(With copyright apologies to wherever this came from. And good taste apologies to everyone else.)
My wife has just sent me a recipe for cooking the turkey this Christmas:
1 Cut out aluminium foil in desired shapes.
2 Arrange the turkey in the roasting pan, position the foil carefully. (see attached picture for details)
3 Roast according to your own recipe and serve.
4 Watch your guests' faces...
You know that feeling when everyone you meet or read is obsessed with something, and it leaves you utterly mystified?
That's how I feel about this.
I'm glad so many people are so happy as a result of it. But I don't get it. Although I'd heard of Led Zepellin, I'm not aware of ever having heard of, let alone heard, a single one of their songs. And after hearing them on the radio this morning, I don't think I was missing anything.
I was, I suppose, an odd child.
I don't think I've ever read a piece by Rachel Sylvester which didn't tell me quite a lot I didn't know. She really is outstanding. Today's piece on Ed Balls is typically insightful:
[I]n recent weeks, the man responsible for drawing up the plan has also had to deal with Northern Rock, missing CDs and the donor row. Before that, he was busy preparing for (and, indeed, hyping up) the election-that-never-was.It's certainly true that Ed Balls is a clever man. Dealing with him in my old, Fabian days, was always a genuinely worthwhile experience. But it's one thing being clever; quite another being a good politician, let alone a good minister (just look at Jimmy Carter for proof of the different skills required.)According to exasperated officials and ministers in his department, he can be called away to Downing Street three or four times a day. There are often many more phone calls, text messages and emails to handle from an anxious PM. Every morning at seven, he has to participate in a conference call with key Number 10 aides to discuss the strategy for the day.
He is sent polling results, focus group research and media briefs for every subject under the sun. It is a miracle he has a moment left to save Britain's failing schools.
Mr Balls is phenomenally bright - he talks quickly, absorbing ideas as rapidly as he pours them out. A 20-minute coffee with him is more rewarding than a two-hour lunch with most ministers.
...Education is Mr Brown's self-declared passion. Politically, the department's wider remit is a crucial battle zone for the PM, who is struggling to prove that he, like David Cameron, understands that "general well-being" is as important as GDP.
The Secretary of State should be able to concentrate on his day job rather than having to help Mr Brown trouble-shoot as well.
As Mr Balls said in an interview on Sunday, he has spent 15 years working as Mr Brown's closest aide, so it is not surprising that the Prime Minister still turns to him for advice.
But it is also a sign of Mr Brown's insecurity that he is so heavily reliant on the small circle with whom he has been drinking beer, watching football and devising policy for so long.
Other ministers are beginning to resent the fact that Tony Blair's sofa has been replaced by what could be called an "armchair" style of Government - even smaller, but not as cosy.
There is scant evidence so far of his political abilities (and as a perforner he is embarrassingly bad on TV). That said, as one of those pushing Brown to go for an October/November election, events have proved him bang on the money. Had he gone then, it's - at the very least - more than likely that he would now be basking in electoral triumph, instead of presiding over an administration falling further apart with every passing day.
UPDATE: Ouch. A commenter quite rightly takes me task for that very ugly and ungrammatical first sentence. That's a danger with writing on the hoof and not looking back at what one has scribbled down. Apologies.
Do I hear £1.05? Is there no one willing to go beyond a quid?
And how much does it cost not to have to have lunch with her?
(via Peter Briffa.)
1) The ludicrous Tessa Jowell insists, through her department, that:
We are very confident that the £9.3 billion funding package is robust and will cover both delivering the venues and facilities for the Games and leave a legacy for London and the UK. There is a substantial contingency within the overall budget to cover against costs rising and we believe that will be sufficient.Is there anyone out there in the real world who believes that there is a cat in hell's chance of the budget sticking at £9.3 billion (which is itself, don't forget, 291% more than the original costing of £2.375 billion)? Do they think we are all idiots? The Olympics is a money pit the like of which makes every other example of government waste look positively parsimonious.
2) Gordon Brown, it seems
has overruled his Cabinet over plans to bail out thousands of pensioners whose employers went bust. Ministers had promised £725million to help more than 125,000 workers whose company pension schemes collapsed. But the Prime Minister has risked a major Cabinet split by vetoing the plan.Welcome to Gordon Brown's moral compass. It's fine to throw an unlimited pot of billions of pounds of our money paying for people to run around in a converted dump. But finding a fraction of that money to do something for 125,000 people who have worked all their lives in good faith and whose companies have gone bust, and who now have no pension, is beyond the pale.
Pierre Mendes-France said that to govern is to chose. We know how Gordon Brown chooses to spend our money.
(UPDATE: Somewhat humiliatingly, my oroginal post had the wrong percentage figure. Duh.)
I have a piece in today's Times about the acquittal of Kieren Fallon on Friday. Here's the gist of it:
My interpretation of the farce that ended on Friday is that the racing authorities started from the presumption that the chavs involved in racing are bent and that, because Kieren Fallon was their bête noire, ergo Fallon was bent and had to go. And so they cobbled together smears and circumstantial evidence to bring him down. That, of course, says more about the unfitness for their jobs of the disciplinary authorities than it says anything about Kieren Fallon.
How could the media have missed this, perhaps the most important news story ever:
Kangaroo farts could ease global warming.
You have to wonder in which parrallel universe Melanie McDonagh exists:
...[I]t is worth asking in passing whether Jews could now be depicted with the same idiom as is now being deployed against Catholics. You don't have to think particularly hard to conjure up the Semitic equivalent of the crazed popish assassin, the Jesuit plotter, the Vatican conspiracy against the nation state, do you? But while the stereotype of the Jew is dead, that of the Catholic Church as a force for evil has been given a new, and rather disagreeable, lease on life.This, in a magazine which a few short years ago published this:(My italics.)
