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The Deputy Prime Minister (and if there was ever a title – despite even the despoiling of it during the monstrous stewardship of John Prescott – that is becoming more and more of an empty honorific by the second this is it) was on Desert Island Discs last weekend. He took the opportunity to whine about how terribly, terribly hard he’s finding it personally to make the lives of the poor and vulnerable even worse.

Because that’s what you want from a leader in this age of austerity, isn’t it? ‘Yes, Kirsty, I am finding the cuts personally morally difficult. But anyway, what I’ve always enjoyed about Shakira’s music is…’ (I paraphrase but if you think I’m going to soil any of my precious time by listening to Clegg trot out his focus-grouped favourite records while trying to convince us of his moral rectitude, you’re as dumb as Clegg thinks you are.)

Did nobody around Clegg think even for a second that this might come across, you know, as ever so slightly thoughtless and spineless? One notices he admitted his difficulties in the brief seconds between tunes on a Sunday morning and not in an extended interview on a news programme.

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They gave Nick Clegg another shot at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday. The poor, benighted blighter got a bit huffy about the description of his government’s policy of forced migration of the underclass out of London as ‘social cleansing’. The term is ‘deeply offensive to people who have witnessed ethnic cleansing,’ squealed the Deputy Prime Minister. Of course, the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ itself is deeply offensive to people who have witnessed genocide. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is a foul euphemism coined by signatories to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention who don’t like calling genocide ‘genocide’ because calling genocide ‘genocide’ means they are then bound under the terms of the convention to actually do something about it*. Still, to be fair, it probably would have been a mistake for Clegg to associate the word ‘genocide’ with one of his policies. And anyway the thought probably eluded him as he feigned high-pitched outrage in order to avoid giving a straight and honest answer to a question about the attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable to which he’s giving valuable political cover.

* See chapter 4 of Steven Poole’s essential Unspeak: ‘The adoption of the phrase “ethnic cleansing”, in short, constituted verbal collaboration in mass murder.’

ITEM: Excitement! An amateur photographer has taken film footage purporting to be of the legendary and elusive Ed Miliband in the wild. Scientist are divided as to whether the footage is genuine and, indeed, whether Miliband even actually exists.

ITEM: The 33 Chilean miners were lauded by President Sebastián Piñera at the country’s Government House today. The president greeted each in turn. When he approached miner number six the man declared, ‘I am not a number, I am a free man!’

ITEM: Apparently Government computer networks receive 1,000 malicious emails every month. Only 1,000? Seems very low to me. Michael Gove alone must get tens of thousands of emails every day calling him a dangerously anti-intellectual and thoroughgoing misanthropic shit.

ITEM: Michael Corleone has acknowledged that his office was involved in the murders of the heads of the New York families and Moe Greene in Las Vegas, but insists it was part of a “transparent” process.

ITEM: The Guardian has found the UK’s military interrogation manuals detailing how to humiliate, strip and threaten prisoners. Jack Straw writes about human rights in the same paper. If you can get past the second paragraph of Straw’s self-serving cant without wanting to blow your breakfast, you’re a better (or is it worse?) person than me.

Here’s a handy cut out and keep guide to rising racism and xenophobia across the world.

ITEM: The Tory government has condemned the use of Romanian children to pick vegetables on British farms in freezing conditions. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ said a Home Office spokesman. ‘It should be British children out there.’

ITEM: MISSING OPPOSITION PARTY. Goes by the name of ‘Labour’. Very timid so please approach with care. If spotted please call Britain on 01 811 8055.

ITEM: Remember caring, sharing Iain Duncan Smith telling Wales’ ‘static’ unemployed in Merthyr Tydfil last week to get on the bus and go looking for work further afield in Cardiff? It seems Iain didn’t look into the details before giving the undeserving poor the benefit of his intellect. ‘Research by the Public and Commercial Services union showed there were 15,000 people in Cardiff chasing 1,700 jobs, while in Merthyr there were 1,670 unemployed people and 39 job vacancies, all temporary and part-time. The number of people out of work in Merthyr and Blaenau Gwent combined was more than the total number of job vacancies for the whole of Wales, said the PCS.’ Oh, Iain, you waged the war but had no plans for the reconstruction and aftermath.

