The week in politics and news
The week in politics and news
29 September 2008
The newspapers called it the ‘kiss of life’.
A freeze-frame which, the Prime Minister hopes, will be held up to future generations, documenting the moment that Gordon Brown and New Labour launched their comeback.
Sarah Brown: pleased with herself
Though Mrs. Brown’s uxorial greeting to her husband at the Labour Party Conference may have seemed to some to be more reminiscent of a ocean-going tug beaching itself on a reef, Party members were applauding this transparent stunt, rewarding their leader with three standing ovations as he claimed that his children were ‘people, not props’.
The embattled leader then went on to tell his audience that he really liked things that were fair, that he thought fairness was good, that unfairness was bad, and that bad things were bad, and that he didn’t like bad things.
Bad things, he said as he waited for the compulsory applause, were bad. And unlike Mr Cameron, he, Gordon Brown, liked things that were good. Things like fairness.
All this took place against the broader political backdrop of Paulson’s plan to tell bankers that they musn’t bring the world to its knees again, that they had really been jolly naughty, but this time he would let them off with a warning, a sore bottom, and the prospect of billions of dollars in return for managing the ‘trash for cash’ assets that he wants the Federal Government to buy at the bargain price of $700bn.
It’s a plan endorsed by Mr Brown, who likes how fair it is, and he, as we know, likes things to be fair.
Not like Mr Cameron, who likes unfair things. He’d probably spend that kind of money invading another Middle Eastern country and watching it tear itself into bloody shreds over several years.
For those who tired of watching powerful foreign men in suits holding a hammer over a model of a small suburban house, pretending to bring it down, then going ‘ha, ha, gotcha that time,’ then pretending to smash the house again, then going, ‘ha ha ha, you thought I’d do it tha-‘ and then smashing the little house anyway, there were other stories during the past week that could inspire despair and the vague, shallow wash of guilt that accompanies the thought that the world would be a much better place if everyone was dead.
Somali pirates angered wacky, kooky, far-out Cornish pirate enthusiasts by attacking and taking possession of a Ukrainian ship laden with Russian RPGs, anti-aircraft guns and 33 tanks. ‘Yarrrr,’ commented one childless children’s entertainer, ‘they be givin’ pirates a bad name, they be’. ‘Yarr,’ he said again, winking so as to give the impression that he would suspend his disbelief if you would, that it’s really important that kids have a little magic in their lives, and that dressing up as an eighteenth-century sea-based rapist, robber and murderer is just the way to supply this. ‘Surely, me old sea-dog, ye didn’t miss out on International Speak Like a Pirate Day, did ye, yarr? T’was last week, t’was’. T’wat.
Meanwhile, efforts to destory the world using the large hadron collider suffered a setback due to a broken fucking magnet or something.
They're going to try the old ‘turn it off and on again’ trick, and hope to be chasing their incensequential tails again come the spring.
And a Swiss guy proved how indomitable the human spirit of adventure was by moving from France to England through the air.
Check out Yves Rossy (aka the JET MAN) here
Also, a Christian woman called Ruth left whichever job no one could remember her doing to spend more time killing chickens and praying for rain.
‘I told Gordon back in the May that I intended to resign, but he asked be to stay on until the Autumn reshuffle because he couldn’t immediately think of anyone availble with the requisite experience to sit around picking their arse all day and holding insane one-way conversations with an ancient, make-believe ghost.’
