AYE-AYE CAPTAIN

HEDGEHOG-HEADED JOHN TERRY has recently been re-instated as captain of the England football team for the all-important match against Wales on Saturday next. While for many international football nations playing against Wales is about as exciting and/or worrisome as a pimple on the buttock for a single heterosexual man, for England it is the big event: defeat against Wales is unthinkable.

THUS OUR MANAGER FABIO CAPELLO, the inept and unintelligible Italian who has for reasons unknown been given charge of selecting the England team, has had to struggle over whether to “return the armband” to Terry. This, as all of our newspapers have not tired of pointing out, is because Terry was “stripped” of the captaincy because he had been “playing away” with the wife of a colleague.

ONE MAY THINK THAT SIX MILLION pounds per year is a lot of money for doing nothing, even nowadays, but I wonder how many people have to deal with dilemmas such as Capello’s in choosing the England captain from among the serial shaggers, adulterers, bar-room brawlers and convicted grievous bodily harm inflictors that make up the current squad. Of course, we may add a particular misdemeanor of Ashley Cole's to the list, even though taking photographs of one’s own penis on a mobile phone and then spamming it to everyone on your contact list is not yet a crime in Britain.

IF ALL GOES AS PLANNED, and barring injuries, Capello’s ideal England team, using his hopeless 4-3-3 formation, would be the following outfield players, given the fact that Capello has stopped fielding a goalkeeper since David James retired in order to spend more time with his hairdresser:

Defence:

2. Glen Johnson: No previous convictions

5. John Terry (captain): Adultery. Having sex with team-mate's wife.

6. Rio Ferdinand: Involved in alleged “gang bang” of a young lady in a Manchester hotel, the lady later described as “a good shag”. Filmed in indecent sex video in Cyprus resort. (See Frank Lampard)

3. Ashley Cole: (see above) Regularly discovered by The Sun newspaper to be fornicating with and then vomiting over women who look like his (now) ex-wife Cheryl Cole. A serious case of dementia with a fixation for hair extensions. Also found to have shot an intern at Chelsea with a rifle. (See Darren Bent).

Midfield:

4. Steven Gerrard: Tried in court in Liverpool for allegedly attacking a Disc Jockey with a bottle. (See Andy Carroll)

7. Frank Lampard: In 2000, Lampard (along with Rio Ferdinand) were filmed indulging in indecent sexual behaviour at a holiday resort in Cyprus. Found drunk and disorderly at a hotel in Heathrow in 2001, insulting American tourists about the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City.

8. Wayne Rooney: Regularly found indulging in sex with any prostitute who happens to be around when he is, particularly while his wife was pregnant. (See Peter Crouch, Ashley Cole etc.). One prostitute, Jenny Thompson, said of him, “Everyone says he looks like Shrek, but when you get to know him he’s a nice lad really. That's why I phoned my friend Helen to come and make up a threesome.”

Forwards:

10. Peter Crouch: Spotted, like Rooney, indulging in extra-marital sex while his drop-dead gorgeous wife was pregnant. Famous quote when asked what he would be if he was not a footballer: answer “Single”.

11. Darren Bent: Formally warned by Metropolitan Police after allegedly having shot a 12 year-old boy with a rifle. (See Ashley Cole). Conviction dropped due to lack of evidence.

9. Andy Carroll: Accused of and/or charged with assault, common assault and grievous bodily harm on four occasions. Convicted twice. Forced to live under conditions of police bail. Foolishly moves from Newcastle to Liverpool, where he stated he might not “get into trouble so easily”. Absolutely.

THE DESERT SONG

THE MORE ONE SEES HILLARY CLINTON ON TELEVISION the more I give thanks to the powers on high for allowing Americans to momentarily go colourblind and elect Barack Hussein Obama as their leader. While there can be no doubt that Hillary is at the cutting edge of contemporary fashion design in her choice of eye-catching outfits, it is becoming increasingly apparent that she has less of an idea about foreign policy than George W. Bush. At the moment she is swishing around Arabia attempting to gather support for the USA in yet another incursion to save the world. Earlier this evening we heard her state the absurd: “There can be no doubt that Libyans are safer tonight than they were yesterday.”

