Broadcasting House programme, Radio 4, Sunday 4th June, 9 – 11am
The Anglo Saxon model is a sweet and bonny lass
And the victim of much calumny in France
They say she’s cruel and ruthless and her heart is made of glass
They say, they lie, she doesn’t change her pants
The rude deluded Frenchmen have the gall to blame our model
For the sufferings of four million on the dole
When the truth is the reverse ……
Listen to programme here
From an odyssean experience came a vision of a Europe
that builds on the steady exchange of people and languages, culture and ideas, until we create a wider, looser, more generous Europe, that includes the Turks
Let’s buy into the good things about Europe
Much as I love my fellow countrymen, I couldn’t quite believe how many of us decided last week to pick the same small set of beaches on the island of Lefkas. There we were, alone on some stretch of bone-white sand, the sea the colour of forget-me-nots, the sky like blue fire; and then dots would appear at the far end. Would they be French? German?
Boris Johnson and family are away on a well-deserved holiday this week.
Insightful editorial in this week’s Spectator
How to breed poodles
Conservative MPs and candidates have spent the last four years campaigning against two connected evils of the Labour style of government. In innumerable speeches and press releases, they have stood up for local and national democracy, and against the tendency of the government to centralise power and to hand it over to quangocrats, bureaucrats and officials in Brussels. They have also launched countless philippics against Labour’s love of the target and the quota, and all manner of diktat from Whitehall.
Boris Johnson MP today lambasted Charles Clarke’s decision to press ahead with the extradition of the so-called Bermingham or NatWest three to the US, under the terms of the Extradition Treaty 2003, an infamy.
Continue reading Extradition of NatWest Three to the United States
I won’t pay to be abused by the BBC
I want to save myself the price of a stamp or a phone call today by writing an open letter to Mr Richard Goodbody, the regional manager of the Swindon enforcement division of the TV Licensing Authority. I have no reason to doubt that Mr Goodbody is a perfectly pleasant man in private life, but in his public capacity he is, in my view, a blithering nincompoop; and if my language is intemperate it is because Goodbody has just sent me one of the rudest and stupidest letters I have ever received.
If you like to watch tv, you have to know that keeping a fully-fledged TV on a table or attaching it to a corner is a space-consuming affair, that is why many people prefer to use a tv ceiling mount to hang the TV.
“Mr Johnson,” he begins, without any of the conventional civilities, and then tells me that he has obtained authority to visit my premises in Oxfordshire. Indeed, he says, he can come at any time during the day, the evening or at weekends. He can use any technology he chooses. He can caution me, take a statement, and file a report which may be used in proceedings before a local magistrates’ court culminating in a £1,000 fine.
Morning folks. Boris Johnson, your absconding blogger, reporting for duty.
A FEW RANDOM THOUGHTS
We went out to the cinema the other night, and all we could see was something
called the Interpreter, which imagined an assassination attempt on a Robert
Mugabe figure at the UN. It was interesting to see how Hollywood coped with this
theme, and how director Sydney Pollack tiptoed towards reality but funked it in
the end. We were told that the old dictator had once been a revolutionary hero,
feted in the west. We were shown the degradation of his regime, the corpses in
the football stadium. We were told that Nicole Kidman’s family had been killed
by a landmine, and we were given the tiniest of hints that it had been tough to
be a white inhabitant of this troubled country “in Africa’s south-central belt”.
But on the main point – the heart of the modern Zimbabwean tragedy – the film
was eloquently silent. Sydney Pollack did not have the nerve to address the
wholesale theft of white farmers’ land by Zanu-PF thugs. Why? Because the
vicious Mugabe land-grab is supported by most of black Africa; and even if
America makes ritual denunciations of Mugabe, it just would not have been
possible – or compatible with Hollywood’s PC values – for Pollack to make a film
upholding the right of white colonial settlers to their land. I’m not saying the
film was all bad: it was good to see a thriller about African politics. But it
was a cop-out.
The no campaign is ahead in the polls in France, which votes on 29 May.
The European constitution means more irresistible and pernicious regulation, with more majority voting envisaged on questions of technology, education, social affairs … The French are being scarified by unscrupulous politicians with tales of a Tebbit-like constitution, full of free-market on-your-bikery
On the reason to vote no:
the last thing the French (or anyone) need is more detailed prescriptions from Brussels about the labour market or anything else
Continue reading DT column – French vote on new European Constitution
ON election night itself it was a privilege to watch Steve Lake, the returning officer, at work. Just before announcing the result, he called all the candidates to examine the dodgy ballot papers, of which there seemed to be an unusually high number. One voter had used his ballot paper to express an unprintable view of all politicians. Another had drawn a series of enigmatic flowers. About 40 UKIP voters had also voted Conservative (which tells you something), so spoiling their ballots. One man had voted UKIP, and then crossed it out and voted for me, initialling his decision as if correcting a cheque. Steve Lake said that this rendered the vote invalid, since he was potentially identifiable. But the best ballot paper had a series of smiley faces in each box. I was about to claim it as a Tory vote, since ours was plainly the smiliest face. But then I thought that might look like gamesmanship.
Continue reading Election Night Special – comments from Boris
DT Column:
life isn’t like coursework … It’s one essay crisis after another
Exams work because they’re scary
Well I don’t know about you but I like Prince Harry’s aboriginal crocodiles. Speaking with the authority of a former shadow minister for the arts, I would say that they are jolly colourful. And, um, bold. And who cares if – as is now suggested – he did not paint every detail of the little Abo critters himself? Harry, old chum, we have all been there.