ITEM: Meanwhile, here’s another metaphor for the horrible compromises the Liberal Democrats have had to make in government.

ITEM: Undertow by Warpaint. I like this very much.

Guido Fawkes suppository and Tory Bear, blogger Harry ‘Gordon Brown looks like a paedo‘ Cole, is running the propaganda campaign in defence of self-confessed liar Nadine Dorries MP. One wonders if he’d give an opposition MP in the same position such a free ride. Ninety-nine per cent of those attacking Dorries are lefties who aren’t even her constituents says the corpulent hairdo. Poor Harry seems to think that placing importance on things like expecting the truth from elected representatives is a local and/or partisan issue. If those around Dorries would only give her some friendly advice and impress upon her the vital nature of honesty and fair dealing, the perfidious left-wing entryists Dorries and Cole seem to see everywhere could pack up and go home. The thing is, some of us remember a recent, vociferous and ‘ineptly negative‘ right-wing campaign to bring down Labour MP Kerry McCarthy. McCarthy ‘will suck the cock of anyone who can offer her a lift up the greasy pole‘, said one fragrant critic. That’s not something I’ve seen any leftie say of Dorries. And who was the ‘mastermind’ behind the campaign who isn’t even one of McCarthy’s constituents? Why, it was Harry Cole.

ITEM: Compassionate Conservative Iain Duncan Smith has been giving job-seeking tips to Wales’ unemployed. ‘If they got on a bus for an hour’s journey, they’d be in Cardiff and could look for the jobs there,’ says the heir to Norman Tebbit. There’s another tip Iain could give to dole scum: be economical with the truth on one’s CV. It never did him any harm, after all.

ITEM: What is with conservatives and the truth? ”’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,’ an aide to George Bush told Ron Suskind in 2002. In other news, Tory embarrassment Nadine Dorries MP decides it’s better to be thought of as a liar than as a thief and says ‘the blog she writes on her constituency website is “70% fiction and 30% fact”‘.

ITEM: Meanwhile, ‘the government doesn’t actually know what it is doing‘ and ‘seems determined to ignore the lessons of history‘ (or, if you will, reality).

ITEM: I was think of photoshopping this photograph of George Osborne to make him look more imperiously satanic but I realised you can’t improve on perfection. Stare into the abyss of his left eye. Don’t dare look away. I swear I saw him lunge at me with bared teeth.

ITEM: All together now…

As we all know, George Osborne and his droogs hate what they see as the undeserving poor. You know, the people, as George describes them, with ‘the blinds pulled down’ and ‘sitting there and living on a life of out of work benefits’. The thing is, current Tory policy has much the same attitude as the Chancellor’s imagined dossers, doesn’t it? They want politicians to do much, much less. The lazy bastards. The logical extension of George’s mandate-free hacking and sacking and burning and firing of what government does is that he gets to go home, pull down the blinds, climb under the duvet with a cup of warm milk and watch his In The Night Garden DVD boxsets back to back. What, if not unearned (out of work, if you will) benefits, are the millions of quid George leeches from his dad? He said in his Spending Review yesterday that those with the ‘broadest shoulders’ should ‘bear the greatest burden’. Lucky then, for him at least, that he’s a narrow-backed little dilettante mooching off his daddy.

Update: Read this.

Update updated: Read this as well.

And then there’s:

We’re all in this together. I know it’s true, I heard the Chancellor say it yesterday. I suspect that some people might have preferred it if we’d all been in this together when things were going well and paying big bonuses, but that didn’t happen. But now, we’re all in this together.

12:30 – Jesus Christ! I tune into the Spending Review to find a terrible villain has laid waste to the country. This is far, far worse than anyone expected.

12:33 – Sorry, wrong channel. That was the Sarah Jane Adventures on CBBC. Over to BBC News…

12:35 – Jesus Christ! I tune into the Spending Review to find a terrible villain has laid waste to the country. This is far, far worse than anyone expected.

