Tflie Questin g Vole Nv hen Malcolm Rifkincl becomes, as is being predicted,
Tory candidate for Windsor and, in short order, a member of the shadow Cabinet, his involvement in frontline Scottish politics — and his love affair with the magnificent landscape north of the border — will come to an end. If you travel to the Isle of Lewis, you will find that the locals still talk of the occasion that Rifkind, then minister of defence, was invited stalking on the Eishken estate. Anxious to give the impression that he was an experienced hand. Rifkind got kitted out in his tweeds and told the gillie he wouldn't need a practice shot before going out for the day. But, when the beast was at last in his sights, he panicked, missed and the shot thudded into another animal, standing behind the trophy stag. It was only wounded, and another seven shots from 'Deadeye' Rifkincl were needed in order to finish it off. I'm sure there's some metaphor here for Tory leadership bids, but I'm blowed if I can make out what it is.
Have you noticed the curious coincidence which links two men now in the very centre of the public eye? Both Charles Clarke — the Fungus the Bogeyman lookalike busily steering the nation's young 'uns into a utopia of equal poverty, idleness and illiteracy for all — and Phil Tufnell, the celebrity gameshow character and sometime cricketer, were educated at Highgate School. How on earth could such a nice posh school turn out such a brace of louts? Is it them — or is it Highgate? A statement from the latter clarifying the situation would be welcome.
Speakers UK — the agency through which David Mellor hires himself out for afterdinner windbagging these days — treats delicately the subject of his fall from grace. 'His rapid rise,' states its potted biography of the football-loving Disgraced Former Minister, 'suddenly took a downward slide as he was caught in a media anti-sleaze war on John Major's government.' That's one way of putting it, I suppose.
All hail to the pioneering work done by the adult comic Viz, seldom sufficiently recognised in the mainstream of public debate. Its swearing dictionary, the Profanisaurus, is already one of the most considerable contributions to popular scholarship in memory. Now it has started a new cartoon series, 'The Drunken Bakers', which bears comparison with the
work of Samuel Beckett. Two lugubrious, slightly dishevelled bakers in the back room of a bakery pour each other drinks. Deadlines for the delivery of buns, loaves and simnel cakes pass unmet. Occasional, bewildering encounters with customers end inconclusively. They pour more drinks. To quote Estragon in Waiting for Godot, 'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!'
Atouching tale of Ann Coulter, the pinup of America's libertarian Right. A fierce and fearless champion of all the liberties that the free-born American has traditionally enjoyed, she nevertheless pleads with interviewers not to mention that she smokes (and, boy, does she smoke; even between courses at lunch). Why? Because she's worried that her mum will find out.
The government still claims that its public consultation period over 'entitlement cards' (the wretched doublespeak for ID cards) has been a huge success. The Home Office minister Beverley Hughes announced in the House the other day that they had had more than 2,000 responses; only a slight advance on the figure Lord Falconer was touting before Christmas. What of the 5,029 responses — most, but not all, likely to have been negative — forwarded in three weeks by the direct democracy website www.stand.org.uk? Have they been lost in the post? The government has failed to confirm or deny Stand's suspicion that it plans to deal with the inconvenience by lumping all 5,000 submissions together as a single 'no vote'.
During all the fuss last week over the granting of a lifelong anonymity order for Mary Bell, I was intrigued by the fiery quotations from representatives of a group
called Marnaa — Mothers Against Murder and Aggression. Isn't that a wonderful name for a campaigning organisation? If their sensible lead were followed, we could have Policemen Against Burglary, and Church Leaders Against Atheism, and everyone would know where they stood. 'As mums we were horrified that children were killing children,' their founder, Lyn Costello, has said. 'We set up the group because we did not want to sit back and do nothing.' Is there an equivalent group in favour of murder and aggression? The closest we got was Lady Olga Maitland's magnificent 1980s campaigning group Women for Defence, which counterpicketed the Greenhorn Common ladies. It was, she recalls proudly, nicknamed 'Mummies for Missiles'.
Aixther week, another Christopher itchens bust-up. This time he revives a feud with an old friend, the former Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal. What happened, you'll remember, was roughly this. Blumenthal testified, at the height of the Gobblegate scandal, that he had not been briefing off the record against Monica Lewinsky, no sir, nohow — and that he especially hadn't told anyone she was a stalker and a fantasist who couldn't be trusted an inch. Pants on fire? cried Hitchens. You told me only the other day over lunch that she was mad as a badger and not to believe a word she said. This was rather embarrassing for old Blumenthal, since it, potentially, exposed him to perjury charges. Now he has written a book in which he puts his version of the episode — and Hitchens has duly risen to the bait. In a 2.500-word, page-by-page rebuttal posted on the conservative Free Republic website, Hitchens addresses such key points as Who First Called The Other By The Nickname `Cousin'?, Whose Idea Was The Annual Vanity Fair Party?, Was Hitch At That Supper With Gore Vidal? and Why Wasn't Hitch Invited To Sidney's Book Launch? This dispute can surely only be settled in the courts — divorce, not libel.
?Thus Keanu Reeves on The Matrix: I Reloaded: 'It's one of those — "Is it a wave, is it a particle?" It's hard to know. It's like the Mobius strip. It's about the search for identity, the struggle of life, trying to find out the mythical themes of the Messiah, of the lovers, of the teacher, of the Shaman. It's such a great platform for how we can sometimes think about our own lives.' Thus the Vole: 'No it isn't.'
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