Every detail of the murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce seemed calculated to provoke my middle-class anger. With every word, I could feel my heart turning into a bubbling, lid-flipping cauldron of fury, and when I looked at the faces of his killers — Carty and Brown — I felt something I have hardly ever felt in my life.

I simply wanted them to pay. I thought how hard the 32-year-old Cambridge graduate had worked, how happy he was that he was going back to see his fiancée. I thought how she had been due to try on her wedding dress, and of the wedding plans strewn around his corpse.

I thought what a nice chap he sounded, and how brave he had been to fight back with his bare hands in those last dark moments in Kensal Green; and then I thought of Carty and Brown, and how they had stabbed him and kept stabbing him in the head and the arms and the torso, even though he had already given them everything they wanted, which turned out to be nothing but a mobile phone and an Oyster card; and I thought how they composed moronic rap songs about killing and stabbing, and then I looked again at their blank, expressionless, remorseless faces and I am ashamed to say I was overcome with hatred.

Continue reading God knows how Carty and Brown will repent →

by Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph

In so far as New Labour has a fairy godmother, Polly is the girl

It is easy to make fun of Polly Toynbee. It is easy to convict her of hypocrisy; but she genuinely knows and cares about the bottom 20 per cent …(she) has made herself an authority on the evils of Gordon Brown’s high taxes on low earners

Polly Toynbee the Tory guru: that’s barking. Or maybe not

Nah, I said to myself. You have got to be kidding me. I squinted again at the Guardian headline on the mat, and felt all funny. Someone, I whispered, is pulling my leg. You all know of course that I am a voortrekker of the Cameron movement. You realise, I hope, that I positively breathe the spirit of the solar-powered, bike-riding, glacier-friendly modernising tendency of which I am proud to be a part.

But when I saw yesterday’s Guardian, I almost swooned. A new ideological guru had been found for the Tory party, smirked the paper in triumph – and it was Polly Toynbee! The author of the new position paper was none other than my brilliant friend Greg Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells, with whom I found myself recently in total agreement at the Tory conference.

Continue reading Polly Toynbee →

Reid’s as hard as jelly, or he’d challenge Brown to a scrap

Come on then, Reid, you big girl’s blouse. Come on and show us what you’ve got. Get out of that BBC studio and do something really brave, for a change. I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up of hearing the Home Secretary telling us how tough he is.

According to his own propaganda, Dr John Reid is the kind of guy who would knock you down for looking at his girl the wrong way in the pub. He acts like a man with “love” tattooed on a bicep and a steel plate in his head, and a pitbull that runs up and sniffs you very meaningfully indeed.

I imagine that when people meet him after closing time on a pavement in Glasgee, they look at his working jaw and his mad ice-blue eyes, and they think yikes. And that is what they are supposed to think. In a Labour Party increasingly dominated by superannuated lecturers and wonks and Milibands, Reid still exudes something of the smell of spilt beer.

He sounds tough, acts tough, looks tough. But as to whether he really is tough, my friends, I am afraid he makes overcooked tagliatelle look positively rigid. Every day we hear of some new ferocious Reid-inspired “crackdown”. He’s not just going to fine noisy neighbours; he’s not just going to give them Asbos. Tough-guy Reid is going to kick them out of their homes!

Continue reading John Reid’s Agenda →