Bremner’s Brown Blag Bust!

Roy Ters: Tuesday 12 July 2011, 13:01 BST

IN A twist bizarre even by the standards of the ongoing News International phone hacking scandal, satirical impressionist Rory Bremner has been arrested by police investigating the ‘blagging’ of former PM Gordon Brown’s financial affairs.

Concealed beneath a blanket, Bremner was bundled into the back of a police van in the small hours of this morning and driven to Lewisham police station, where he was questioned for eight hours before being released on bail.

‘Blagging’ is the practice of impersonating someone’s voice in order to obtain information over the phone under false pretences. It is a technique more often used by private investigators working for shady newspapers, such as Barry Arsehole who, working for the not-as-good-as-it-used-to-be Sunday Times, impersonated nobody in particular and tricked gullible solicitors Gonad & Overy into giving away details of a property purchase made by dour Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

But in this instance it is thought that Bremner had been corrupted, or more likely blackmailed, by flame-haired temptress and erstwhile Sun editrix Rebekah Brooks who needed a very specific and well-known personality’s voice to be impersonated, none other than that of dour Prime-Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown himself. It is believed that Brooks forced Bremner to pretend to be Brown in order to phone controversial Prime Minister Tony Blair to tell him how much he hated him, though why she bothered seeing as Gordon Brown used to do that himself several times a day is anybody’s guess. A source close to the titian-haired homophobe said it was 'probably just force of habit'.

The police were tight-lipped about the exact nature of their questioning, but after being slipped a few quid a police source told us, "We got him to do his Gordon Brown, you know, where he makes his cheeks look all jowly and lets his lower jaw hang lifelessly when he pauses speaking, but to be honest I thought he sounded more like that bloke out of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, what’s his name, Doctor Something-or-other wasn’t it? Anyway, the Super backed me up and said there was no way anyone would be fooled into thinking he was Gordon Brown so we let him go with a caution and a bit of a friendly slap around the head."

Tony Blair was not available for comment as he is too busy whoring himself around the lucrative US lecture circuit to earn enough to keep his missus in baubles and furs.

Napoleon Gaddafi

Way back in February, just as the situation in Libya went completely tits-up and Mad Dog Gaddafi went for the rebels' collective jugular, your's truly emailed the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki Moon, and wrote a letter (yes, a letter!*) to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Mr David 'Call Me Dave' Cameron, outlining a completely brilliant plan for resolving the imminent collapse of dodgy regimes.

*Only because the No 10 website won't let you email a message much longer than a twitter thing, whatever one of those is.

Said letter ran as follows (bear with it, it's bloody long):

24 February 2011

Dear Prime Minister

Re: A Plan for Minimising the Violent Transition of Power When Autocratic Regimes Collapse

I write to you concerning a plan that I have lately presented to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon, for defusing tensions as autocratic regimes begin to collapse, thus avoiding bloodshed of the kind currently seen in Libya. As a respected international statesman, I am confident that you have the qualities to lobby on my behalf and persuade Mr Ban to adopt my proposal. Also, the rules of the United Nations preclude their being able to adopt any proposal not made by an Official Representative of a Member State, which you are (or at least the Ambassador to the UN is, and as his boss I have the fullest confidence that you can persuade him to present this proposal). As a further incentive to lobby for my plan, I am convinced that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee would look upon the proposal most favourably, and I feel that Mr Ban would, like myself, be happy to share the prize (which I understand is perfectly permissible within the rules of the Nobel Foundation) with a third party – I am sure I need not spell out who I have in mind, Prime Minister...

My proposal is simple, though not necessarily just. It is simply this: that a remote tropical island, perhaps in the Indian Ocean, be mandated under United Nations governance and protection and set aside as a sort of superannuated retirement home for ex-dictators. Luxury accommodation could be built for the ex-dictators and their families (if need be), with entertainment facilities provided, and enough of the money they stole could be kept by them to keep them in comfort until they die (the rest of their ill-gotten gains would be repatriated to their countries). The ex-dictators would be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, but only if they agreed to be exiled there for the rest of their lives.

