I’m sorry I caused offence to Liverpool

I can’t remember what words Paul Bigley used to describe me yesterday afternoon, on the line to a BBC studio, but I think he said I was “a self-centred, pompous twit”. He wanted to say how much he disliked my appearance, my voice, my mannerisms, and how much he wished I would just disappear.

No matter how big your ego, there is something crushing in being so addressed, not just because I have never met Paul Bigley, but also because he has just suffered an appalling bereavement, and is the object of national sympathy.

How do you feel? they all asked, when I left the studio. Do you feel bad? asked the girls and lads with the cameras and the notebooks.

Continue reading Apologetic in Liverpool →

*Bloggers* I am greatly heartened by your support. Here is my column:

To call it genius, frankly, is putting it mildly. When the nation sank back on the sofa last Saturday afternoon, and everyone rubbed the eye that had been accidentally punched by his neighbour’s gesticulation, and when the screams of delight had died away, we were left to contemplate the mental processes by which David Beckham, 29, was able to slot that second goal into the back of the Welsh net.

The rest of the animal kingdom must bow before him, because there is nothing else like it in nature. No dolphin jumping for a ball; no monkey hurling a nut; no archer fish catching a fly with his sputum dart – no other species can solve such a complicated, three-dimensional problem with such speed, and, of our own species, Beckham is the supreme exponent.

He was five or six yards outside the penalty box to the left; Welsh defenders were lunging at him, and yet – in a trice – he had sized up exactly how to strike that laminated sphere so that it moved in a gorgeous, uninterruptible parabola, describing the entire hypotenuse of the box, and arriving with such speed in the top right hand square foot of the goal that it left the keeper’s fingers flapping as uselessly as a dying butterfly.

Any biologist would be bound to concede that this was the human brain at its finest and most efficient.

He would also have to say, however, that there seem to be different types of cleverness; because if Beckham is in some ways cleverer than the cleverest rat or squirrel, he seems in other respects to be a few apples short of a picnic.

Continue reading Unbend the truth like Beckham, Tony →

Bloggers: here is my latest.

Boris

Safety phobia isn’t funny – it can be fatal

You should have seen the way we all laughed yesterday at the conker story.

You know the conker thing: the way some head teacher, probably a Lib Dem, decided to forbid his pupils from playing conkers without first fortifying themselves with safety goggles. Goggles for conkers! Ha ha ha. Ho ho ho.

Everyone in the Bournemouth amphitheatre threw back their chins and howled.

What will they think of next, eh? It’s political correctness gawn mad, I tell yer; and then everyone wiped their eyes, and sobered up, and prepared for the next question – a serious question, we assumed.

And that, I thought, is the problem. We have become so used to this kind of thing, the health and safety fetish, that we kind of bleep it out. Children not allowed to take eggboxes to handicraft classes in school for fear of salmonella.

Ha ha ha. Risk assessments to be carried out before every school trip. Tee hee hee.

Of course, it is mad that a teacher has to go to the proposed destination (the Science Museum), scout it out for paedophiles, highly polished floors and other hazards, and then file a report on these dangers and keep it on the school premises.

Of course, we know that such madnesses are reduplicating at a terrifying rate; and yet somehow they are so numerous, and so mad, that the wells of our indignation are running dry. We treat it as a joke, when the modern obsession of risk is sometimes very far from a joke.

Continue reading Comments from the Party Conference →