What a week. After the sleepy eyed sojourn of the Christmas break, the journalists, politicians and slebs hit the ground running as though to make up for all that lost time. The first political scandal of the new decade came from Ireland. A fiercely religious woman of conservative principles, who quoted the Bible to back up her homophobia, could have done with reading just a bit further on where the same book condemns sex outside marriage. The press raised its collective eye brows but when it appeared that the 60 year old woman MP for Strangford had been having hot interpersonal relations with a 19 year old boy, the nation’s journalists and moralists had a collective convulsion of exaggerated outrage. She’d broken parliamentary rules by arranging finance for this person, they said. She hadn’t declared her interest, they said. She sat on the council that awarded the licence for the café the money went to open, they said. What they didn’t say was that these middle aged droopy and saggy men, penning these articles were really more upset that she had gone with a good looking and thrusting man, a fraction of their age. It must have been like receiving their sexual P45’s. MP’s the subject of financial irregularity, is not something the press have much energy for these days. Old woman chooses man a 1/3 of her age, well there’s not enough ink in the world to document how awful that is. And she’s called Mrs Robinson - and if you’d made that up, no-one would have believed you.
The second political scandal was the attempted unseating of that immovable object Gordon Brown. Two former cabinet ministers, Geoff and Pat sent a round-robin email to see if anyone else wanted Darth Gordon to go, or was it just them? This was like trying to move a church by blowing on it through a straw. It turns out that all his cabinet colleagues are tickled pink just to be sat in his shadow and sent out unconvincing statements of half hearted support.
And then the Conservatives launched a poster campaign featuring a close up of Diddy David Camerons’s face, so made-up and strange that it looked like an advert for Avatar, or plastic, and we forgot all about Gordon’s travails and had a good laugh at that instead.
Oh, and it was cold.