I've just been listening to Today, and am flabbergasted by their news judgement. Other than in the paper reviews, I heard no mention of David Hencke's sensational scoop today. (Maybe they mentioned it in the few minutes when I was, er, otherwise engaged?)
According to Hencke:
Labour officials helped lawyers acting for David Abrahams to draw up complex covenants that allowed the millionaire businessman to pay up to £650,000 indirectly to the party, the Guardian has learned.The arrangement, which was set up four years ago, was regarded as a "loophole" that allowed Abrahams to lawfully pay the money and remain unidentified.
The Guardian understands it was drawn up in 2003 through John McCarthy, the Newcastle solicitor acting for Abrahams, and put to two middle-ranking Labour officials at the party's London headquarters.
I add one caveat. It may be, I suppose, that the BBC wants its own proof, given that the story is by David Hencke. He is a brilliant sleuth, but sometimes his enthusiasm runs away with him. I've been a victim of this.
Seven years ago, I was greeted by this Guardian story:
An interesting scoop on the inside story behind the NHS Plan. The only problem was that it was total and utter nonsense. Not a word of the story about me, my girlfriend, Mr Blair and the River Cafe was true.Chance chat over dinner led Blair to order u-turn on private beds
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent, The Guardian
Friday July 28, 2000
The GuardianWhen Tony Blair took Cherie for dinner at the fashionable River Cafe restaurant in west London earlier this year, it was coincidence that a Daily Express associate editor, Stephen Pollard, was eating with his girlfriend at a table nearby.
On the way out, the prime minister called the other couple over for coffee, and they began talking animatedly about the NHS bed crisis.
During the conversation Mr Blair mentioned a chap, whose name he could not remember, who had challenged him on Newsnight in February over people left on trolleys in NHS hospitals.
Mr Blair was seeking confirmation from an old colleague (Mr Pollard had been a Labour researcher when the PM had been an opposition MP) that he had not been fed a line by the private sector. The unknown man turned out to be Tim Evans, external affairs director of the Independent Healthcare Association - effectively the most powerful lobby for the 460,000 beds and 211 hospitals and nursing homes in the private sector.
Mr Evans had in essence caught out the prime minister by getting him to agree to use spare capacity in private hospitals to help out the NHS.
After the TV programme, Mr Blair went over to Mr Evans and questioned him. Mr Evans, a fast-talking postgraduate who previously worked at the free market Adam Smith Institute, gave an instant run-down of the country's private facilities, pointing out 800 high dependency beds and operating theatre facilities that were underused. He also mentioned he knew Mr Pollard, and that the NHS executive had sent out a circular making it all but impossible for the NHS to use private beds.
Mr Blair went away and did some checks. The story stood up, and it helped persuade the prime minister that he should take personal charge of the whole NHS initiative.
He then discovered that his former health secretary, Frank Dobson, had shifted the NHS's position from neutrality toward using the private sector when necessary, to one of being positively hostile.The NHS executive annual letter sanctioned by Mr Dobson and sent to all chief executives and GPs on September 9, 1997 read: "Health authorities, GPs and NHS trusts should explore the scope to make maximum cost-effective use of local NHS capacity before contemplating recourse to private sector hospital provision. Where care is nonetheless commissioned from private hospitals, the reasons must be reported to the regional office."
The circular had made hospital trusts nervous at using beds in nearby private hospitals in the winter beds crisis. It also led to a heated but fruitless exchange between the private sector and Robert Hill, the Downing Street policy adviser, weeks before Mr Blair's appearance on Newsnight.
Within days of the River Cafe conversation, Mr Blair is understood to have ordered Alan Milburn, the health secretary, to repeal the offending letter. But that was not all. Letters were sent out to a range of leading doctors, health care companies and drug firms to come for talks at No 10 - ostensibly with the Downing Street policy unit, though most visitors were ushered straight into the PM's office.
What emerged was an instruction from Downing Street for a concordat with the private sector to be negotiated by senior civil servants at the Department of Health, who months before had dismissed the idea. The fruits of the deal were published yesterday.
Once you get the reputation as a blabbermouth, you never lose it, so I had to get a correction asap. And to give the Guardian credit, when I told them that the story was pure fantasy, they caved in (although quite why David Hencke never bothered calling me to ask about his story - a basic rule of journalism - remains a mystery.)
Stephen Pollard, an apology.There were a number of significant errors in a report by David Hencke on page 9, yesterday, headed Chance chat over dinner led Blair to order u-turn on beds.The report depended substantially on the assertion that Tony Blair had had an animated conversation on the NHS beds crisis with Stephen Pollard, described as an associate editor of the Daily Express, whom he was said to have met by chance while the latter was dining in the River Cafe with his girlfriend.
Mr Pollard is not an associate editor of the Daily Express; he is a columnist. He has never eaten in the River Cafe, let alone with Tony and Cherie Blair. While it is true that he has strong views on the NHS and the private sector, he has never discussed them "animatedly" with Tony or Cherie Blair.
Mr Hencke did not check any of this with Mr Pollard. Profuse apologies.
Britain certainly imprisons a higher percentage of its population. But this is a meaningless measure, since it takes no account of the proportion of the population who commit crimes. Allow for the extraordinary proportion of the UK population which commits crimes, and Britain has a low imprisonment rate. Whereas Britain imprisons 12 people per 1,000 crimes, Spain imprisons 48 and Ireland 33.
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