12:37 – Osborne’s destruction of life as we know it would go over better if he didn’t look as if he’s thoroughly enjoying himself. That thumping you can hear is not him hitting his hand on the desk, it’s his priapic nudger knocking on the Despatch Box.

12:42 – Do MPs get training when entering the House of Commons? Who is it who teaches them go go ‘HYAH! HYAH! HYAH!’?

12:44 – Apparently ‘the whole country’ is ‘looking forward’ to the Queen’s forthcoming Diamond Jubilee. I must have missed that meeting. Are there plans to put blind enthusiasm in the water supply or something?

12:48 – The thing about the ‘HYAH! HYAH! HYAH!’ thing is do these oafs even know what they’re agreeing with? Even George sounds like he’s struggling to understand what he’s saying. It’s like a six year old reading a Haynes Manual aloud.

12:52 – David Cameron is very pink, isn’t he?

12:55 – Reform and fairness, fairness and reform. Osborne announces he’s setting up a task force of an infinite number of monkeys to try and come up with a definition of those thoroughly and utterly buggered terms.

12:58 – Disaster strikes as Osborne’s testicles descend mid-statement.

12:59 – Poor Nick Clegg really does look dead inside. I keep expecting him to try and eat Danny Alexander’s brains.

13:08 – Like the rest of us, David Cameron is working very hard at looking like he understands what is being said.

13:10 – It’s amazing the amount of crap that accumulates inside a mouse, isn’t it?

13:21 – My hand is hovering over the telly remote’s off switch ready to strike when Nick Robinson appears.

13:25 – Up to £1bn will be available for a carbon capture and storage project. Projects to catch clouds in a big net will also be funded.

13:29 – Funding for the NHS to be ring-barked.

13:31 – You have to hand it to George. It can’t have been easy writing all this in crayon.

13:34 – George commends his statement to the House and his soul unto Lucifer. Good night and good luck.

ITEM: And so a lazy, shameful, pisspoor media has decided on its cliche for George Osborne’s cuts. It’s the ‘axe’. Axe, axe, axe, axe, axe. Literally everyone is talking about the axe. Listen chumps, George Osborne isn’t even strong enough to lift an axe let alone wield one, that’s why he’s in the job he is. Not one hack could think of a fresh angle to describe what millionaire George Osborne and his millionaire mates are about to do to millions of the lower orders. No ‘Maximillian‘, no ‘woodchipper‘, no ‘perverted, impassively violent and eviscerating assault that would make even David Cronenberg toss his breakfast’. I despair. Looks like I’ll be spending the afternoon drunk. Again.

ITEM: Just look at these dicks. It’s all their fault.

ITEM: I’m very taken with this story of the online campaign to raise $10 million to pay the less-than-adequate band Weezer to split up. How about we organise something similar for the Liberal Democrats? The paths of glory are strewn with discarded promises, like condoms at a dogging venue. The previously anti-tuition fees Clegg and Cable are now for them. The previously anti-nuclear power Huhne is now its cheerleader. And then there’s Sarah Teather, formerly a prominent campaigner (like the rest of her Lib Dem mates) for votes for 16 year-olds. Now she’s got a big job as an education minister she’s against votes for 16 year-olds (like the rest of her Lib Dem mates). It’s the new politics and you should be ashamed of yourself for feeling so cynical.

ITEM: Thatcher is in hospital being treated for an infection. The outlook isn’t good. Once sociopathic political economy takes hold you’re knackered and she’s lived with it a long time.

ITEM: Only his second Prime Minister’s Questions and Labour leader Ed Miliband was reduced to make ‘Kenneth Clarke is fat and wears Hush Puppies’ ‘jokes’. He’s one of the the ‘Left’s ‘top’ ‘minds’, ladies and gentlemen. Roy Hattersley says Dead Ed has ‘undoubted intellect‘. God help us all.

ITEM: There can be few sights more nauseating than that of Defence Secretary and war criminal groupie Liam Fox strutting around the place like a smug, priapic peacock, spinning his shit sandwich into a boast about the amount of military viagra he’s pumping into the country’s waning libido. Won’t somebody buy him an Action Man and tell him to shut up?

