What a total prick.

ALISTAIR DARLING announced the rich will see their tax rates change. Yes, they will — when they bugger off to Switzerland.

The one bright spot in the Budget was when the Chancellor said: "I’m taking the necessary measures for Britain’s recovery." Unfortunately, the gun jammed when he tried to shoot himself in the head.

I couldn’t believe that in the current financial climate it took him 20 minutes to explain our Budget... how long does it take to say: We have three beans, we are going to eat one, plant one and attempt to trade the other for a magical harp?

Analysts expect that Britain won’t be able to balance the books until 2018, when at least two or three General Elections have passed and the British Civil War has ended. Duty on the average bottle of beer has gone up by two per cent, thereby putting an additional strain on Scottish parents as they’ll have to increase their kids’ pocket money. And two pence has been added to a litre of petrol. This will upset many rural types, making their favourite tipple unaffordable.

He has been criticised for allowing pubs to close, while trying to save the car industry. This is a silly move; the more drivers we have using pubs and then ploughing their cars into bus stops, the more demand for replacement cars. This will also help buoy the replacement limb industry and florists.

The Chancellor announced a 2billion package aimed at preventing school-leavers from joining the dole queue... he’s going to build a big fence around job centres to stop them getting in. The City has dismissed Darling’s predictions on the economy as overoptimistic. Coming from them, that’s interesting. They based their entire financial model on receiving a mortgage payment from an unemployed, one-eyed banjo player in Detroit.

Most Chancellors proudly hold the Budget box high for photographers, whereas Darling looked so embarrassed he used it more to cover his face like a paedophile getting into a police van. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d delivered the entire Budget speech holding a blue folder in front of his face.

The new supertax will affect people who earn over 150,000. It’s surely of no surprise that Alistair Darling earns 141,866 as a minister. The real surprise is he hasn’t introduced a tax for people who’s hair and eyebrows match.

They are taxing the rich to help pay for assistance for the unemployable.

So Labour have returned to their socialist principles. Tony Blair must be spinning in his four £9million homes. Darling is putting 150,000 young people into jobs in green technology. This should be successful. Brit teens are already experts at smashing streetlights and heating whole estates with one burning car.

DEMON..STRATION

It's been an interesting week or so in the land of law:

It’s been revealed thousands of policemen suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing so much violence and horrific injuries. Luckily, there’s a cure. Stop beating people up. The police said they now want to carry Tasers permanently. I can’t wait for the next demonstration in London. It’ll look like the video from Thriller.

Then of course cops were caught taking photos of each other sitting on the Queen’s throne while on duty at Buckingham Palace. It’s lucky the Queen didn’t catch them. As she’d have got a slap in the face and a baton to the legs.

Finally, a Japanese woman has been sentenced to death after four of her neighbours died when she served them a curry laced with arsenic. There are probably still British men who would complain it wasn’t hot enough. Arsenic curry? That’s a bit too bland for me. Can you do me a polonium vindaloo?

Ranting about rants...surely not!

In these troubled times, we all need something consoling to cling on to, something familiar, although not necessarily something good. There is nothing more comforting, for example, than a cold, particularly if you've got the time to indulge it, which, in unemployment-racked Britain, thousands more do every day.

It doesn't hurt - the symptoms are as cosy as they are uncomfortable - and it's an excellent justification to moan. You know exactly what's wrong with you and can feel sorry for yourself, safe in the knowledge that you don't deserve genuine pity and won't get any.

There is nothing further away from the uncertainty and fear of worrying you may have a terminal illness than the gladdening pseudo-glumness that comes over you as the certainty of an incoming sniffle becomes apparent. "Oh no, a cold," you can say with a weary shake of the head. It's so different from how you might say: "Oh no, Aids."

Sometimes when people complain, it's because they like doing so, not because they're asking for a solution? When someone says they find it difficult following conversations at noisy parties, they want the response to be: "Oh, I'm the same!", not: "This is how you can get yourself a hearing aid." When I whinge about backache, it's because the whingeing seems to lessen the pain, not because I want the phone number of another sodding acupuncturist.

