Friday, March 11, 2011

Seeking the gift of knowledge? Get a Ferrari.

"Let me tell you my background," said Nick Ferrari on tonight's Question Time from Edinburgh, when invited to offer some words of wisdom on the release of Megrahi. Given the gravity of his tone, I naturally expected I was about to learn that he had a position of some expertise on the matter. No, it turns out that he "has a show on LBC" and that irate Londoners have regularly been on the blower to tell him what a bloody awful thing those Jocks did. Yes, I think we get the picture, Nick. Later on, he authoritatively informed us that football doesn't cause half as much violence against women in England as it does in Scotland - he presumably knows this because Dave from the Office of National Statistics is a regular caller to his show. Clearly when I wondered aloud whether the link between Old Firm matches and incidents of domestic violence had been firmly established by statistical evidence I shouldn't have been looking towards academic research to provide the answers - Nick "The Encyclopedia" Ferrari was my man.

As for Douglas Alexander on the same show...well, I can only admire his brazenness. As he nodded furiously in response to Nicola Sturgeon's reminder that he had once described Megrahi's release as "stomach-churning", I wondered how on earth he was going to reconcile the reaffirmation of that view with the revelation that the UK Labour goverment of which he was part had wanted Megrahi released at all costs. Silly me - it turns out that it was merely the "scenes in Tripoli" after the release that he had been referring to as stomach-churning, and not the release itself. In that case, let's recap - the Labour government a) privately thought Megrahi's release was highly desirable, but b) thought (as did we all) that a triumphalist welcome in Tripoli was inappropriate. That being the case, wasn't it more within the Foreign Office's province to take steps to head off the latter problem, something they should have been in a position to do given Tony Blair's demonstrably close relationship with the Gaddafi regime?

Last but not least, we had David Dimbleby musing with a glint in his eye that Alex Salmond only likes to appear on Question Time when it is in England. Well, I can't claim to know for a fact why that is the case, but I'm prepared to hazard a confident guess. By my rough calculations, Question Time comes to Scotland somewhat less often than our 9% of the UK population would justify - the infamous show in Glasgow was a full four-and-a-half months ago, which even taking account of the Christmas break is a much longer gap than you'd expect. The producers can't really avoid having an SNP representative on during the Scottish editions, and Salmond may well have rightly calculated that his agreeing to appear only in non-Scottish editions is the sole way of ensuring that the party receives its fair share of participation on the programme. You can guarantee that if Salmond did routinely participate in the Scottish editions, there would have been no SNP representatives at all in shows recorded elsewhere. Not for the first time, it seems that Dimbleby is totally oblivious to the Anglocentric irony of his own bemusement.

6 comments:

  1. "Not for the first time, it seems that Dimbleby is totally oblivious to the Anglocentric irony of his own bemusement."

    So beautifully constructed, I just wanted to see it again ;-) Bravo Maestro!

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  2. Hear Hear Jim! Lovely sentence. Here, read it again!

    "Not for the first time, it seems that Dimbleby is totally oblivious to the Anglocentric irony of his own bemusement."

    I sometime wonder that they don't turn Westminster into a hospital wing. What with all the stomach churning and vomiting that goes on there. Cameron would require his own private room and a certificate of sick leave according to the number of times he reports that something has made him physically sick and now we have wee Dougie joining in.

    It would, of course, have been within the remit of the London government to take retributive steps to deal with Tripoli when Gordon Brown's request to Mr Gaddafi to keep the return low key was ignored completely.

    It was a slap in the face to Scotland to have our decent humanity repaid in this way, but we had no tools in our kit bag to deal with that. We could scarcely ask for the man back.

    Brown, however, could have sanctioned the Libyan regime, refused to do business with him. I wonder why there was not one single action taken in that direction by the government of which Mr Alexander and his chundering guts were a part?

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  3. "Cameron would require his own private room and a certificate of sick leave according to the number of times he reports that something has made him physically sick"

    Very true! It must be quite a strain on the man, having such superior moral rectitude. Robert Menendez will know the feeling.

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  4. I fear there's an awful lot of selective superior moral rectitude going about, and Call Me isn't the only one who suffers from it in what I worry may be terminal dozes.

    It's either that or all that stodgey food and Eton and alcohol in the Bullingdon has given him a dicey tummy....

    I don't know what Mr Menendez's excuse would be.

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  5. http://www.north-ayrshire.gov.uk/na/Councillors.NSF/4c177e37079a7ef90025759e0049aa35/521681e288a7763d802572d500439f80?OpenDocument

    I found out who Braveheart is.

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  6. Really? Nothing would surprise me anymore!

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