Mosley

I've been catching up with the Max Mosley story, which broke while I was away.

One thing puzzles me about his attempt to remain in office since his predelictions became public knowledge. Why has he stayed? Surely he wants to be punished?

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Very odd

Some thing very odd has happened. I have just read a piece by Inayat Bunglawala with which I mostly agree.

Given that Bunglawala is, as Harry's Place calls him, unfit for his role - I'd go further than that - this is most odd. Bunglawala holds some pretty repellent views, such as his belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are controlled by Jews:

The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob...[They are] close friends… so that's what they mean by a 'free media'.

In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman "courageous" - just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman's arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere".

Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.

Butt has signed a deal with UK publishers who have promised us a book in which he will reveal a "full account of terrorist activities that were undertaken in Pakistan" and how he found himself "planning and funding terrorism for one of al-Qaida's associates" and how he was now coming to terms with the "fact" that he had "spent a decade killing for killing's sake".

Now, of course, I have no idea whether this is just exaggerated nonsense, but clearly if Butt does possess information about terror activities that he claims to have been involved in, then that information should surely be given to the police without delay, especially if he really has turned his back on extremism.

The police should not have to wait for him to write a book so that he can also make a pretty penny out of his past actions at the same time. 

Quite.

Inayat.

Who wrote this?

"So on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's death, I was truly elated."

Yes it was you!

And yes you went on demo's calling for Rushdies death.

Quick Inayat, turn yourself in for Soliciting Murder.

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Who'd have thought so?

It's hard to believe this, n'est-ce pas?

Olympic chiefs were accused of understating the true cost of the 2012 Games yesterday as it emerged that the bill for the aquatics centre was already four times higher than the original bid price.

The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) announced that the contract, which was awarded to Balfour Beatty, had risen from the 2005 price of £75 million to £303 million.

And this just doesn't ring true:

The figures come after soaring costs at most of the Olympic venues and have led to renewed fears that the £9.3 billion 2012 budget will be exceeded. Jack Lemley, the former chairman of the ODA, gave warning that the bill was now likely to be £20 billion and he claimed that Ken Livingstone and Tessa Jowell had been understating the true costs.

How about a competition? We won't know the result until well after 2012, but there'll be a prize for the winner. You have to guess how much the bill will finally be.£20 billion? £25 billion? £18 billion. And the prize is very clever. The higher the winning pick, the larger the debt we will have to repay. It's clever, don't you think?

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I'm back

So I'm back, after nearly three weeks. What's happened since I've been away? Mugabe has tried to steal an election; Gordon Brown is unpopular; Nick Clegg has made himself even more of a laughing stock; the son of a Nazi has shown he inherited certain sympathies; and Harriet Harman has looked like an idiot.

The details might differ, but there's nothing there we haven't known before.

And I thought Cloudy Lane was a good thing for the National, what with my fancy 25/1 prices and all that. Ouch.

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T5: baggage-handling's not the issue (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on Terminal Five. Here's an extract:

Let's start with the hour-long wait after we'd landed before a gate could be found for the plane. Nothing new there, you say; that's long been a feature of Heathrow. Precisely. Our apologetic - and clearly embarrassed - pilot told us as we waited that there might well be an expensive new terminal but the same old problems remained.

What's the first thing many people do when they get off a plane? Go to the toilet. The genius who designed the men's loos placed the dryer at immediate right angles to the sink. So if one man is washing his hands, no one else can dry, and vice versa. Within seconds a queue builds up and the entire toilet becomes a mass of angry, frustrated and tired loo goers. The loos were, needless to say, disgusting.

But that queue is as nothing alongside that to leave the arrivals hall.

There are two working lifts to get to the car park (two more were broken). Each, with luggage, holds about five people. With no alternative exit route. And a constant flow of people trying to leave. So guess what happens? Another, far bigger and far angrier, queue. Chaos, designed into the very fabric of the terminal.

As for the design: T5's ceiling is one of those trendy affairs with all the guts showing - sort of urban metal chic (chic, that is, if it was finished, rather than with loose wires and cardboard hanging down). Mrs P, who knows about these things for a living, tells me that, if the innards are real, an expert need only study the ceiling for about ten minutes to work out how to disable the terminal. Terrorism? Who cares!

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Welcome home

On Friday, I was in South Beach, Miami. It was 84 degrees, with almost 80 per cent humidity.

This morning, I woke up to this:

I know which I prefer.

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T5 part one

I'll have a lot more to say about Terminal Five later, but now that I'm in it - I write this in the immigration queue - here's my first point.

The announcements are all made by a recording with a heavy foreign accent - Dutch, I think.

Why? Heathrow is a British airport and T5 is for BRITISH Airways.

Mind you, given the shocking state of things I've seen - nothing to do with baggage handling - I'm not surprised. More follows...

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