ITEM: No less nauseating is the sight of once-and-future disappointment Ed Miliband checking his balls in at the door. Would he attend the TUC rally against Tory cuts, he was asked during the Labour leadership campaign. ‘I’ll attend the rally, definitely,’ said the Left’s last ‘hope’ in a pitch for the union vote. Now he’s in the big chair and lacking the guts or guile to fight (or, God forbid, defend) his ‘Red Ed’ nickname, we hear ‘there was never a firm commitment that he would attend the rally‘. Those of us who remember the handbrake turns of Harriet Harman will not be surprised.

ITEM: I case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a strange country. It’s one where the idea that people should have secure housing for life is sneered at and yet the fact that one of the blokes leading the sneering is heir to a baronetcy created in 1629 and has hoovered up four million quid’s worth of the sweat of his father’s brow is regarded as perfectly normal.

ITEM: This is ace.

ITEM: ‘I don’t think democracy is the way to run anything,’ says cars-going-round-and-round supremo Bernie Ecclestone. Of course not. It was Bernie, lest we forget, whose idea that government policy could be bought and sold ripened at exactly the same time as we got a government who agreed with him.

ITEM: Ikea Knightley and Albert Steptoe. You never see them in the same room, do you?

And so the first of the Chilean miners have been saved; a ray of warmth in an otherwise cold, hard world.

As you would probably expect, Hollywood has a script for a screen adaptation of the miners’ ordeal almost ready to go. It’s on its 15th draft and has only had 26 writers working on it so far.

As it currently stands, the film opens with evil drugs baron Chico Lopez, played by John Travolta, laying the explosive charges that will cause the rock slide trapping the 33 miners. Told in flashback we find that some of the miners, when not risking their lives for a rapacious corporation that doesn’t give two shits about their safety, are brave crusaders against the damage Lopez’s drugs is doing to their community.

The ensemble cast of miners features some brave choices of actors. Liam Neeson plays the cool, calm and collected leader who commands the respect of his men. Brad Pitt and Matt Damon play two miners whose antagonism turns to mutual respect by the end of the film. Angelina Jolie is the sassy female miner over who the two fall out. Chris Rock/Chris Tucker/Martin Lawrence plays the wisecracking black comic relief who learns wisdom from the wise, oldest miner of the group played by Morgan Freeman. Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays the shaky, nervous kid who becomes a man. Denzel Washington plays the unflappable, stoic rescue team chief who risks his marriage to save the miners.

The second act of the film closes with the miners’ rescue. The third and final act see the 33 (along with Washington’s character) attacking Lopez’s mountain compound with machine guns and rocket launchers. In a touching death scene, Morgan Freeman passes the torch of his wisdom to Chris Rock/Chris Tucker/Martin Lawrence. After a thrilling chase, Lopez meets his end by falling down the same tunnel from which the miners were rescued. The film ends with the smiling 33 descending back to work in the mine, waved off by Washington who has been reconciled with his wife.

Remember how we laughed grimly when a newly-elected David Cameron appointed Theresa May, a woman who’d previously voted against the repeal of section 28, as Equalities Minister? Remember when the Prime Minister gave the Foreign Secretary jobs to neo-conservative William Hague? And the Defence Secretary job to war-criminal fan Liam Fox?

Well, once-and-future disappointment Ed Miliband wants a slice of the hyenas-guarding-the-creche action as well. Why else would he appoint the less than lovely Meg Hillier, someone who in the past has ‘voted against improvements in housing energy use efficiency [...] voted against limiting civil aviation pollution, was for Heathrow’s expansion, [and] in fact according to Public Whip she has a poor voting record on the issue for a Labour MP, let alone compared to the Tories’, as shadow Minister of Energy and Climate Change?

