Thought for the day

Don’t you just hate it when otherwise respectable people punctuate their conversation with “D’you know what?” I realise they do this for dramatic effect, but in my opinion it just makes them look a bit of a prat. 

But it’s a contagion so no doubt I’ll do it myself sometime. Whatever. 

The News is like news-on-steroids at the minute. I’ve been binge-watching politics all morning, and d’you know what?  I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it. It’s so mad that even the normal norms are abnormal, if that’s not too Rumsfieldian for a Sunday lunchtime.

Oh yes, and by the way, I’ve been thinking about Andrea Leadsom and motherhood and apple pie, and although I’ve been thinking about it - as a mother myself - I haven’t come down on one side or another in that binary way we often talk about. 

Bingeing

Like Sue, I binged on politics this morning. It matters, it's fascinating, and it was still raining.

My ears, as ever, were listening out for bias and Paddy O'Connell's Broadcasting House decided to mock Andrea Leadsom for overusing the word 'clear'.

They had a dizzying montage of her saying 'clear' in their introduction and the 'feature proper' mocked her repeated use of 'clear' to the accompaniment of the kind of music I associate with late '50s/early '60s adverts showing women trying out soap powders.

Does she use 'clear' more than other politicians? I'm not at all clear about that. After all, the famous Jeremy Corbyn said 'clear' twice in his Marr interview today and the sainted Theresa May used the dread word three times in her last Marr interview.

Was this an example of some clever biased BBC type (who doesn't like her) spotting her using a word on a few occasions, finding it funny and then wangling it onto a receptive BH?

James O'Brien pursues a line...

If there's one thing I picked up on earlier (from commenters on Twitter and at Biased BBC, Guido Fawkes, The Spectator, etc) is just how strongly James O'Brien stood out today for pushing a particularly aggressive line on the Nice atrocity on his LBC programme.

He provoked considerable ire for so doing (as befits a shock jock). 

Cutting off at least one caller (apparently), he ranted for ages (apparently) on the subject of why it's wrong to blame Muslims for such things as the Nice massacre (a matter that - apparently - mattered to him above all else).

Boris-baiting

This was part of BBC political correspondent Chris Mason's introduction to a short interview with Boris on the BBC News Channel at 10:10 this morning:

Mr Johnson has a curious relationship with Turkey. His great-grandfather was a controversial journalist and politician killed in Turkey, and a figure sufficiently controversial that his name, if you like, is still mentioned in conversation in Turkey now. And just a couple of weeks ago, before Mr Johnson took up his post here at the Foreign Office, he won an 'offensive poetry' competition run by the Spectator magazine in which he penned a verse about the current president which, to put it mildly, was less than complimentary. Anyway, within the last half an hour of so Mr Johnson has made a statement. We'll play it to you now.

Gavin Esler on Boris's "silly" and "juvenile" poem

More Boris, and more Gavin Esler...

Here's a question Gavin put to Turkish journalist Guney Yildez on today's Dateline London:

Guney, I just wondered how...He wrote a pretty juvenile poem which won a prize which said things about President Erdogan which, I think, on reflection he might think are rather silly. I mean, does that matter to people in Turkey?

Let's just recall that Boris's winning poem was meant to be juvenile. That's what Douglas Murray of the Spectator specifically asked for - and he didn't ask for it for childish reasons. He was being deadly serious.