The Master

Mr Editor has a post about John Simm as The Master. He is wonderful, yes. But there is and will only ever be one true Master: Roger Delgado.

Here's my Master story. A certain Roger Delgado was a member of the same synagogue I attended as a child. I cannot fully describe to you what it felt like on a Saturday morning to see, sitting ahead, the Master at prayer. To say it was a mix of sheer terror and utter fascination doesn't remotely do it justice.

(BTW, a couple of sites describe him as Catholic. He certainly wasn't listening to the Pope when we used to see him in synagogue!)

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Nothing worth bothering the DIY programmes with

How about this for priorities? I'm in Brussels. Every main continental TV channel I can see on the TV here has suspended normal programmes for coverage of the Haymarket bomb. There are only two national channels which have stuck with the usual daytime drivel: BBC1 and BBC2.

So much for the UK taking the war on terror more seriously than the rest of Europe. Sent via BlackBerry

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Comments

Sorry about the comments. The sytem is kaput at the moment. Hopefully it will be back very soon.

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He's a yid!

Further to my post on Jeremy Bowen below, Oliver Kamm has a typically eruditte post on this particularly stupid remark by Paul Reynolds:

David Miliband's Jewish background will be noted particularly in the Middle East.

Israel will welcome this - but equally it allows him the freedom to criticise Israel, as he has done, without being accused of anti-Semitism.

I urge you to read the 1800 words in which Oliver demonstrates that "David Miliband's antecedents give us no clue whatsoever to his stance as Foreign Secretary".

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Here we go again?

The long-serving finance minister, who had been made to wait what seemed like an eternity before taking over as Prime Minister, promised sweeping change. Petty party differences should not prevent the best people from serving the country, he said. Indeed, his government would be one of all the talents.

When it came to announcing the Cabinet, however, there was just one figure who had not previously been a member of the governing party. The country groaned - the same old, same old, in reality.

I'm talking, of course, about December 2003, when Paul Martin became Canadian PM.

Remember what happened to him?

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Motto

The motto Brown should have revealed, of course, was this:

Volo vestri argentum. Volo decoctum is.

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Tebbit's humour

Talking of funny...

This is just wonderful:

Chatting with me a few days ago, Norman Tebbit described an unexpected approach from a very senior and slightly embarrassed parliamentary colleague: “I’m writing your obituary for The Times. Could you help with it?” “My dear chap, I’d be delighted, but on one condition: that we introduce into the obituary one small but identifiable error of a kind which The Times will be unable to spot. Then we hand to a third party a sealed envelope containing – for dispatch the day the obituary is published – a letter from me, handwritten to the Times Letters Page. It will begin: “Sir, Even from beyond the grave I must hasten to correct . . .” To Lord Tebbit’s disappointment his colleague turned the idea down.

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Bye bye Tim

This is what's known as funny.

As for Tim...well, at the risk of reviving the clash of the titans with Mr T Hames:  

Tim. I mean, Tim. Has there ever been a more appropriate name for a tennis player than Tim. Try yelling a full-throated 'come on, Tim'. See what I mean? It's not possible. You have to squeak it in a shrill whine, which says all that you need to know about the man himself. For four years he has got into the semi-finals, an oh-so-typically British performance: far enough not to be humiliating to his fans but, in the end, completely useless. To winners, the only thing which counts is, well, winning. Not coming fourth.

Mind you, it's such an appropriate name for a tennis player. Tennis is, after all, the sport for people who don't like sport.

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Aspettare stanca

You can, if you are so minded, read my latest Il Foglio column here, and then continuing here.

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It's not helpful to call Ian Brady a murderer

Lord Malloch Brown, I ask you! A man suffused with the terror appeasing voice of the FCO. Here's what he had to say in the FT last August:

It's not helpful for it again to appear to be the team that led on Iraq or even on Afghanistan. It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hizbollah employs terrorist tactics, it is an organisation however whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda.

You can hear it now, can't you? "It is not helpful to couch our discussions with Herr Hitler in the language of international conquest. The Chancellor employs aggressive tactics, but Germany has a historic presence in the Rheinland, Sudetenland and Poland. We need to look at events from Herr Hitler's point of view, and reach a satisfactory accomodation with his desires, which spring from German history".  

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