‘Universities should be be able to charge up to £12,000 a year for magic beans,’ just about sums it up for me. I contend, and not for the first time, that the university experience is worthless for the majority of people beyond allowing them to learn how to a) hold their drink and b) talk to people they’d like to take to bed, in a safe environment away from mum and dad (admirable and necessary skills but ones you can also learn outside of higher education). Kids, particularly from the lower end of life, emerge from the sausage machine with an inflated set of expectations from life that are never, ever going to be fulfilled. They’d be better served by being told to spend a few years of drudgery saving up as much money as they can and then pissing off somewhere better (a dwindling pool of places, admittedly), if possible for good.

JK Rowling has been named the most influential woman in the UK. Victoria Beckham was the runner up. The top ten also features Cheryl Cole, Samantha Cameron and Kate Moss. You really have to ask yourself what possible merit there might be in the continued existence of our species.

ITEM: Britain, 2010: ‘Ask Boy A what he is scared of and he says dogs, strangers and policemen. He is scared to go outside and play with friends. At night he wets his bed. He cannot sleep without his mother. He is nine years old.‘.

ITEM: Have a listen to this. On the Today programme last Thursday John Humphrys interviewed John Hutton and the TUC’s Brendan Barber about the former’s report on public sector pension ‘reform’. Compare the different tones in which Humphrys conducts each interview. (The Barber interview starts around 12 minutes 30 seconds.)

ITEM: On Sunday morning, for reasons known only to the mutton-headed vulgarians who run the station, Harry ‘Gordon Brown looks like a paedo‘ Cole was invited on to Five Live as a ‘pundit’. The station’s remorseless quest to lower the standards grinds ever onwards.

ITEM: Blogging will never replace sickening deference to power, says the BBC’s Andrew Marr.

ITEM: So, ‘Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police , has privately lobbied the home secretary to make it harder for people to take legal action against his force.’ This, critics say, would put the police ‘beyond the rule of law’. To which a cynic would reply, they pretty much are already, aren’t they?

ITEM: ‘It is truly alarming that this person enjoys a position of national responsibility.’

Tariq Ali says Barack Obama’s foreign policy ‘mirrors the ugliness of the Bush years’ and that there has been ‘no fundamental break in foreign policy between the Bush and Obama regimes’. (Via John Brissenden)

Right on cue we get reports that ‘a US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information‘. Obama, it seems, hyped up a terrorist threat in time for the US mid-term elections and as political cover for an expanding policy of assassination and civilian deaths in Pakistan. Remember how we used to spit when Bush pulled the exact same shitty stunt?

Meanwhile, from the scene of one of Western values’ greatest triumphs comes the news that ‘heavy US reliance on private security in Afghanistan has helped to line the pockets of the Taliban‘. It’s the perfect marriage between turbo capitalism (think of Milo Minderbinder’s assertion in Catch-22 that wars should be fought by the private sector) and the kind of Bushite incompetence we came to know and love in the noughties.

ITEM: Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt might have the Daily Mail reading Tory heartlands clapping like seals at his suggestion that the lower orders should limit their breeding if they want to keep the pittance a disapproving government affords them, but has he really thought it through? Just where does Hunt think the people who clean his bog, serve his lunch and maintain his trying-too-hard haircut come from? The people that Hunt likes and seeks to court just aren’t squirting out the ankle biters like the underclass he despises. So what happens when we don’t have enough people here to do the shitty jobs and support an ageing population (you know, the stuff we resent doing)? Some kind of forced upper middle class breeding programme? (Does Hunt aspire to his own son wiping arses in care homes?) No, we import workers from abroad to the accompanying howls of the same crowd Hunt’s trying to impress. How’s that for joined up thinking, benefit claimant and immigrant hating scumbags?

ITEM: I’ve been reading about gladiatorial combat in Ancient Rome and how fights would end… ‘As for thumbs up, there appears to be no evidence for it — or at least, if it was used, it probably meant death, not mercy’. Yes, not mercy.

ITEM: ‘We need to learn some painful truths about where we went wrong and how we lost touch,’ said Labour leadership election loser Ed Miliband in his leader’s speech to the party’s conference. ‘We must not blame the electorate for ending up with a government we don’t like, we should blame ourselves,’ he went on. ‘We have to understand why people felt they couldn’t support us’ in order for Labour to be able to form the next government. So, charged by these words, what does the Labour Party do? Elect to the Shadow Cabinet the same embarrassment of dicks that helped torpedo the last government. Good work.

