Boris is oblivious to the bombs around him at the convention centre in Baghdad:
Had you told me that four shells had landed only 100 metres away, scattering shrapnel, I expect I would have hurled myself to the floor like any other self-respecting MP, a species widely credited with a cockroach-like instinct for survival.
Boris Johnson puts the Government on a par with the IRA:
Jumblatt: jubilant with the spark of democratic revolt spreading in the Middle East:
“The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”
Continue reading Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese Opposition Leader in the DT Column
Sorry, Blair, but that is so much phooey
I have a terrible feeling that, if you lift your eyes a few inches to the north, you will have a shock. An intruder has crept into the chaste domain of the comment pages.
I can almost feel his Cheshire cat grin over my shoulder. I can already hear the torrent of drivel seeping down from my columnar next-door neighbour, and I am afraid I want to throw up my figurative window and say, “Oi, Blair, shut it, mate. Some of us down here are trying to talk.”
I remember when I first experienced contempt for Tony Blair, whom I had hitherto regarded, I am ashamed to say, with something approaching optimism. It was the Hoddle business. You know: the priceless moment when poor Glenn Hoddle, his brains turned to mashed swede from heading footballs, announced that he believed in the migration of the soul; and that, furthermore, he believed that the disabled were paying for sins committed in a previous existence.
Thursdays wouldn’t be the same without a Boris Johnson D T comment to chew over …
Under Prescott’s demolition plan Ringo Starr’s home looks set to be pulled apart along with many other terraced homes in the North, while rabbit hutch style homes are to mushroom in the South.
Now Prescott’s bulldozers are coming for Penny Lane
It is a policy that defies logic …the economic map of Britain looks like a swelling tear drop, getting ever fatter at the bottom; and to hell with local democracy or the environment
*Good to see Boris back in the D T*
**Lucky Cherie to have bumped in to him**
You know, I have always had a soft spot for Cherie Blair. You may think I am mad, but I have resented the attacks on her, and suspected that it is to do with the jealousy that surrounds a successful, high-earning woman who possesses a mind of her own.
Continue reading Violent Crime on the Up – How are you supposed to get on your bike?
Taking your lead bloggers ! Airbus it is – thank you for your speedy reaction
Boris’s thinking reaches stratospheric heights in his DT column today:
This is not a bus, or even a tram or a train or ship. It is an Airvillage. Already Richard Branson is planning to fill his 380s with casinos and gyms and coffee parlours
Read on …
European dream and American reality
Incroyable! Unglaublich! What a triumph for the European dream. What a stunning rebuke to all of us Euro-sceptics, with our acned teenage insistence on the dogma of the free market.
In less than two months, the first of our runways will rumble to the thunder of the new plane’s payload, 40 per cent heavier than that of a 747. In a couple of years, they will be circling in midge-like cones over Heathrow, except that they won’t be midges so much as aerial whales, Moby Dicks of the sky, each capable of taking 555 passengers, rising to 800 or even 1,000 as new models come on stream. In a decade, they say, the Earth will be cats-cradled with their vapour, as air travel passenger numbers triple in response to the inflated capacity of their bellies, holding 30 per cent more seats than a jumbo.
Those in the knowin’ expect a fresh view from Boris on Thursday mornings.
Well, today in The Daily Telegraph he recommends that we ‘hold our horses’ when it comes to all the alarmist news about a radiologist’s views on the effect of mobiles – just as we should have done with the MMR panic.
Dodgy mobiles? Don’t hit the panic button
It had to come. It couldn’t last. How could we have been so naive as to think that the gods – ever jealous of mankind’s technical prowess – would let us get away with an innovation as benign as the mobile phone? Like families across the country, the Johnson household has recently taken a momentous step. We gave a mobile to the 11-year-old, and it was not an easy decision to make. Look here, I said, representing the forces of inchoate conservatism, are you really sure? When I was a nipper, I said, a telephone was a semi-sacred instrument; you had to dial it by actually dialling a dial; the contraption was made of Bakelite and you never really got to have a go on it unless the grown-ups were out, and you could tip-toe softly and phone one of Rupert Murdoch’s red-hot chat-lines, which had only just been invented.
Boris Johnson’s column out today deplores the high rates of tariffs on textiles and calls on Brussels to address the continuing injustice to Sri Lankan undergarments in particular:
The cuts could be spread, over time, to all the third world, and in the meantime they would stop jobs in Sri Lanka being relocated elsewhere, and encourage local industry.
All it would take is one meeting in Brussels, and less than three minutes to do
Continue reading Scrap the Tariffs on textiles from Sri Lanka, Thailand and other flood-hit areas