The beginning of the end? (For Tony Blair)

The gift of our water to the Germans.......who are now going to make a MASSIVE profit when they sell.......

In England and Wales 20% of our water is lost in leaks. Here in Germany the leakage rate is just 7%.

I just loved the way that they turned up with a tanker, asking the Germans if they could give them some water to take back to England.

Hilarious!

Good old Panorama. Long may it broadcast.

I know you like Simon Hoggart in the Guardian nimh/Walter

this is one of his better ones imo

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,1867463,00.html

Except of course he didn't quite resign. Instead he revealed a tiny bit more yesterday than he had done the day before. Mr Blair resembles a strip-tease dancer who arrives onstage to loud applause, then coquettishly removes one woolly mitten. [..]

Then the motorcade pulled away, Mr Blair on the side away from the demonstrators, as he glided back to Downing Street to continue his hectic schedule of not resigning.

Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke has accused Gordon Brown of "absolutely stupid" behaviour during the furore over Tony Blair's leadership.
Mr Clarke told London's Evening Standard newspaper people were angry at pictures of Mr Brown smiling broadly as he left Downing Street on Wednesday.

Steve 41oo wrote:

I know you like Simon Hoggart in the Guardian nimh/Walter

this is one of his better ones imo

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,1867463,00.html

Yes, I read that one.. very funny.

· In seeking to understand the dramatic, perhaps historic, events that have, over the past two days, so rudely shaken our great nation, it seems we have neglected the immense - perhaps crucial - role played by Farmers Weekly. "Autumn is just around the corner, and the peak season for TB will soon be upon us," warns the publication darkly on page 35 of its current issue, beneath a frankly insurrectionist headline, Time To Unite Against TB. "If we are to get on top of TB, as we must do, then the disease must be tackled. That means action on every front ... We will never win the battle if we fight with one hand tied behind our backs." Innocent agricultural magazine or seditious propaganda sheet? Unhappy coincidence or treasonous call to arms? We report. You decide.

· Back in the dark and desperate days of 2003, when the Tories were at their lowest ebb and the tide was showing no signs of turning, this paper thoughtfully commissioned a hot young ad agency to come up with a campaign that might actually win votes. Their radical new post-political concept was to take any good experience and link it to the Conservatives, and any bad one and associate it with Labour. Thus, a sad-faced woman might appear with the words "My cat died under Labour", or a happy chap with "We won the Cup under the Conservatives". Simple but brilliant, the winning slogan was: "It rained less under a Conservative government". Yesterday Dave Fotherington-Cameron's newly resurgent Conservative party said it had retained the hot young agency in question, Karmarama, to help it design a series of "innovative campaign projects", including, quite possibly, its local election strategy. This, it appears to us, is beyond irony.

· Three cheers for Mr Tony and his fine government for choosing Trevor Phillips to lead our exciting new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights. It was, of course, a tough post to fill, since only three candidates - the heads of the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and the Equal Opportunities Commission - were ever really in with a shout, and the other two wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. So we fully understand Ruth Kelly's need to hire a leading firm of headhunters to find just the right person. And we are most grateful to her staff for getting this firm's fee down from an exorbitant 25-33% of annual salary to 20%, which even on Trev's humble existing per annum of £150k amounts to a mere £30,000 of all our money. Such astute stewardship of the public finances can, we feel, only bode well for the dear girl's next big job, the revaluation of our beloved council tax.

· It seems [..] that we may have been a trifle hasty in awarding our Local Newspaper Headline of the Week Award to the Orlando Sentinel for its admittedly outstanding Man Arrested After Pants Crotch Explodes. We have, it seems, a strong contender in the shape of Teenage Girl Buries Aunt Alive for Selling Dog to Barbecue Shop, from the Kurier newspaper in the north Russian region of Pskov. Regrettably, we disqualified Suicide Squirrel in Opera-Hating Kamikaze Bike Spoke Mangle - the worrying tale of Esa Ruuttunen, Finnish opera singer, who broke his nose just days before the world premiere in Helsinki of a major opera when a squirrel got tangled in his bike wheel - on the grounds that it came from theregister, which is a website. [..]

· Now is not, frankly, the time for a new terrorist threat, but we fear we may have uncovered one. Following our sensational series earlier this summer about squirrel sabotage in Beaver County and, indeed, this week's report about an unwarranted attack by a small bushy-tailed rodent on a Finnish opera singer, we are alerted by the indefatigable Gretchen Lippett to the fact that Google News is currently carrying no fewer than 1,670 squirrel-related stories. Sample headlines include Suicide Squirrels Strike Again; Killer Squirrel Takes On the World; Squirrel Threat Grows; Chased By An Angry Squirrel; Squirrel Defies Police Officer; and Vicious Squirrel Terrorises Town. Metro, the only paper to be taking all this remotely seriously, is already asking its readers What Should Be Done About the Squirrel Menace (a. Wipe out all squirrels, this is war; b. Try to understand their culture better; c. Bribe them with nuts), but the question, quite frankly, touches us all. Especially since, as the Chippewa Herald reports, squirrels at a cemetery in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, are even now "stealing American flags" from soldiers' graves to "rip them up and line their nests". And if that doesn't put the wind up you, we don't know what will.

Local Newspaper Headline of the Week Award to the Orlando Sentinel for its admittedly outstanding Man Arrested After Pants Crotch Explodes

For Osso and any others from elsewhere who might only just be getting their bearings on the whole Blair/Brown feud, there's as summary a description of the background as any here:

Ten years of pacts, pettiness and feuds



Thanks, Nimh. I'm now caught up in reading up to this post. Excellent thread here; it's filling in a lot of info/gaps for me.

Well, that was a short-lived truce...

Taken to a popular vote, I think he would fail. And despite 300 years of union, many English don't want to see a Scot up there telling them what to do.