ITEM: If there was something that induced you to make a face like this you’d avoid it at all costs, wouldn’t you? I mean, Jesus.

ITEM: Here’s a thing. Did you know I played suave superspy Jeremy Trousers in the long-running 1970s television action series The Undercrackers? My moving portrayal of the tortured genius (Trousers battles crippling virginity as well as the intelligence establishment who are revolted at his insistence in using semen as invisible ink) won me several awards.

ITEM: It was interesting to hear David Cameron expressing outrage in his speech to the Tory Party conference about the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi. Of course, like me, many people are angry that the Lockerbie bomber isn’t in prison. That’s because he’s never been caught. Megrahi didn’t do it.

ITEM: Sweet Jesus, what is going on with women in frontline British politics? We’ve got rid of Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Hazel Blears only to get the perfectly idiotic Baroness Warsi. Talk about losing a pound but finding a penny and then losing a tenner. I have to change channels when she on I’m so embarrassed for her. I don’t doubt there are highly intelligent and non-patronising women in politics who know what they’re talking about. So where the hell are they?

ITEM: Having said that, the men aren’t doing much better. After listening to a particularly vapid George Osborne blithering and flannelling on the Today show the other day I had to have my toes surgically uncurled. I know I’m not one to talk but he’s hardly an intellectual titan, is he? Can we really not do better than him? There should be a ban on calling Britain ‘Great’ until Osborne is fired in ignominy. We don’t want to get done for false advertising.

ITEM: ‘Daveybloke told the British people: “Your country needs you”, a slogan most famously used on recruiting posters for a war in which large numbers of deserving poor endured horrendous conditions while a lot of hard-faced men did very well out of it.‘

ITEM: Here’s a thing. Did you know I played the heart-throb proctologist Gert Finger in the long-running 1970s television medical series Finger’s Progress? My moving portrayal of the tortured genius (Finger battles diphallia as well as the medical establishment who disapprove of his maverick style of endoscopy) won me several awards.

ITEM: It’s difficult to get angry about the Tories dicking with the benefit system. I mean it’s exactly what we expected, isn’t it? When a newly-elected New Labour trashed lone parent benefit in 1997 there was shock and outrage. The Tories booting the poor in 2010? Well, it’s what they do. You might as well expect a dog to stop licking its town halls.

ITEM: Here’s the awful Hazel Blears. You can take the over-promoted fool out of the tawdry, mendacious bullshit but can’t take the tawdry, mendacious bullshit out of the over-promoted fool.

ITEM: I really, really wanted a samurai umbrella before it occurred to me that carrying one in public must present a huge risk of suicide by cop.

ITEM: Amusing as it is to see Patrick ‘bombs in boobies’ Mercer MP peddling yet more alarmist fantasies, can’t someone have a quiet word with him? Obviously he really likes being on the telly and in the papers but isn’t there a more dignified way for him to do it? Like go on Total Wipeout or similar?

ITEM: Here’s a thing. Did you know I played the pipe-smoking polymath Randolph Arglestein in the long-running 1970s television sci-fi series The Arglestein Incontinence? My moving portrayal of the tortured genius (Arglestein battles his incurable vulgarity as well as the British establishment who refuse to believe his disturbing discovery that terrifying alien forces have infiltrated the Variety Club of Great Britain) won me several awards.

ITEM: The shallow, stagnant mind of Nadine Dorries MP craps another brainturd. Her and her hangers-on really do have a consistently misanthropic line in smearing those who have the temerity to criticise her. That someone like her can be elected to Parliament and then onto the Commons Health Select Commitee proves something or other. That there’s hope for rampagingly inadequate, offensively mediocre and small-mindedly vindictive people everywhere, I think.

