I think we can all agree that Liz Truss is chocolate-teapot useless
I THINK we can all agree that Liz Truss is chocolate-teapot useless.
She was pro-remain and then she was in favour of Brexit.
She was a Lib Dem and then she was a Tory.
And then, after she became Prime Minister, she decided to turn Britain into a western version of Singapore, which is just about sensible, if you squint a bit.
But then, having said she wouldn’t change her mind, she changed her mind.
So how is her headless chicken strategy going to work if Putin uses nukes?
“To retaliate, I’ve fired ours at Moscow. And now I want to bring them back. Oops!”
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Obviously, she has to go as soon as possible, but that gives us an even bigger problem because what’s the alternative?
The Tories took two whole months of careful filtering and thinking and voting to come up with Truss, which means all the alternatives are worse.
Which is presumably why everyone in Britain is now saying they want Starmer.
I don’t. I’ve never liked him and I’m not going to change my mind just because the Conservative Party has imploded.
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Which leaves us with what? The Lib Dems?
And I have absolutely no idea who their leader even is.
Or the Greens, who make Truss look balanced and sensible.
When the next election comes along and we are faced with the option of some communists or some lunatics, we’re all going to be hoping for the traditional multiple-choice option at the bottom of the ballot paper: E. None of the above.
So maybe the time is right for someone to come along and form a new political party.
This is what happens elsewhere in the world when the old guard no longer cuts the mustard.
The party that’s just won power in Rome — The Brothers Of Italy — didn’t even exist ten years ago.
Could that happen here? Worryingly, I don’t think it could.
Devil we know
The Queen’s death reminded us that, at heart, we are fiercely traditional.
We want blue passports and red phone boxes.
We like stuff that’s been around for a while.
We prefer the devil we know to the devil we don’t.
So we’d treat a new party like we treated Ukip — with such suspicion that in the 2017 local elections it lost all of the 145 seats it was defending.
Today there isn’t even a whisper of a new party coming along.
Which means we are entering a period of high interest rates, runaway inflation, tumbling house prices, power cuts, strikes and possible food shortages, knowing that our leader will be either a woman who can’t read a room — or a eulogy for that matter — or a man whose hair is made of Lego.
God help us.
Sunflowers and Mona Lisa are fine art but Athena is the head Turner
ACCORDING to a survey out this week, the best piece of art ever created is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
No it isn’t. And nor is it the painting that took the second slot, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
If either of these had been painted by a member of the Women’s Institute, and were for sale in a tea-room, you wouldn’t give them a second glance.
In fact, the second-best piece of art of all time is Turner’s Rain, Steam And Speed.
And the best, by a mile, is that poster of the Athena tennis girl.
AS you may have heard, my local council has ordered me to close the farm shop’s restaurant.
This means I’ve had to sell all my adult cows, which were going to be used to make the beef, leaving only their calves in the fields.
Except they’re not in the fields.
Without parental control, they are in my flower beds, my orchard, my neighbour’s drive and all over the A361.
And every morning I’m woken at 5am by the sound of them crying.
They can’t understand why their mums have gone.
And, if I’m honest, neither can I.
Nip this in the budd
AS we know, the sort of right-on eco protesters who glue themselves to motorways spend their free time arguing that it’s everyone’s right to go through life without ever being offended.
It’s their main thing. Black. White. Straight. Gay. Trans. It doesn’t matter who you are, you should never encounter anything that causes you to be upset.
And yet this week, an eco dimwit called Maddie Budd decided to empty a bucket full of excrement all over a statue erected in honour of Captain Sir Tom Moore.
Well I’m sorry, love, but according to your own rules, that caused offence to millions of people across the entire country, which means you must be charged with a hate crime.
Let’s hope the court decides to cut your penis off.
Hurt by that? Tough.
ACCORDING to Michael G Wilson, a producer of the 007 movies, the next James Bond should be in his thirties.
Presumably this is so he looks good when the next film opens with him in the shower, having simply dreamed that he was a dad – and dead.
Lighter side of outage
I REMEMBER power cuts from the Seventies with affection.
We’d chuck a few more lumps of coal on the fire and huddle round the small television that ran off a car battery.
And everything was fine. I suspect, though, that if we get power cuts this winter, they will be fairly terrible.
Because you can’t burn coal any more, or logs, so you’ll be cold.
And you won’t be able to cook, and the wifi won’t work so even if you can get the television to run on a 12-volt battery, you won’t be able to watch anything on it.
Still, it’s not all bad because, in the evenings, you’ll be able to amuse yourself by driving round your neighbourhood, parping the horn and revving your engine every time you pass the house of someone with a Tesla.
Ray is caught short
WILDLIFE enthusiast Ray Mears came out of hiding this week to say that he finds David Attenborough’s nature programmes boring.
He called them coffee table wallpaper and said that whenever he sees a gannet diving in slow motion, he falls asleep.
Ray says that, to keep people interested, these shows need an actual presenter.
Someone to get in there among the termites and the killer whales to explain what’s going on.
Quite right, too.
I used to love watching Ray on his wildlife rambles, partly because his enthusiasm for the subject was infectious, but mostly because every time he crouched down to point at a twig, his very short shorts would ride up his thighs to the point where there was a very real danger that we’d catch a glimpse of his chicken skin.
Bird is found in bush
TWITCHERS raced to Scotland this week upon hearing news that a local had spotted a small brown bird in a bush.
Around 50 turned up and took photographs as three others tried to entice it from its hiding place.
Some are saying this was cruel and insensitive to the small brown bird.
But I reckon it’s good news.
Thanks to a devastating outbreak of avian flu, I haven’t seen a bird for ages.
The red kites that normally patrol my farm have gone. So have the buzzards and owls.
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And the flocks of yellowhammers are conspicuous by their absence, too.
These are worrying times, so it’s good to hear that in Scotland, there is still one bird left.