Familiarity is so heartening that it can cheer us up even when the familiar thing has horrendous connotations. Everyone was reassured when Winston Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty in 1939, partly because they'd seen it before - he'd held the same post at the beginning of the First World War.

Like that went well! What kind of nutter perks up at the recurrence of something that, last time around, presaged the most murderous conflict in history? It's not even as if Churchill had done the job brilliantly the first time - he was responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Surely no one was seriously buoyed by the thought that this new war might only be as bad as the last one?

With hindsight, we know that, had that been the case, tens of millions of lives would have been saved. But, in 1939, you'd have to be a severe pessimist to call that sort of speculation "realism".

Nevertheless, people were using their familiarity with a global war to make the prospect of another one less alarming: "It's just us and Germany and Churchill all over again," they felt better for thinking. "Bit of rationing, the odd zeppelin, every mother loses a son and we'll all come up smiling in four years' time, even if quite a few of us have developed stutters and get the shakes whenever a door slams."

Our fear of the future is so great that likening something to previous problems, however enormous, is far preferable to envisaging unprecedented ones. In other words, old problems are never as scary as new ones. Someone predicting that the credit crunch will be as bad as the Great Depression is something we can bravely take in. Saying it might be worse is a pant-wetter.

Of course our greatest moan, will always be the weather, and it seems that even with that, our days of moaning about the weather may be numbered; when it's 30 degrees in the shade in March, with the sea encroaching on Coventry, our nostalgia for bemoaning drizzle will be heartbreaking.

"There's nothing new under the sun", "'Twas ever thus", "Dear oh dear!" - these are the mantras of middle England and we need their calming effect now more than ever. So let's not focus on solving old problems that don't much matter or we'll be left with nothing to distract us from the insoluble new ones that do.

What are you worth?

I don't want to brag, but the other day I met an American, yes a real one. I shouldn't use his real name so we'll call him Brad. No wait, that's too stereotypical, let's call him Buddy.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that within three minutes of meeting me Buddy had asked me how much money I earn:
Buddy: "What do you do?"
Me: "I'm a writer/manager of production"
Buddy: "Who do you work for?"
Me: "Various people"
Buddy: "How much do you make?"

I don't think I've ever felt more English. I mean, you don't ask a chap another chap how much a chap makes. The problem was I couldn't think of any reason why I was so reluctant to tell him. All he wanted was a handy way to place me, what was wrong with that. After all wouldn't the world be a better place if we could ask each other whatever we liked without offence:
How much do you earn?
What do you weigh?
Are you loved?
Who will miss you when you die?

Everyone says they hate small talk so why not abolish it and replace it with massive talk?
How much someone you have just met earns is one of the things that the game of polite conversation is designed to help you try and work out. Like 'how much sex are you getting?' and 'are you happy?'

You can't just ask those questions not because it's vulgar, but because it's too easy. You have to form these opinions yourself, you can't cut to the chase, drawing your own conclusions is the chase.

And on the other side we all have the right to present ourselves as we wish to be perceived, and the convention of not asking that particular question allows us to represent ourselves as worth more, or indeed less then the bold fact of what the market will bear! Because the subtext behind the question was:

"Look, I don't have time to make a judgment of my own, give me the bottom line, what has it been decided that you are worth?" And therefore when boiled down, are you any good? And you shouldn't have to answer that just because someone has asked you.

Strike it lucky.

Michael Barrymore is set to release a book in the coming weeks, which already is set to become a best seller in the world of 'celeb biography' as it's now known. It will of course be a best seller not because the 'my kind of people' star has any real life story that is so interesting it won't be bypassed to chapter seventeen, all we're interested in will be the infamous incident involving Stuart Lubbark.
In the book, Barrymore writes:
'You can call me a lousy entertainer, but you can't call me a killer'
Well that's fair comment I think. Somebody died at his house, in his swimming pool, at a party he was hosting. I think it only fair we say that he is a lousy entertainer. I mean I'm not Hyacinth Bucket, and I don't have a pool, but even on one of my wild entertaining parties, the police have just turned up to moan about the noise, never with a forensic team and sniffer dogs.

I tell you what offends me...

I was deeply offended by something on the BBC recently. It wasn't Clare Balding laying into a jockey's teeth, but this time with a cricket bat, or a repeat of Diana's funeral with an added laugh track. No, it was a new low.