ITEM: I note with weary dismay that there seems to be a significant overlap between those turning cartwheels over Ed Miliband getting the Labour leadership and the people who lectured those of us sceptical that a ruthless machine politician from Illinois being elected US president was a fresh breeze about to sweep the planet. Oh, well.

ITEM: While we’re on the subject of the same old shit, it’s the Tory Party conference this week. Apparently public champagne drinking has been banned as it sends the wrong message to those living on newly scorched earth. Just what message we’re supposed to take from the Tories’ very public dismantling of large parts British society hasn’t yet been adequately explained. The Tories might be booting the poor, trashing schools and pissing on the NHS but at least they’re not on the champers while doing it. For that we must be grateful.

ITEM: You know, even I’ve ceased to care what I think about this bollocks any more. Somehow, this blog consistently gets more visitors on days I don’t post. This amuses me.

I didn’t watch Ed Miliband’s speech. I can’t listen to him speak. My mind wanders and I find myself wishing he’d just blow his bloody nose. If he’d only had his adenoids when he was a kid, his voice could be two, maybe three, percent less irritating. Did I miss anything beyond platitudes? I just couldn’t face an hour of having my intelligence insulted by him and then by Nick Robinson. Can someone please nudge me when he says something worthwhile? The Guardian’s Michael White says ‘Miliband reclaimed optimism for his party – always a good thing to do.’ I’m reclaiming optimism as well then. Now, what do I do with it? Look at me everybody, I’m the new generation of change and I’m optimistic! There, I feel much better.

And farewell Miliband (D). He’s sore at losing the Labour leadership when in reality he should be thankful that it’s merely the height of the punishment he’ll receive for his torture hiding and war-backing. He’s stepping down because he fears ‘perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where there is none and splits where they don’t exist’ between him and his brother. In other words, he’s lost his bottle. The media holds too much power over the career of politicians and he’d be shit-scared all the time. This is, for some reason, an acceptable state of affairs under British democracy. Basically, he’s paying the price for the pandering and abasement New Labour has peformed for the likes of the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail. Alastair Campbell, defending Milliband (D) and in the wake of Peter Mandelson’s, Tony Blair’s and his own unsightly soul-baring and petulant self-justification in their memoirs, even had the balls to criticise ‘the constant soap operatic blah that would surround David and every word he uttered as a frontbencher‘. Campbell, lest we forget, was the one who published a story about Mandelson punching him in an argument over whether Blair should wear a tie or not. If there is a soap opera going on it’s because the likes of Campbell helped script it. Miliband (D) along with the rest of his New Labour mates got into bed with the gutter press and now he’s being screwed. He only has him and his mates to blame. One’s heart bleeds.

ITEM: Is anybody else still laughing themselves sick at the idea that Vince Cable and Ed Miliband are some kind of communist fifth-columnists? Is it stupidity or mendacity that fuels this horseshit?

ITEM: Aw, no. Are they really going to let Gemma Arterton (24) play Nicola Six (35) in the screen version of London Fields? It’s a piece of spectacular miscasting not seen since John Wayne ‘portrayed’ Genghis Khan. I last saw Ms Arterton in the impressively dull* Clash of the Titans remake in which she was as charming and charismatic as a room full of Milibands. Read the book before Hollywood ruins it.

ITEM: The International Monetary Fund backing the Tory and Lib Dems policy of scorched earth isn’t really the good news Chancellor George Osborne claims. As victims of the IMF’s misanthropy elsewhere would no doubt testify, the organisation has a real thing for grinding the poor into the dirt. Have a look at what they did to Argentina, Romania and Haiti, among others. When the IMF says you’re doing a good job, you can be pretty certain that someone undeserving is getting shafted and hard. The ‘recovery’ is ‘under way’ apparently but for who isn’t adequately explained. Is that the sound of champagne corks popping across the sink estates of Great Britain I can hear? No. No, it isn’t.

ITEM: Bee!

ITEM: Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is a bit of a dick, isn’t he?

* It takes a special kind of perverse genius to make giant scorpions, Liam Neeson barking ‘RELEASE THE KRAKEN!’ and Greek mythology in general so stupefyingly tedious.