FETCHING FASHION ICON HILLARY went on, speaking in Morocco, to announce the great benefits coming down the turnpike that King Mohammed VI has apparently agreed to announce to commemorate Clinton’s no doubt fleeting interest in his country as a base for US aircraft, avoiding having to make the round trip from Missouri with Stealth aircraft at a cost of billions of US tax dollars. Mohammed of Morocco happily promised today that from “sometime soon in the future” he will be allowing “women to go to school for longer” and stand for election. If the result is politicians like Hillary then perhaps we might all be better off if they stay at home and groom their goats, or go about stealing from tourists, begging, or sleeping with men for money like their husbands do.

COMEDIAN BOB HOPE HAD A RUNNING JOKE he often used about Washington DC. Feigning ignorance and imagining a United States capital in Arabia, he would often quip, “Isn’t it somewhere in the Middle East?” Hope, of course was referring to the middle of the east coast of the USA, but listening to Clinton’s vacuous and tenuous grasp of world politics makes one long for President Bush’s Hope-style gaffes. At least they were honest mistakes.

THE DISTURBANCES IN THE ARABIAS AND THE MAGREB have somewhat distracted me from my intended purpose in spreading the word about the new version of the operetta The Desert Song, which I discovered recently via the technology of the Internet. Here it is:

Part One: The Road to Morocco

French General Nicolas “Napoleon” Sarkozy has been sent to Morocco to root out and destroy the Spliffs, a band of Arab rebels who threaten the safety of the French outpost in the Moroccan desert. Their dashing, daredevil leader is the mysterious Red Shadow, aka "Ka-da-fi", reputedly a Frenchman, but suspected to be an Arab aristocrat who owns many things in Britain including the London School of Economics and three British Members of Parliament.

Part Two: Sand in their Eyes

Margot Bonvalet Clinton, an innocent American girl, is in Morocco to be married at the French fort to Sarkozy's right-hand man, Captain “Scarlet” Cameron, and go on a honeymoon to Libya. Sarkozy secretly loves Margot, but has to pretend to be a useless, ineffective, socialist, unimaginative, milksop to preserve his integrity and maintain his position back in France, where the population likes these qualities. Margot tells Nicolas that she secretly yearns to be swept into the arms of some bold, dashing sheik, perhaps even the Red Shadow himself. Nicolas, pretending to be the "Ka-da-fi", the Red Shadow, kidnaps Margot and declares his love for her.

Part Three: The Road to Nowhere

Margot Clinton wakes up to face her abductor Nicolas, who, strangely for a Frenchman, treats her with every western consideration. When Cameron comes face to face with General “Napoleon” Sarkozy over the love of Clinton we will see the final conflict between these two powers. Puffed up Sarkozy challenges Cameron to a duel. Skirting behind the scenes are Clinton and her servants, including Berlusconi, the sinuous and secretive native dancing girl who will do anything for money.

Meanwhile Sky News and CNN provide comic relief. Eventually, the real identity of those who intervene is discovered, a deal is struck with the Spliffs, and Sarkozy, Cameron and Clinton live happily ever after.



MADMAN BUTTERFLY

THE DISTRESSING NEWS THAT BRITAIN is about to go to war again and that the nation of Japan is about to be thrust into a nuclear meltdown sometime before next Tuesday, with radioactive winds sweeping southwards and skirting the Pacific ring of fire, coupled with the fact that Portugal is about to collapse around my ears in an economic and financial meltdown of its own, have all forced me to turn – as always – to refuge in culture.

OPERA IS WITHOUT DOUBT the only true source of entertainment for a gentleman of standing, and so I have spent a goodly amount of my recently-acquired leisure time (having sacked my incompetent girl Friday for chewing gum) listening to my old favourites. To my mind the most thrilling of all is Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, particularly its Un dì all’azzuro spazio as sung by Franco Corelli, possibly the highest point in the music of love.

HOWEVER, TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has revealed to me that there have been recent new versions in two of my favourite works, which are Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and the operetta The Desert Song by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II. Always interested in providing valid information to my readers, I would like to outline the plot of the first of these remarkable music events.

Madama Butterfly 2011

Act 1

1. E soffitto e pareti. As the curtain rises, Hillary Pinkerton, a U.S. Naval Officer on USS Abraham Reagan, is inspecting a small house, which sits on a hill and overlooks the bay. Pinkerton has found a house for herself and her new husband, Naoto Kan, the local Prefect, nicknamed Ciao Ciao Yen. At first Hillary woos Yen and promises eternal happiness. Yen is thrilled to be an American by marriage now, and as he surveys the beautiful landscape in front of the house he sings the powerful aria Nagasaki no more! Now Beisaboru! However, Ciao Ciao Yen’s manservant Suzuki warns him that Hillary’s attentions may be short lived.

