“Help me! I'm melting! I'm melting! My cheeks are turning to molten jowls and my eyes have become a watery liquid!”
This is what I imagine DM columnist Andrew Alexander said when he was thrown into a vat of boiling, corrosive acid by the fourth form bullies at his public school. Either that or he's the bastard child of fiction's most popular acid-burn victims, Robocop and The Joker. If you think I'm exaggerating check out this delightful little snap.
Anyway, to the point. The broadcast earlier this week of the programme in which Michael Portillo lauded Mrs. Thatcher's achievements and whinged about his own failings has given our man at The Mail an opportunity. Andrew has decided the time is right to stage The Mail's monthly exhumation of Mrs. T's political legacy and to get some copy out of it.
Under the headline of “Change for Change's Sake” Andrew puts his horrendously deformed boot into David Cameron and his betrayal of the true Tory faith. He claims the reasons the Tories have lost the last three elections is not that they went on too long and too hard about immigration, crime and Europe, but that they didn't go on about them enough. Move over Fukuyama, someone call MIT, I think we've got some new kind of political genius in the hemisphere! Of course it wasn't the laughably inept leadership choices, the covert “nudge-nudge” racism of the “Are you thinking what we're thinking?” slogan, the bloody stupid “Save the Pound” battle bus, the sleaze or the recession of the early nineties that did 'em over. It was not being right-wing enough! Silly us.
He then lays all the credit for the economy's success over the last ten years at Ken Clarke's door, claiming our Gord was handed an “Golden chalice”. Arch pro-European Ken Clarke guardian of the Thatcherite legacy? Seems like corrosive acid isn't the only kind this cat's been exposed too.
Andrew then embarks on a 14 paragraph journey into a seventh circle of hell reserved for economic waffle and percentage points. But fear not, like all good DM hacks, he ends on a note sure to strike fear directly into the cheque book of anyone with mortgage.
To show how Labour's economic luck has run out and that without a old-school Thatcherite government we'll soon find ourselves rifling through bins and gnawing on the ankles of our social betters in a desperate attempt to procure nourishment, he drops the bomb. “In the last few weeks of 2007, BG (parent company of British Gas) was actually losing money. BG has to procure gas in the international marketplace.”
Hellish as the idea of a massive energy corporation missing out on any kind of profit may sound, there's a few facts worth remembering:
1. BG's board is packed with foreign interests,leading to large chunks of its profits being syphoned out of the UK, and some into off-shore bank accounts in Lichtenstein and the Caymans.
2. The company has been almost constantly under attack (at times even by The Mail itself) for continuing to raise prices for consumers even when profits were rocketing by up to 86% (in 2006).
3. BG has also been embroiled in a massive corruption scandal in Italy over paying kickbacks to secure a contract to build and run a gas terminal.
The only thing left to clarify is who ordered the privatisation of British Gas in the first place and allowed all this to happen?
Oh yeah, it was Mrs. Thatcher. Keep up the good work Andrew.
Also this week....
...Amanda Platell yearns for the day when more British politicians will show the same level of dignity, integrity and passion as er... Hillary Clinton...
... Richard Littlejohn continues to baffle the population at large as to just why he gets paid so much for writing pretty much the same thing every week...
2 comments:
BLOODY THATCHER,RUINED OUR MINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It seems to be endemic within the hallowed offices of that rag. A selective glance behind them, constantly yearning for a past that just didn't exist. It's a complete hypocritical vision that seems to run throughout their pages. You can even see it in the pages of one copy; one page will complain about bloody im'grents 'stealing' jobs and the other will be a quaint condescension on how hard the Polish work. I had to stop reading the Mail when I realised my blood had reached boiling point.
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