It was Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, eliciting a round of applause on Any Questions for suggesting that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand should pay the BBC's "Sachsgate" Ofcom fine. The rest of the panel bravely agreed with her.

"Well, you would be offended by that!" you may be thinking. "You work in media/radio. I don't suppose you like the idea of having to foot the bill if something you say appals the nation!" That's true, but we live in the era of the subjective offendee and my complaint is just as valid as those made about jokes involving dead dogs by viewers who say their dog has recently died.

As an insider, I can tell you that such opinions are deferred to by the post-Sachsgate BBC. Everything is scrutinised for potential offence by jumpy "compliance" staff who endure no professional setback if the comedy output ceases to be funny. They have the right to do this because they're ultimately responsible for what's broadcast - their organisation pays the Ofcom fine.

But it strikes me that, if I'm going to have to pay the fine, they no longer have the right to censor the content. And it's all academic anyway; if things continue as they are, TV comedies will only ever get fined for blandness.

Let me try to fake some objectivity and seriously address Blears's suggestion, which has since been reiterated by Jack Straw and Tessa Jowell. She says it's unjust that the fine comes out of the licence fee, paid for by everyone, so instead the wrongdoers should pay.

First, this idea of a net cost to the licence fee payer is nonsense; Ross was suspended for three months, saving the BBC £1.5m, and Brand resigned, saving it £200,000 a year. So the licence fee payer is well up on the deal and Ross and Brand have each taken a greater hit than the corporation will.

Second, Blears defines the wrong-doers as only Ross and Brand and gives the BBC's producers and executives no share of the blame. This is grossly unfair. The offending segment was pre-recorded. As a sick comedian myself, I genuinely understand how they could improvise something that offensive in that context. But I cannot understand why the station chose to broadcast it. So the then channel controller, among others, is at least as much at fault. But she's not as rich, so suggesting she pays a massive fine is a less applausey route for Blears to take.

I don't know whether the fine will hurt the BBC or whether it would particularly hurt Brand and Ross if they paid it, but how can she possibly think that the fallout from the whole business hasn't hurt that institution and those men?

The law requires that the BBC pay the fine rather than individuals. This is not a law that Blears, Straw or Jowell has ever queried before. But they're willing to come out against it for a short-term popularity boost for a beleaguered government - for an egg-cup sized bailer on the Titanic, for one round of applause.

That's what I really despise: the political opportunism. How long do these ministers imagine the friendships in the rabblerousing tabloids that they are so buying will last? And the price is high; they're supporting a campaign to associate the BBC, its comedians and producers - my whole profession - with all that is offensive, smug and self-serving; to encourage millions who are justifiably angry or afraid, who imagine a mugger in every hoodie, who fear for their jobs and houses or have lost both, to associate the causes of that fear and anger with entertainment and, of all things, the BBC.

The BBC is an institution of genius, one of the great achievements of the 20th century. It's famed for its news reporting, drama, comedy and documentaries; it provides the best radio stations and website on Earth. But there is a plot to destroy it; a plot to which Ross and Brand's childish remarks gave an unwitting but enormous boost; a plot led by people who say they support the BBC but not the licence fee, by people who find the word "fuck" more offensive than Holocaust denial. By its competitors.

Without the BBC, they'd make more money, even if the whole nation would be left comparatively uneducated, unentertained and uninformed. Their argument is the moral equivalent of private hospitals campaigning against the existence of the NHS. And last week, three members of a Labour government joined in.

I don't think that those ministers really want to damage or destroy the BBC, but they're willing to risk it on the outside chance of saving their political skins. I, for one, find that very difficult to forgive. But then I'm easily offended.

M40 M42 M6 G20

"So, darling, how's your week looking?"

"So-so. I've got a meeting on Thursday."

"Oh, that's a bore. Where is it?"

"London."

"London!?"

"I know. Got to go to London for a meeting."

"What's it about?"

"Er ... everything, really. It's a meeting about everything. We need to sort everything out, so we've got a meeting about it."

"That might run on."

"Yeah."

This is the sort of conversation I imagine the world's leaders and their spouses having in the run-up to the G20 summit.