2. Amore o grillo. Pinkerton admits to a friend that she does not know whether she is really in love or just infatuated, but she is bewitched with Yen’s innocent charm.

3. Bimba, Bimba, non piangere. (This begins the famous long love duet, which ends Act I.) Pinkerton tells Yen that that "All your relatives and all the priests in Japan are not worth the tears from your loving, beautiful eyes." Yen smiles through his tears, "You mean that? I won’t cry any more. And I do not worry about their curses, because your words sound so sweet." They hear Suzuki offstage, saying his evening prayers.

4. Vogliatemi bene. (The long duet concludes.) Yen pleads with Pinkerton to "Love me, please." He asks whether it is true that, in foreign lands, a man will catch a butterfly and pin its wings to a table. Pinkerton admits that it is true but explains, "Do you know why? So that he’ll not fly away." She embraces Yen and says, "I have caught you. You are mine." Yen replies, "Yes, for life." Yet Hillary leaves for parts unknown.

Act 2

5. Un bel dì. Three years have passed, and in this, the opera's most famous aria, Yen says that, "one beautiful day", they will see a puff of smoke on the far horizon. Then a ship will appear and enter the harbor. He will not go down to meet Hillary but will wait on the hill for her to come.

6. Ah! M’ha scordata? Yen is given a letter by Sharpless, the US Consul in Japan, who tells him that Hillary has found a new lifetime partner, Obama-San, and she is now in China, where she is doing “much business”, singing the famous aria Molti Yuan per me. Yen refuses to believe this at first, until one day he sees an economic newspaper headline showing the Nikkei stock exchange ratings compared to those of Shanghai. He is distraught, crying “Listen! Listen to my sad song, Take pity!” and says to Sharpless that without the love of Hillary he prefers “Death! Death! Rather would I cut short my life! Ah! Death!"

Act 3

7. Io so che alle sue pene. Hillary and Obama receive news that Naoto Kan Yen and his entire family, as well as many other inhabitants of his Prefecture in Nagasaki, have been stricken by a mysterious illness and are unable to work. Money is running out for them and they desperately need help from “the big world”.

8. Addio, fiorito asil. Pinkerton and Obama at first consider helping Kan, with Obama singing Yes, we Kan, but advice from a chorus of journalists at the New York Financial Times persuade them to “keep out of it.” Pinkerton remains deep in thought.

9. Con onor muore. Yen, distraught and overwhelmed by his illness and the financial disaster affecting the citizens in his Prefecture decides: "Who cannot live with honor must die with honor." He takes a knife from a ceremonial cabinet and walks behind a screen. The knife clatters to the floor as Yen emerges, staggering. From outside the house, Pinkerton cries, "Yen! Yen!" and rushes in - but it is too late. He is dead

NEXT: THE DESERT SONG 2011

RUBY THE HEART STEALER

THIS WEEK’S SUNDAY TELEGRAPH carries an interesting article by Nick Squires about Italy and about what being Italian means. On the eve of Italy celebrating its 150th anniversary as a nation, the tenet of this piece is that Italy is still a mish-mash of races who speak different, mutually unintelligible dialects or languages and lacks anything which might bring these peoples together other than football and war.

MR SQUIRES MAY BE OPTIMISTIC in including war as a unifying factor, as Italy changed sides in both world wars, and the only common feeling was a shared desire to run away from the guns being pointed at them or to pay those holding the weapons not to shoot at them.

BUT THIS CULTURAL MOSAIC IS ONE OF THE elements that makes Italy such a pleasant place to visit, and the vast differences in behaviour, customs and language one encounters provides one with a welcome challenge in these days of standardisation. Of all the European countries I have visited, none has the charm of the incomprehensible practices one finds as a tourist in, say, Milan, where I was finding it difficult to work out whom I should pay on the bus and I was helpfully informed by a local that bus tickets were sold in bunches in tobacconists or, on Sundays and in the evenings, in pharmacies, or – he added with a snigger – you just don’t pay.