Ed forgets to bring his long spoon.

So, Ed Miliband is the new New Labour leader. Excited? Feeling an Obama moment? No? How can you be so cynical? The membership and the parliamentary Labour party came within a gnat’s chuff of elevating his torture-hiding war criminal brother so I suppose we should thank heavens for the unions who put the brakes on that bout of collective nasty pragmatism, for all the good it will do them.

Ed, let’s not forget, is a machine politician who owes his entire career – intern to Tony Benn, speechwriter and researcher for Harriet Harman, special adviser to Gordon Brown, safe seat in Doncaster North (not exactly a local boy) – to his father’s name and the patronage of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson/Campbell axis. He did Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford which has produced more supervillains over the years than the Marvel Universe.

Any attempts at ‘I feel your pain’ will be worth hearing. Listen to him speak and he even has the Blairite speech patterns and glottal stops (as has his brother) that have made our blood boil since the sainted Tony arrived on the scene back in the 1990s. They gave Tony and crew the boys and Tony and crew gave us the men.

Look at his victory speech: ‘Today a new generation has taken charge of Labour, a new generation that understands the call of change’. Like, what does that even mean? Change to what? Who’s doing the calling? Ed certainly hasn’t understood the call of change that pleads for a little less meaningless, platitudinous bullshit in New Labour leaders’ speeches.

There’s hilarious talk of Ed dragging the Labour party to the left. It depends what you mean by ‘left’. I don’t think we’re going to hear words like ‘socialism’ bandied about, do you?. Ed doesn’t look like someone to challenge the neo-liberal consensus that the three major parties all cling to, giving us such a stunningly diverse choice at the ballot box. If you’re a millionaire City boy, I doubt you’re too worried.

Bear in mind that those spreading these theories are supposedly dead-ender (yeah, right) Blairites like Mandelson who are to the right of a swathe of the Tory party on many issues let alone Ed Miliband. Ed wouldn’t have to edge very far leftward away from them for them to regard him as Trotsky reborn. Getting on the right of them would be quite some stunt.

In summary: Meh. Electing this grown-in-a-laboratory berk doesn’t bring me any closer to taking my vote back to New Labour and I doubt I’m alone by a long way.

ITEM: A historic moment this week when it was revealed that, for the very first time, The Sun had sent its senior political editor to the Liberal Democrat party conference. ‘Hello – I can see you. We know who you are. You are particularly welcome,’ swooned the party’s Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes, in his speech. It was The Sun, lest we forget, that outed Hughes in 2006 with the fragrant straplines ‘A second Limp-Dem confesses’ and ‘Another one bites the pillow’. Nice to see political expediency trouncing homophobia. Maybe the Daily Mail could send Richard Littlejohn next year.

ITEM: Using the voice of John Humphrys ‘to scare off hungry deer from eating gardeners’ prized fruit and vegetables’ is a great idea. His voice certainly scares me away from listening to Radio 4′s Today programme. No doubt the voices of the programme’s other presenters could also be put to good use. When I hear Justin Webb’s voice, for instance, it always scares off feelings of wanting to be alive.

ITEM: The upper echelons of the Obama adminstration have never been that keen on discussing Hamid Karzai’s deep-running corruption and whether it precludes him from being from being Afghan president (here’s a clue: for reasons never adequately explained it somehow doesn’t but it bloody well should should). Karzai’s mental health however is fair game for Washington tittle tattle and public discussion, it seems. It turns out Karzai’s depressed (and let’s face it, who wouldn’t be in that job) and suddenly now he’s a liability? It’s another insult to all the people who cope with depression on a daily basis but have never rigged a national election. It’s a strange world we live in.

ITEM: I notice from the photographs accompanying the story about boorish waste of carbon Chris Moyles whining about not having been paid for two months that he is hugely overweight and a smoker. If he’s not careful his money troubles will soon be behind him. Just one letter away…

ITEM: The six men arrested for burning two Korans will be punished in a novel fashion if convicted. Their own holy texts (collections of SAS fiction and Razzle) will be confiscated and incinerated while they are made to watch.