This Morning's Nonsense From The Evening Standard

Two great examples of the kind of guff the Evening Standard spews out this morning:

• Honours Police 'Closing in on the Blair Gang of Four' the paper rants, conjuring up a melodramatic image of John Thaw, Dennis Waterman and associated Flying Squad officers sweeping into Whitehall in a fleet of copper brown Mk1 Ford Consul GTs and marine blue MK3 Ford Cortina 2.0XLs.
  
  The truth, of course, is a million miles from the scaremongering comments made by Baroness Kennedy - and quoted by this right-wing rag - that Tony should and will resign if criminal charges are brought against his key aides.
  
  As I reported before Xmas, The Great Leader was not "arrested" in connection with this fictitious "scandal", but met with police officers assigned to the enquiry to enquire how they were getting on with their investigations. The reality is that Tony is standing full-square behind Abe Levy, Jonathan Powell, John McTernan and Ruth Turner and will give his full support to them at this difficult time. Both Tony and Cherie have promised that, if by any freak circumstance sufficient spare capacity should be found in the penal system to allow custodial sentences to be imposed, they will pay regular visits on alternate weekends.
  
  I'm particularly upset about the inclusion of John McTernan in this group. He is, after all, the man who explained to my somewhat dimwitted spoofster that newspapers such as The Guardian and the London Evening Standard are full of lies and distortions and that his covert team in No.10 was keeping them under careful surveillance.
  
  As for the disappearing emails disappearance of "crucial emails and documents" - I mean! What kind of crap is this? Do you keep all your old emails? I get sent thousands of messages each week - some of them quite unpleasant - and I just smile and click on the old wastebin icon. And once a month I get the paper shredding company round to clear out and destroy old documents.
  
  I'm sure Ruth has done much the same thing without any thought of "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice". According to the Evening Standard there's a secret "mole" who has revealed details of missing emails after burrowing into Downing Street computer systems. I ask you! It's straight out of Agatha Christie's Wind In The Willows. And the idea that anyone in Government is deliberately shredding or otherwise "cleaning" evidence is nothing short of preposterous.
  

• Meanwhile Standard journalist Alexa Baracaia blamed Blair for a new row today after a public school pupil on the reality TV show "Shipwrecked" hit out at Britain under new Labour, claiming "Britain's really not Britain anymore", "the economy's turning into a complete mess" and "Americans had taken over our foreign policy".
  
  Referring to certain Cabinet ministers, the schoolgirl is quoted as having said: "I don't like fat people and I don't really like really ugly people". And in a controversial reference to the government's recent policy on immigration she added: "I don't like it when foreigners come into this country and they don't take on British culture and British values. I'm for the British Empire and things. I'm for slavery, but that's never going to come back."
  
  Explaining these outbursts, Baracaia wrote: "The reason why some young people today hold morally superior, elitist and racist attitudes can be laid firmly at the door of the present Government. Many of these bigoted ideas can be traced directly to the utterances and policies of New Labour." Is the Lucy Buchanan episode "symbolic of a new rottenness, a failure of New Labour?" No Alexa, you are just remarkably silly.

I'll leave my little rant there, as anything else I say is bound to lead to a deluge of protests and rebuttals and I'll end up having to add dozens of footnotes apologising for everything I got wrong in this post and grovelling to those powerful, covert people in the Party who threaten to make sure I never appear on the New Year's Honours List if I carry on writing stuff like this.