"Can I come?"

"What, to the meeting?"

"No, to London. I thought I might come along with you and just, you know, hang out."

"Why?"

"Oh I don't know. There might be a dinner."

"A dinner?"

"Yeah, they might do a dinner for all the wives and Angela Merkel's husband. Dame Kelly Holmes and JK Rowling might be there."

"That doesn't sound very likely."

"I bet there'll be a dinner. Naomi Campbell and Martha Lane Fox might be there. Come on, you never ask me along to anything."

"Haven't you got things of your own you need to be doing?"

"As is still the convention with politicians' wives, I totally don't."

And so the wives and Angela Merkel's husband start making plans while the husbands and Angela Merkel make mollifying phone calls to their mistresses and whoever Angela Merkel might be having an affair with. Let's say it's Jacqui Smith's husband - we know he likes fun.

"It might be a chance for us to spend a bit of time alone together," continues the wife or Angela Merkel's husband.

"Right."

"What?"

"A hundred other people are coming."

"A hundred other people?"

"Yeah, I'm bringing a hundred people from the office. To help out."

"Doesn't that constitute an invasion? Are we invading Britain now?"

"Everyone's doing it. Obama's bringing five times that."

"What do you need them all for?"

"Loads of things. You know, photocopying, erm ... "

With an entourage of 500, there is no way the American president will have had to do any of his own photocopying last week. Any suggestion that he might photocopy something himself, get his own coffee, brush his own teeth, or even shake his own cock after a wee, will have been met with dismay by the army of support staff and servants feverishly competing for the right to cater to one of his finite number of every needs.

Like a medieval king on a progress, the president is using this retinue to demonstrate his power. "America is still the mightiest country on Earth," he is asserting.

It's a worrying sign that he feels the need to. The US has been going through a bit of a bad patch. He obviously feels that now is not the time to skimp on prestige.

Back when it was the only country with nuclear weapons, an American president could have come to a summit on his own, or with a girlfriend to get off with during the boring bits. If he'd wanted any photocopying done, he'd have got another world leader to do it. But these days, the Americans are reduced to a ludicrous attempt to outnumber the Chinese.

Which must have made for a frustrating few days for his attendants. Riding a wave of presidential cachet and buoyed up by the self-importance that only an Air Force One napkin can give you, they arrive at London's already fully staffed American embassy with very little to do.

Suddenly, they're in a world where securing a meeting with Alastair Darling is a coup. Some of them probably settled for George Osborne, poor sods. But then I suppose it beats standing around watching footage of a window being broken on the news, and taking it in turns to replace toner cartridges.

An apparently healthy man, Obama travelled with six doctors. I hope, for his own sake, that doctor number six brought a book.

But then, after all the razzmatazz, the dinners, the meeting the Queen, the jostling of the entourages, the group photograph, the breaking of the window of that bank, 20 people walk into a room to have a meeting. A meeting about how everything's going wrong and is there any way of stopping it?

How does that work? How do they refrain, as soon as the doors close, from pissing themselves laughing?

"What the hell do those guys out there think we're going to do!?" I imagine them giggling hysterically. "There's an asteroid heading towards the planet and we haven't even got Superman's phone number!"

Does this make them insincere? Are they, as the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote of the delegates at the Congress of Vienna, "mere hucksters in the diplomatic market, bartering the happiness of millions with a scented smile"?

I don't think so - there won't have been much smiling and I can't vouch for their breath. And they're not evil. It's worse than that - they're just a bunch of people having a meeting.

That's what it's come to. Our only hope of saving the world is that a meeting goes well.

A meeting - something that anyone sensible hates and avoids, where nothing ever gets achieved, where the most boring person talks the longest, that runs on for hours and prevents people from getting on with their actual jobs - that's what we're relying on.

The same process by which bypasses are approved and the admin of church fetes discussed. Item one: economic implosion, item two: environmental catastrophe, item three: parking.

In case anyone's wondering, no I don't have a better suggestion. And presumably most of what is agreed at summits is sorted out behind the scenes beforehand. Obama's fourth doctor has a quiet drink with Medvedev's third IT support guy, who knows a bit of maths, and they hammer out the details. It's probably better that way.