THUS IN THE MIDST OF THIS ANARCHIC CHAOS one should be grateful as an Italian for anything that smacks of being vera italianità, anything that is stable, predictable and reliable and worthy of the risorgimento. Particularly anything that can live up to the international stereotype of the bottom-pinching, slightly underhand and shifty, foppish, smarmy and occasionally irascible Italian male. And thus we find an explanation as to why so many Italians would not swap Mr Berlusconi for all the ice cream in Naples.

FINALLY ABOUT TO FACE THE COURTS, Berlusconi still sees no imbroglio in being accused of sex with an underage girl called Karima El Mahroug, along with other charges of perverting the course of justice in her favour. Adding to the bizarre situation, Karima herself, pictured above at the opera and who has become known as Ruby 'the heart stealer', has appeared in an advert promoting a book by former MEP Alfonso Luigi Marra called 'The Female Labyrinth'. In the advert she is stripped by a man dressed as The Phantom of the Opera, and goes on to describe the book as a "guide to love, unemployment, the economy, etiquette and reform of the EU.” If anyone reads the book and discovers the connection between these things and/or their relationship to the book’s title, please let me know.

IT IS CLEARLY DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE the news that comes out of Italy, and I wonder where else a prosecuting lawyer would accuse a 75 year-old man of having sex with a 17 year-old girl; or one where the man would deny it; after having admitted it, saying he thought she was 18. On Wednesday last Berlusconi, after hearing the full charges against him, including his having sex with thirty-three prostitutes last summer, laughed and said, "I'm 75, and even if I'm a bit mischievous, 33 girls in two months is too much even for someone who is 30."

INDEED IT IS. BUT ONE MUST ADMIRE his panache. And like a large number of my fellow men, I would like to think that when I am 75 I will be in a position to be accused by someone who suspected me of having had sex with a 17 year-old girl. Most men of that age can’t even remember where they were last summer. So I am already practising clever lines to use in my defence if and when I am accused of something similar in twenty-five years time. My favourite one up to now is, “A 17 year-old you say? What day was this?”

THE JAPAN DILEMMA: KAIJU OR NOT?

THE RECENT SEISMIC EVENT IN JAPAN, besides the extremely tragic human suffering that it has provoked and possibly will provoke for some time in the future through nuclear fallout, is proving something of a difficult issue for those responsible for foreign policy and diplomatic relations in the USA and the United Kingdom.

BRITAIN’S INEPT WILLIAM HAGUE, who recently has been far too occupied with blundering the Libya issue, busily trying to play down the fact that Colonel Gaddafi’s elite troops, who are at this moment murdering innocent citizens, were trained in 2009 by Britain’s SAS troops under the “ongoing defence cooperation” agreement between Britain and Libya, has been extremely quiet on the matter of Japan.

WHILST THIS SPARES US ANOTHER of his horrendously mispronounced definite articles and irritating Yorkshire nasal pronunciation of all his other ill-chosen words, it does suggest that he, like many others, is slightly worried about how to approach the issue of seeing most of the northeast of Japan reduced to rubble and Tokyo now threatened with obliteration by a nuclear disaster.

THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND BRITISH PEOPLE have expressed immense sadness over recent years when facing such tragedies as the Tsunamis and earthquakes in the Indian Ocean and Haiti, as well as flooding and poverty in Africa, but the revolutions in the Arab world and this disaster in Japan have revealed underlying prejudices and ambiguous feelings towards these peoples which in turn dictate government attitudes.

WIDESPREAD TURMOIL IN ARABIA, including the “crushing” of the “dogs supported by foreigners” by stand-up comedian, drag artist and sometime dictator Gaddafi, have met with little sympathy among our prejudiced classes, who, either sitting around in pubs or in the House of Lords, openly merrily chat about Muslims killing each other.

NO ONE SEEMS TO BE DOING THE SAME about the disaster in Japan as yet, but silence often speaks volumes. World War II may be nearly seventy years ago, and Britain and America appear to have forgiven Germany (although not totally in Britain, and in the USA half of the intelligent Wasp middle classes are Germans anyway) but Japan seems to be a different kettle of sushi.

JUST IN CASE WE HAD FORGOTTEN PEARL HARBOUR, Randall Wallace and Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor in 2001, a blockbuster movie playing on Americans’ dread of being attacked from abroad and coinciding with the Islamic airline attack on New York City, which no doubt left many American citizens fusing Japanese and Muslims into one amorphous enemy who deserved to be bombed out of existence. American politicians and military strategists duly obliged in 1946 and since 2001.

