Chubby Dave in a downward spiral

THE FRIDAY THING: WE shouldn’t laugh, I know, but the Tory toffs are certainly having a rough old time.

What with a Chancellor who travels in a first-class train carriage (is there something else?) on a second-class ticket; careless chubby Dave loses his newly-appointed chief whip; the Tory vote is in free-fall in the polls and all this on the back of VAT on pasties, the lunatic cut in the 50p tax rate for fellow toffs and the was-it-a-promise or a flight-of-fancy commitment to give us all the cheapest charges for gas and electricity?

Still, there are scraps of good news around: especially if you are a badger. The plan to shoot 100,000 badgers (heaven only knows how we could shoot so many when very few of us have actually seen one or even know where they live) has been put off until next year.

The badger lobby has won the day in a contest with their bovine chums who now face the prospect of 26,000 deaths due to a type of TB passed on (unkindly, you might think) by badgers. Maybe it’s the badgers’ revenge for having to plough through piles of cow poo on their nocturnal snuffles.

Badgers have the “awe” appeal, not least because we only see them on the telly, whereas cattle (T-bone and sirloin on legs) are not exactly up there with nature’s best looking. I know, who am I to comment on beauty, bovine or otherwise? Just look in the mirror, I hear you cry.

And to those who wish we could have a cull of MPs, borough councillors and other sundry busybodies, such as parish councillors, all I can say is that we do. It’s called an election and we are to have one soon to choose a commissioner to run the local police force and to make sure that he responds to all our priorities when it comes to reducing crime.

Will it work? Well, the former boss of Scotland Yard says we should boycott the election and stick with police authorities who are being abolished not because they don’t work but to try something new, untried and untested that may give access to all sorts of odd-balls and extremists.


AND when it comes to busybodies, we can leave politicians behind for a moment and take a couple of hundred steps up the ladder of social rank to Prince Charles, Prince of Wales.
Government ministers certainly recognise the Prince of Wales’s handwriting as he virtually besieges them with letters on a whole range of subjects.

The Liberal Democrats wanted the latest tsunami of letters from Prince Charles to be made public.

Nick Clegg led the nosy-parker parade, demanding to see HRH’s letters, but as toffs tend to stick together like old caramels in a trouser pocket, attorney general Tory Dominic Grieve (now he, unlike Nick Clegg, actually sounds like a toff) overturned the decision of three Freedom of Information judges on the grounds that the letters were “deeply held personal views and beliefs” and, excitingly, “particularly frank” and therefore could not be viewed by commoners like MPs

Apparently the letters could potentially jeopardise Charles’s future role as king which makes them sound even more intriguing. Perhaps he’ll share them with the badgers at a “We’re not going to get shot party”.


FINAL WORD: We men, of course, strive endlessly to discover what makes our women happy so that we can provide it and stay in their good books, reducing the risk of deaf-and-dumb dinners and nights in the spare room.
So it is intriguing and useful to read that, in the perfect day, women like eight hours of sleep; 98 minutes on the computer; 82 minutes of socialising; 78 minutes relaxing; 56 minutes shopping (gross underestimate, in my opinion); 57 minutes talking on the phone (another under estimate); 68 minutes exercising and 36 minutes working.

And for perfect happiness, women would like 106 minutes of what the research calls “romance with their partner”. What it doesn’t say is whether those 106 minutes are in a week, a month or a year.

We should be told so that we can get in training or come up with more imaginative excuses than a headache or a groin strain.

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