Back again

My favourite comment on Palin so far comes from this report of a conversation by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator:
"She was put on this earth to chew gum and kick ass," said one conservative journalist I spoke to. "And she's all out of gum".

Separated at birth?

Am I alone in noticing the uncanny resemblance between culture secretary (and Shami Chakrabarti-nemisis) Andy Burnham and crafty teen truant Ferris Bueller?

Public enemy

Martha Stewart has been barred from entering the UK. Fair enough, I suppose - she has a criminal conviction, and those are the rules. But what about this? Surely rape also counts as a "serious criminal offence".

Tears for Blears

Daniel Finkelstein reports on a conversation with an un-named Labour MP:

Yesterday, chatting with one of his colleagues, I learned that Gordon Brown was not the only one to earn contempt: The one good thing about global warming is that as the waters rise, Hazel Blears will drown first, the MP said.

Hurrah for Hari

The only problem with parodies by the likes of Public Interest is that they can't beat the real thing. Take this unintentionally hilarious column from Johann Hari. The shocking bit is not where he reveals he was breast-fed until he was three ("she only stopped the day I wrote her a note saying I expected to be breastfed that afternoon"), nor where in despair he asks of those who don't follow this example: "Why? Why do we hobble our babies, and our country?". It's not even his explanation ("Women are conditioned to find their own bodies disgusting, except when they can be used to entice men").

No, you only really begin to suspect he's on a completely different planet when he refers to Harriet Harman as "one of the Government's best ministers".

Only the Irish

"Just over three million Irish voters are registered - in a European Union of 490 million people," concludes the BBC in its report on the Irish 'No' vote. Leaving aside the dishonesty of the implication given the majorities in bigger countries that are also opposed, exactly what number of people would it take before a refusal to ratify could be considered legitimate? If, say, France voted against it, would that be enough?

David Davis

Stephen Pollard probably has the best take on this: it's not just the risks for his own party inherent in Davis's decision, it's that there's no obvious up-side. As Pollard puts it:

Let's assume that things panned out as he had wished, and he won a thumping majority against Labour in the by-election. So what? What would it have achieved? Nothing. A big fat nada, other than to remove from the post of Shadow Home Secretary a man committed to the abolition of 42 days. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot... All it can do is damage his own party's chances of getting into power and doing what he claims to want - standing up for civil liberties.

And I have to admit to wincing when Davis described it as a "noble endeavour". I can't be alone in thinking, "I'll be the judge of that."