welcome distraction, and why politicians love it so. From the Romans, with their colosseums and gladiators, to Hitler and the Berlin Olympics, sport has always served the same function. It won’t improve in any way the life chances of those watching it, won’t make their life any the easier and it won’t change the priorities of the society that they exist in, but it does have understandable rules, a known duration and at the end of it all, a winner.

Actually, if TV executives did have the balls to update the Roman concept of a gladiatorial combat thing, I’d watch it and so would you, in addition to millions of others. A live and uninterrupted, as long as it takes, last one standing amidst the dead bodies of their former rivals, fight to the death. No weapons, no time limit, no adverts, no time-outs and of course, no rules. Taking place in ring the size of a five-a-side football pitch, a ring that was fenced in and with crowd baying for blood. Talk about fighting for every vote! There’d only need be one of these and it’d certainly far more entertaining than last nights shout and lie fest.

Julie Etchingham was so far out of her depth that I thought she might drown.

I was thinking about my post of a few days, wherein I suggested that D-Day was the single most defining moment in European history and because of that, it therefore follows that Winston Churchill is by quite a wide margin the most important European ever.

I know that there are increasing numbers of revisionists who maintain that because a number of controversies in his past, these dwarf any other consideration. In my opinion, proponents of these controversies seek to defame Churchill in order to promote their own reductive narratives or divisive agenda’s and because of the age we live in now, such idea’s have inexplicably become commonplace. This obsession of interpreting the past through the prism now is utter nonsense, because as I pointed out in my earlier post, we only have the values of now because of his actions then.

The undeniable truth of this was borne out in the European elections that took place recently. Not the results themselves – although I might come back to them – but the fact of them even having happened. That there exist the necessary conditions that allow them to take place is thanks chiefly to him. 

Functioning democracies that help create a flourishing civil society, ones that allow a multiplicity of views, the right to hold those views and not be subject to arbitrary arrest if you hold views that are deemed unpalatable, rights that are guaranteed by the rule of law, a law that is interpreted by an independent judiciary, free from the whims and score-settling of politicians and governments. With a free press that is able to hold those politicians and governments to account, and with political parties for those with differing political beliefs to belong to.  

And whilst it hasn’t always been that way for all European countries, all of the time, broadly speaking it has. However imperfect it may have been, and possibly still is for some, it could all have been so very, very much worse. 

The Europe that Europeans live in today only happened because after the war that had torn Europe apart ended. European leaders looked at the ruins of their former countries and put in place measures to prevent it happening again.  For example, The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), set up in 1949, a security alliance between the US, Canada, and 10 Western European counties. It has grown, as the threats individual countries face increase and the so the benefits of membership become ever more apparent. Now it has 30 members.

Because of that, and the obvious benefits of closer co-operation that helped to ensure continued peace and stability in non Soviet Europe, more institutions were created and more European countries joined those institutions, leading, until recently, to over 70 years of almost unbridled peace and harmony unparalleled in European history.

But this happy outcome only happened because the Allies won the war. A war which I believe was one war, not two, but one with a half time stoppage, like a football match so everyone could take a breather, except in the case of the Germans, who instead massively built up their military. Churchill, being aware of this and alive to the very real threat it posed, constantly sounded warnings and for his troubles he was eventually cast out into the political wilderness. 

Until his warnings proved to be correct in 1939.  Germany resumed the war. European countries were quickly overrun. And he alone had both the moral and political authority needed to provide the leadership that had been so conspicuously lacking and had allowed events to unfold as they had.

Yes, he may not have been perfect. Yes, some of his views might be unpalatable now. Yes, some of the things he did could be judged unfavourably. But those are as nothing when compared to fact that he led Britain through the war, led it when Britain stood alone, when accepting a peace deal with Hitler was more favourable to the political elites. 

But thankfully he didn’t and we live in a better world because he didn’t. That’s why there were elections in Europe, because fascism, the old kind, the unimaginable horror kind, the dictatorial and concentration camp kind, not the modern someone disagreeing with you or misgendering you kind, was vanquished.

No man has ever had more of a single greater influence upon the present he lived through and because of that, the present we now enjoy.  

And that is why, to me at least, he is the most important European to have ever lived.

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The news that Mr Magoo’s son, Wellington, was found guilty yesterday on all counts relating to his having lied about his drug use when applying for a firearms licence was a shock. He seemed like such a nice man, the kind of man who would clear the paths of his elderly neighbours if it snowed and would do it in secret, so as not to highlight what a nice man he really was.

So imagine my dismay upon finding out that this wasn’t, in fact, the case. If anything, he was even more Ryan Giggs than Ryan Giggs himself, something I’d thought impossible. A week or so ago, an article in the Guardian, reporting on his imminent trial noted that ‘Prosecutors also may call Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe Biden’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer. (In 2015) Hallie Biden was dating Hunter Biden when he bought a handgun in 2018.’

So hang on! He was having an affair with his brothers widow at the time of the alleged offences, and they bury this detail at the end of the article? So naturally, I went looking and depending on your view of humanity and also how personally removed you are from the events a bit a Googling unearthed, they are either a savage indictment of the morality of the wealthy and powerful in America, a tragedy caused by an entitled man, a man who even when the game was up, still clings to his entitlement or just typical.

Remember the stolen laptop that was such a big deal out of by people who make a living out of making big deals out of things? Probably not, if you have a life.

Anyway, analysis of that laptop revealed that he sent the grieving widow of his dead brothers wife, the one he had an affair with, a series of emails begging her to get an H.I.V test after their affair had cooled off. This was a month before before he fathered child with someone who worked for him at his consulting firm.

Not only was the mother taken off the firms insurance policy months after giving birth, he also denied he was the father, resulting in a bitter paternity case. Not helped by him claiming to have no memory of ever having met her, I suppose.

His then wife, with whom he has three daughters, bizarrely decided to divorce him. I know!  She only found out about his unorthodox method of grief counselling after she found lots of incriminating emails on his iPad. 

Had he not heard of the delete button?

Sadly, due to various this’s and that’s, The Guardian wasn’t able to let its readers know about such things which took me all of five minutes to uncover. Had it been Fart however, they’d have been endlessly gorging on this story like a vampire at a orphanage. They covered Fart’s judicial circus as if it were something that had some meaningful impact upon British people, all live feeds of irrelevant minutiae and endless updates on trivia.

But having an affair with your brothers widow months after he died, then when you’ve ended the affair but before your new mistress is about to have your baby, beg the widow to have H.I.V. test, that isn’t news. Neither is the fact he has consistently denied paternity, so much so that neither he, nor Mr Magoo, have ever met his five year old daughter.

One might be forgiven that might be a reason to explain why this might be so.

And for added cringe, I’ve included the video below, in which he claims that the affair was…well click on the link and try not to think, ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging!’ It’s less than three minutes long, and honestly, it speaks volumes about his character…