Shome mishtake

What do you think? I’m starting to think that anyone who has ever given up smoking has no business carping about hypocrisy over peoples’ past mistakes. Mishtakes.

(Since you ask, an impending consultation with a rapier-tongued obstetrician was the pivot that turned me into a non-smoker. Decades ago, that was, and I haven’t lit-up from then on. However, for years I was plagued with dreams that I had ‘caved’. These dreams were ‘real’, credible and devilish, as I definitely hadn’t.)

Anyway, I understand that the BBC is rife with coke-sniffing. I thought that was common knowledge, but it could just be malicious gossip. So it seems hypocritical, doesn’t it, that Andrew Marr would devote about 80% of his interrogation of Michael Gove to that topic when some of us might have been more interested in the detail of his plan to swap VAT for purchase tax. Anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to be involved with the bureaucracy of completing those wretched VAT returns and the like will want to know. 

One might have spotted that Marr allowed his interview with that patronising Corbynite bore Gardiner to over-run, and consequently impinge on Gove’s allotted time.

Andrew Marr was so well-primed on Gove’s mistake and so unwilling to let his apology suffice, that one couldn’t help comparing it with that other abomination. Peterborough. 

It seems that Marr’s research on Ms Forbes’s ‘mistake’ was confined to her ‘liking’ the one offending Tweet. He didn’t show any interest in or knowledge of the rest of her shortcomings, namely the abundance of other indications that she is indeed as antisemitic as the rest of the Corbynists, and that she is thick as a brick. As we used to say of the BBC itself, it’s either ignorance or malevolence.

Why would Marr be so willing to take Forbes’s belated ‘apology’ at face value, when he stubbornly refused to accept the one he repeatedly forced from Michael Gove?

As for the leadership stakes, the jury’s out. 

I fear that the MSM has kiboshed Gove’s prospects, which (personality-wise) weren’t looking too promising from the get-go. 

Jeremy Hunt came across better than I’d thought (on Sky) but his opposition to Trump’s position on the Iran nuclear deal put me off, as I’d like to know why anyone would support Obama’s pro-Iran, anti-Israel fiasco of a temporary deal, which involved abandoning economic sanctions just as they were beginning to take effect, while funding Iran's terror by proxy and their nuclear development programme bound for fruition just beyond an increasingly imminent time window. 

I think Boris’s decision to lie low, media-wise, is sensible but not helpful - the media is so vicious and unreasonable that their meddling is the most negative force we’re facing, barring a Corbyn gov’ment.