How would this prevent violence such as that unleashed in Libya by Colonel Gaddafi? It seems to me that part of the reason for his clinging on to power with such desperation is because he feels he has nowhere else to go. Mubarak was able to retire to the seaside because his rule, while repressive, was never as nakedly brutal as Gaddafi’s. Even Idi Amin was able to retire to Saudi Arabia. But Gaddafi has no such option, and having got on the wrong side of so many national leaders it is incredible to think that any state would grant him asylum. And when numerous international organisations call – justly, it must be said – for Gaddafi to be prosecuted for war crimes, the man himself probably believes that unless he fights he will only end up on the end of a rope, like Saddam, so it is easy to see why we are in the situation we find ourselves in.

But what if my proposed retirement island existed now? Imagine the scenario: popular sentiment in Libya grows against Gaddafi, protests start, his forces try but fail to quell the uprising. At this point, with the situation on the brink of spiralling out of control, the United Nations steps in and tells Gaddafi: “The writing is on the wall, now is the time to go. If you step down now, avoiding bloodshed, you can retire in luxurious exile, immune from prosecution. Refuse, and face the consequences.” Chances are he – or any other dictator in his position – would opt to retire.

Okay, it isn’t just; he won’t pay the price for his crimes. But it would avoid a lot of bloodshed, senseless death and waste. And there is also the entertaining possibility that as the years rolled by and the island filled up with more and more ex-dictators, being such power-mad egomaniacs they might try to impose their power on each other in a sort of geriatric version of ‘The Lord of the Flies’.

I am sure that this plan will make a major contribution towards World Peace, and I have total confidence in your ability to ensure that my plan is presented to the United Nations and adopted by the entire world.

Yours sincerely

McTodd

Imagine my utter disgust when The Grauniad ran this editorial comment on Saturday 9 April.

The air was rendered several shades of blue in the McTodd household**, the phrase fucking thieving bastards being only the most printable quote...

Some weeks later I received a postcard from No 10 acknowledging receipt of the letter. However, to the best of my knowledge, no moves have yet been made to put this Guaranteed Nobel Peace Prize Winning Plan into practice***, and Mr Ban Ki Moon never even so much as emailed me back. So much for the UN.

**Saturday being the only day I will actually part with my hard-earned for The Grauniad. Any other day and the air in my place of work would have been similarly rendered.

***I am keeping a sharp eye on the situation - there's no way I'm letting anyone claim all the glory for themselves and thus screwing me out of my part of the Nobel Prize, no way at all.

THAT bloody engagement...

Yes, Wills and Kate. Kate and Wills.

I couldn't really give a toss about their engagement, apart from the fact that the BBC, in its capacity as Lickspittle Pursuivant, saw fit to slip in an unscheduled half-hour drivelfest on Tuesday night after Newsnight, thus delaying 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) and causing my timer-recording of that programme to end halfway through it!

McTodd was distinctly unimpressed and rendered the air several shades of blue...

Meanwhile, here is the complaint I emailed to the BBC using their online contact form - I might add that I have yet to receive a response:

Dear BBC

You unspeakable bastards.

I write in reference to your sickeningly obsequious extra programme (‘William and Kate – A Royal Engagement’) following yesterday evening's 'Newsnight', reporting – a word I use in the loosest possible sense of the term – the engagement of some heir to the throne to an upper middle-class woman of no objectively discernible distinction.

Thanks to this wanton act of sycophancy, my advance-timed recording of Part 2 of the excellent and informative documentary series 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' was utterly ruined, the recording having ended only halfway through the delayed broadcast.

I was not aware that the BBC still clung to the moribund social mores of the 1930s by insisting on treating everything the royal family does with a level of reverence not seen since the days of Lord Reith and the Abdication Crisis, or even Sir Alastair Burnett's famously toadying reportage. What next? Live coverage of the Queen blowing her nose next time she has a cold? In sharp contrast, the excerpt I saw recently of North Korean state television news coverage of the ascension of Kim Jong-il's son to heir-apparent of that troubled land was a model of decorum and proportion in comparison with this televisual farrago.

Having been a lifelong defender of the BBC license fee, an increasingly minority position in these days of market forces and economic despondency, I feel my loyalty to the Corporation's values sorely tested by this frankly disgusting and annoying last-minute lash-up of a programme and its insensitive, not to mention inept, scheduling.

Not only is the fact that it ruined my viewing of 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' – a prime example, incidentally, of the type of programming for which the license fee can be ably justified – in itself infuriating in the extreme, I am also disgusted at the fathomless cravenness of the Corporation in pandering to the type of braindead rightwing cretin who reads the 'Daily Mail' and whips out a Union Jack every time a royal is within forty miles of them.