IF WE ADD THE FACT THAT MANY PEOPLE in both countries still harbour a grudge against the Japanese people for their army’s and air force’s mind-bogglingly inhuman cruelty during the war, and are resentful of Japanese industrial and technological domination of world markets since the nineteen sixties, then we may understand why buckets of tears are not being shed.

THE 1954 JAPANESE MOVIE GODZILLA played upon Japan’s destruction by the Atomic bomb by personifying the disaster as a mixture of a gorilla and a whale, a “Gorira Kujira”, a monster actually created by nuclear fallout and which comes from the sea and flattens a good deal of Tokyo, then disappears, apparently killed, but leaving radiation in the air and the threat of a return.

IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY NATURAL for anyone in private to comment on the similarity between this tale and what has happened over the last week, or even to directly compare today’s photos of some of Japan’s cities and those of Hiroshima in 1947 – indeed, as I write I have just seen footage of Japan which I mistakenly believed to be post-Hiroshima images – but to do so in public is apparently dangerous.

A COMMON TRAIT AMONG THE FEEBLE-MINDED is to accuse others of sentiments about which we feel guilty for having ourselves, rather as aggressive anti-homosexual male politicians are secretly dreaming of being taken by surprise, or anti-drug campaigners are dreaming of a white Christmas; this may explain the furore surrounding giggly, pouting CNNI anchor Rosemary Church, perhaps the first victim of news reporting on Japan.

COMMENTING ON PICTURES OF JAPAN, cheerful Ms Church stated: “I think the footage we are seeing largely, of these waves of debris, it is almost like a monster movie. Seeing this stuff wiping out entire sections of coastline.” This was stated in Church’s acquired Australian accent, fashionable at the moment on rolling news channels for its lightness of tone and rising intonation, making every statement either sound like a question or a joke, which is presumably how Australians see the world. Anyone who follows Twitter will see that the world is calling for her head, a picture of which is above.

ANDY PANDY

THE UPPER CLASS TWIT, that great English institution, is as much a part of our national heritage as jam roly-poly pudding, toad in the hole, tiddlywinks, Morris dancing and flagellation. Usually sporting an outdated hairstyle, a gormless expression, splayed teeth, a forehead as flat as a plank and an arse like a bag of spanners, the genuine twit can be seen at the races, at foxhunts, in the House of Lords and occasionally jetting around the world attending cocktail parties in aid of “British overseas trade”.

TWITS OF ALL KINDS, even when their physiognomy is slightly off the mark, usually due to their mothers having had “a bit of a fling” with someone outside the immediate family, can easily be spotted due to their typically English upper class sayings, such as “Top Hole”, “I say”, “time for Tiffin”, “Tally ho!”, and the most common one when talking to diplomats from the USA, “Don’t you know who I am, you stupid lower class American moron?”

OUR VERY OWN HANDSOME Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg Windsor may embody – nay, even epitomize – the random attributes set out above, and some say he adds a select few of his own which can only endorse his credentials as a perfect twit. These are (according to some people): utterly English in behaviour yet without a drop of English blood in his veins; married to (and now divorced from) an air-headed lush who has no idea of the value of money nor the meaning of work; and, finally, fully committed to a self-serving lifestyle with a cavalier disregard for the fortunes of or anxieties held by others.

IN THESE LATTER ASPECTS ANDREW is no different to any of his brothers, and his nephews appear to be bowling on the same wicket, although Prince Harry doesn’t look like the rest of them, but one particular element of Andrew’s make-up must be seen as that which hails him as a twit among twits: he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar and one arm around the under-age bimbo masseuse. Surely his head will now roll, particularly after David Cameron’s kiss of death: “Downing St has full confidence in Prince Andrew as our trade envoy.”

JONES THE POLITICIAN

“HE MUST BE IMPORTANT, MR BLACKADDER,” states Baldrick about the young idiot King George II, “he is the Prince of Wales.” “Have you ever been to Wales, Baldrick?” is Blackadder’s response, followed by, “Well, don't. It's a ghastly place. Huge gangs of sinewy men roam the valleys terrorising people with their close-harmony singing. You need half a pint of phlegm in your throat just to pronounce the place names. Never ask for directions in Wales, Baldrick. You'll be washing spit out of your hair for a fortnight.”