"How was your meeting, darling?"

"Long and pointless. I didn't really need to be there."

"What's Nicolas Sarkozy like?"

"His own way."

"No, I mean, as a person."

"Well, remember what you said after meeting Naomi Campbell?"

"Yes, sorry, I really hate that word."

"OK, but he's a massive one."

“And at once the cock crew”

"And the winner is.................."

Yes, that sound means we have been betrayed and let down by so many people in whom we had placed our trust regarding the choice to elect Vincent Nichols as elect Archbishop of Westminster. The news was leaked last night, and was broke officially this morning, leaving fans of Vincent elated, and, (let’s call them) ‘non-supporters’ of him devastated and distraught by the decision.

I always felt like Vincent should change his name to Luke Warm. I think if any pet name could be attributed to Vin, it would be that, Luke Warm. No one can ever really say they have had any sort of run in with Vincent himself, because he is too cool for a run in, he is far too cool for that. His press secretary Peter Jennings on the other hand, has had so many run-ins with journalists it would be fair to say that between and other journalists and Jennings, there is actually less tension in the Middle East. But before Peter is put out to pasture he gave a few short sharp lashes of his over active tongue by laying into fellow journalist Jonathan Wynne-Jones that he was a 'total shit' for reporting the letters sent by two English bishops complaining that his boss Vin Nichols would be a divisive choice for Westminster. Obviously Peter Jennings hadn’t seen or heard any of the comments I had made on several blogs regarding Vincent as a choice for Westminster. If he had I imagine I would take ‘total shit’ as a compliment, possibly even a chat up line.

Vincent Nichols has come across in nearly everything I have ever seen or heard about him as a man who fights off his image as someone who struggles with priestly humility and opts for ambition. His rise in the Church has been regular and methodical, and I imagine (with very little need for imagination), that eventually he will become a Cardinal, thus making his journey in the Church a first class Virgin flight to easy street.

Don’t for one minute think I am unable to recognise what Vincent has to offer anywhere he is asked to go, he is, after all an incredibly able man, but it is his choices, that have shown him what he truly is, far more than his abilities. The liberal elves he has surrounded himself with has made flack taking a whole lot easier when things have gone wrong, so know doubt his report card is gleaming white, but he is never far from tree when a rather bad apple falls and rolls into the media spotlight.

Yet not for a second should we blame Vincent Nichols for his rise to level three on this video game. We should look towards the trendy inner circle that will have brushed under the carpet, the many dodgy statements and actions he has made in his time as Archbishop of Birmingham.

Two things strike me most about this whole incident, which after today I will never comment on again. Firstly, with Vincent Nichols about to take the big chair, we can expect the word ‘nice’ to come up regularly. A God who once had Mozart, Beethoven and Michelangelo on his side now has someone who will eventually reduce what little credibility the Church in this country to some sort of O.K sharing and tearing chirpy bright and most importantly NICE entity somewhat similar to Oscar Wilde’s opinion on dogs. Secondly, whoever (and I have a good idea) is to come to Birmingham, is clearly going to be worse, because if you can’t get the big things right, the smaller things are treated shoddily and with little effort or care.

All the speculation, rumour and discussion over Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor’s successor has reduced this sorry affair into a soap opera, which has been watched by so many who were in fact hoping for some promise of change. I can say unequivocally that Vincent’s appointment to Westminster is a failure, because it has shown such a lack of imagination above everything else. Any dreams people had about someone with passion, fire, guts and imagination have been severely let down by this disappointing Luke Warm who is about to sit very comfortably indeed. It is so enraging to know that despite a desperate need for change and new blood in these angrily secular times, the big guns have fired with nothing more then a comedic joke flag fired that says BANG on it, in that cartoon like way. It seems little thought went into the last year in this pathetic unintelligent soap opera which real people have to live with in their real lives. The consequences of this decision was always going to be so complicated, so diverse, yet unlike any other situation, predicting the future is not a very difficult business indeed. Everything will continue to simmer and reduce in that Vincent like way, until it has all evaporated leaving nothing.

Good luck to Vincent, he wanted it so badly, and in the end, HE GOT IT.