To cap it all, what little I could bring myself to watch of this inadvertantly-recorded atrocity revealed a production of such rank sentimentality, ineptitude and servility as to utterly vitiate whatever kindly disposition I may have hitherto had towards the Corporation. The idea that you consider it fitting coverage of what is, by any objective criteria, a distinctly minor event by wheeling out rancid toadies such as Piers Morgan or sweaty oleaginous royalists such as Andrew Roberts – men of whom there should be a public warning preceding any television appearance they make – is a sad indictment of the risible editorial values that threaten to destroy the BBC and lose it the last vestiges of public support. Furthermore, any programme that features witless privately-educated wastrels who are happy to be referred to in public as 'Ollie' is deserving of nothing but boundless contempt.

Your behaviour with regard to this non-event has been in every sense shameful, incompetent and thoughtless. I trust that you will go some way to compensating for this egregious error of judgement by repeating 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) so that those of us who do not enjoy last-minute so-called 'documentaries' about the blonde descendants of inbred German robber barons and their tediously predictable upper middle-class fiancees may enjoy the scheduled programming.

Yours in utter disgust

McTodd

For Fox sake...

Liam Fox, the Cleggeronic Libservative Coalescence Defence Secretary, has form - remember when he lost his laptop?

But now he's scared.

He's scared that naughty dusky-skinned foreign ne'er-do-wells will explode a nuclear weapon in space with the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) frying our dainty little computer circuits and causing an apocalpyse!

This is the terrifying picture he paints with his word-brush:

Weapons detonated in our upper atmosphere would create an electro-magnetic pulse and knock out our satellites and electricity grid.

This would be worse than a direct nuclear strike such as that which targeted Hiroshima in World War II, Dr Fox said.

Oh my God, worse than having an atomic bomb land on your head?

Just how bad would that be?

Dr Fox elucidates:

Transport systems, computers, phones, fridges and water networks would all be brought to a halt, he added.

Fuck me, that is terrifying.

Just think how much worse it could have been for the hapless victims of the fifteen-kiloton blast at Hiroshima as their eyeballs were melted by the flash from an explosion brighter than a thousand suns:


Bugger me, she got off lightly...

Cat Twat: "It was a joke!"

So the miserable hag who chucked a cat in a wheelie bin has been identified as fat 45-year old drinker Mary Bale:



She claims she did it because she "thought it would be funny"!

Well, Mary, do you know what I think would be funny?

I think it would be hilarious if somebody kicked you in the cunt so fucking hard your ovaries popped.

The Atheist-Team

I have been a member of b3ta* for many many moons now, but it is only today that I finally got a frontpage! Hoorah pour moi!

I got it with this (click for vastitude):


*Teh interweb's premier home of photoshopped nonsense

Moat Madness...

Grim as the unfolding saga of steroid-ridden bodybuilder-turned-murderous rampaging gunman Raoul Moat was, I couldn't help but laugh at some of its media manifestations.

First, the magnificent photo, reproduced everywhere in the British media, of gritty armed policemen stalking the fugitive gunman...


The Grauniad captioned the photo 'Police point guns and stunguns towards Moat'.

More accurate, I feel, would have been 'Gurning policeman auditions for You've Been Framed' or 'Gurning policeman finds rampaging gunman drama a bit of a laugh'. What was he thinking as the camera pointed his way? "I'll put me gritty face on, you never know, I might get a part in The Bill"?

EDIT: It has been suggested by various people that the gurning policeman may, in fact, be shouting at the photographers to get back. Now that I look at the photo more carefully, this seems a very plausible explanation, the copper's apparent snarl merely being a warning caught mid-shout by the eager snapper's camera shutter. If this is the case, then I apologise unreservedly for casting aspersions on a professional doing a tough job.

But even better was the news that Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, famous alcoholic nutter and one-time ball-botherer, appeared on a Geordie radio show pledging support to his old mate Moat.

The cherry on this particular newscake was the quote from his agent:

Gascoigne's agent, Kenny Shepherd, said: "He's doing what? I am sitting having an evening meal in Majorca. I'm speechless."

A wonderful scene is conjured of Mr Shepherd being phoned during his meal and told what Gazza's done now followed by a stream of half-chewed paella and four-letter amazement projecting from his mouth...