THE SUCCESSFUL TV SERIES “BLACKADDER” is not the only modern TV show to find easy humour in ridiculing the Welsh, but few people know about the chronicles of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who set out from Chester in AD 59 to subdue the Welsh after the natives had become restless. On his Cerrigydrudion campaign, and during the later subjugation of the Druids as far west as Anglesey, Suetonius fortunately kept a journal in which he described the Welsh: “The Ordovices seem not to possess fixed residences, nor have any sense of established order. (…) They live on the tops of hills, basically in the open air, with their possessions scattered about them. They rush down upon our troops (…) making loud, guttural, unworldly noises, engage in skirmishes, and then the survivors run away again in any direction.”

THIS DESCRIPTION IS PERFECTLY VALID TO THIS DAY to describe what the Welsh get up to on Friday and Saturday evenings in any of the civilised English towns along the Welsh border, except it nowadays includes getting drunk along the way, resulting in feelings of some disrespect for the Welsh among the more sedentary English.

OUR POLITICIANS, HOWEVER, cannot openly disregard the Principality of Wales, although the monarchy continues to allow its mad male children, like Charles, to be its princes, and even to live there, as in the case of the dullard William. But Westminster would be extremely relieved if it were possible to dig an enormous ditch along Offa’s Dike and push Wales out into St George’s Channel, where it might float off to join Ireland, and the two sets of Celts could babble away to each other to their little hearts’ content in the gargling, throat-clearing tongues they call Gaelic.

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO GET RID OF WALES was on Thursday, with the referendum on power for the Welsh Assembly. The vote was clearly a “yes”, although by my reckoning 65% “yes” out of a 35% turnout means that only one Welsh resident out of five wants to be governed by fellow Welshman. Whether this is enough for the government in London to tell them to get on with things on their own remains to be seen, but it has led to scenes of unbridled joy among the Joneses.

FIRST MINISTER CARWYN JONES (pictured above) stated that this was a “clear yes across the whole of Wales from the coast to the border”, which is a different spin on my realistic analysis, and Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones bizarrely added: "Let's be proud that the nation has spoken with one voice. The rest of the world can now sit up and take notice of a small country.” Somehow I am not sure that “the rest of the world” keeps up with Welsh politics.

1923 AND ALL THAT

I AM NOT THE FIRST PERSON TO STATE the importance of knowing history if one wishes to successfully run a business or country. If Chamberlain had read the story of Alexander “the Great” of Macedon, who successfully lied and promised his way from “just one little conquest” more before going on to invade and occupy the whole of Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor, then he would not have believed Hitler. If Napoleon had studied the downfall of Alexander then he would have been content to stop at Italy; and if Hitler had studied Napoleon then he would have drawn the line somewhere just east of Warsaw.

WHICH BRINGS US TO OAFISH NICK CLEGG, who might have done well to read the history of yesterday’s Liberal Party before yesterday plunging today’s Liberal Democrat Party into an abyss hitherto unimaginable for the three major parties in United Kingdom politics. He would be particularly well-advised to have a look at the last majority Liberal Government and its disastrous policy of coalitions leading to an electoral defeat in 1922 that reduced a party that for almost a century had been a dominant force to one that would fit on a London omnibus tram. The decline continued until by the sixties the whole party could fit in a taxi.

BRITISH POLITICS IS REMARKABLY SIMPLE: to be a candidate for election one pays a deposit of £500, which is returned as long as one gets more than 5% of the votes. Thus we usually have a selection of folk willing to cough up a relatively small amount of cash in order to have a political platform and total freedom of expression (see Sunday Mornings passim) and then forfeit the half a grand. This explains why we have candidates from such seemingly absurd parties as the Bus-Pass Elvis Party and the Pirate Party of the UK, as well as thousands of independents with the most colourful agendas.

I MENTION THIS FOR TWO REASONS: the first is that the three main parties are supposed to finish in the top three in most constituencies; fourth perhaps where there is a large anti-Europe feeling. Yesterday Clegg’s “party of the future” finished in an unprecedented sixth place, with the Lib-Dem candidate losing his deposit and being defeated by, among others, an independent with a colourful programme. The second reason is that, having paid my Council Tax yesterday, I am now once again, after a long absence from the electoral lists, able to stand for election next time; which I will do, forming my own party (I will register the name in Chester Town Hall next Tuesday), the Make Clegg History Party. Clegg will be so unpopular by then that I imagine I have a good chance at getting into Westminster. In this I am, of course, supported by my good lady wife, who is standing by me at this time.