Dennis Benson

I suspect that many a retired geezer rues the day that Tesco 24 came to town.  When I first escaped real life by becoming a hen-keeper I enjoyed having the perfect reason for avoiding shopping – one has to be up at first light and devote the rest of ‘shopping hours’ to cleaning-out, drinking tea and arguing with ones colleagues. Then Tesco arrived. Now it is entirely normal to be asked to pop in on the way to the allotments. This morning I joined the usual early-bird Tesco shoppers, comprising a woman in a  dressing gown whose small child screamed throughout the whole of the time I was there, plus a horde of suits who were all yelling into their mobiles whilst frantically grabbing bottled water with the other hand. I emerged from the hell-on-earth to find that, despite the car park being half-empty, someone had parked their tank so close to my old banger that getting in required unique skills that have long since deserted me.

Assuming that the yelling suits are the leaders of our business community one could only feel total confidence that we will pull out of recession any day now. I jest, but the ever gloomier economic situation is in fact worrying. Today our dear leader is to lecture EU leaders on the need for “successful austerity” threatened only by the impact of the Jubilee holiday break. Being now removed from the world of finance and business I had assumed that our version was proving rather less than successful, but who am I to doubt so great a mind?

In fact so besotted have I become with our dear leader that I tuned in yesterday to Prime Minister’s Question Time. I haven’t watched this for yonks and expected to receive carefully thought through explanantions for the burning issues such as our police shouting down the Home Secretary, the decision to take away disablement benefits from the blind, the massive tax avoidance practices of all our leading companies and other topical mysteries. I was disappointed.

If yesterday’s performance is any guide PMQT has become a modern version of Punch and Judy. The slashing of police numbers at a time of potential civil unrest was first up. Our dear leader turned into his beetroot mode and had to be urged by Ed Balls, of all people, to calm down dear. Since that was a reference to an embarrassing indiscretion by the raging Cameron, he raged even louder.

But he insisted that he was “extremely calm”. However he said it like Herbert Lom as Inspector Clouseau’s boss. You may recall the scene in which, very calmly, he slices off his finger with a cigar-cutter. Ed Miliband spotted the incipient rage. “I know you are going to have extensive training before you go before Leveson. I have a suggestion – it should include anger management”.

Our dear leader’s temper didn’t improve when he was asked about any discussions he had held with the new French president. Unfortunately our hero refused to see him when he recently visited these shores. And then came the not unexpected Miliband punch-line. Why not, he asked, send him a message and sign it LOL. The dear leader’s reply was puzzling. “Perhaps I have been overusing my mobile phone”, he said, “but at least I haven’t been throwing it at the people who work for me”. Does the meek Miliband Junior do such things or was this a reference to the long-gone Grumpy Gordon? Or even Nick Clegg? We shall never know.

Neither it seems shall we know much else about the nation’s zillion crises, for the impression gained was that the dear leader is now totally absorbed with the Murdoch threat gathering around his noble head. Miliband did make one more attempt to elicit a view about the police and NHS but this was, it seemed, the last straw.

Our dear leader flew into a rage of Prescott-like proportions. His only intelligible response of the whole show was; “I often wonder whether your problem is that you are too weak, or that you are leftwing -your problem is that you are both”. And there we had it. All this time we have been speculating as to what the dear leader was devoting his giant brain as the nation heads for the cliff. It appears that it has been exclusively devoted to little Ed.

Had the mythical little green man from Zog popped into the public gallery he would have concluded that the affairs of our country are so much in order that the leaders have time for an audition for a new comedy show.

Pointless really since the only broadcaster that would have used it now has problems of its own, the Cameron/Murdoch/ Hunt bid has failed and future shows are likely to be of a more serious nature! 

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A WARM WELCOME FROM KNACKER!

Just two of the many tributes paid to Home Secretary Theresa May when she addressed the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth yesterday;

“Home Secretary, I believe that you are a disgrace”…Dave Bennett.  “You may not like this Home Secretary, but we no longer trust you in the police service”….Simon Payne, another officer.

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THE NEW COALITION ACADEMY (with thanks to Private Eye).

Headmaster David Cameron MA; “There is a perfectly good alternative to the Austerity word – Efficiency. We are not making ‘cuts’ in teaching staff, the sanatorium, the CCF, the Art department, the building programme or indeed anything else. We are making “savings” in these areas which may, in the course of time, lead to them disappearing altogether – and what a saving that would be. I would like to thank and say goodbye to all the members of staff, too numerous to mention, who have just discovered that they are moving on to fresh opportunities and exciting new challenges at the local job centre“.

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