(can’t be bothered to crowbar-in olive branches or wooden horses, sozz) anyway here’s those proposed referendum options in full:-

1. bail out
2. bale out

wake me when it’s over

how many ill-advised trips does it take to get from imbruglia to imbroglio?

wotjamean any clues? oh alright then

imbruglia: an antipodean popette/looker

imbroglio: a confused or perplexing political or interpersonal situation

obviously there’s no correct answer (yet) but give yourself a point if you said anywhere between 18 and 40.

that’s all folks. david brent has left the building.

theresa may, mp god bless her
is something of a random dresser

what’s not to like about emily maitlis?
despite appearing almost weightless,
she very rarely fails to please
especially when she sits at 45 degrees.

i understand that, consistent with the prc’s stock response whenever these matters are raised, the pm was given no assurances by either the chinese president or premier that any such reforms are under consideration, let alone Hu might take charge, or Wen they might begin.

okay, i know it’s childish, it’s just a bit of fun.

except for the poor buggers on the shit end of it.

in the interests of yourselves and all of the chinese people; be a mensch.

1983: born in the wagon of a travellin show.

i was an unremarkable child. though i’m told i did unnerve the midwife slightly. the story goes that whilst she was preparing to smack my arse i emerged reciting “pi = 3.14159265″.

apparently i similarly irritated my father who when i was just 9 days old, foolishly asked me what i would like for breakfast to which i replied “3.14159265 pies”. he never spoke to me after that.

happily, life took a turn for the better when

1985: at about the age of 18 months i stumbled across a discarded copy of the ft.

from that day i read voraciously and began to show a little more intellectual promise.

so when, at the age of two, on my third day at primary school the central heating broke down and all other attempts to repair it had failed, improbably i was called upon to help. as i recall i had it running perfectly in barely 90 seconds using nothing more than a glass eye from a teddy bear and a half-eaten penny chew, whilst solving two rubik’s cubes with my other hand.

despite generous applause from all quarters i still refused to sit up straight or drink my milk.

1987: at four i entered and was accepted for the bbc’s prestigious mastermind quiz. although i managed to bag a satisfactory 78 points in the general knowledge section, sadly my fate had already been sealed in the specialist subject round where having narrowed my options to two, namely ‘the life and works of max beerbohm’ and ‘anoraks i have owned’, i had foolishly selected the latter.

not surprisingly, at such a tender age i had owned no more than two, so the question-master quickly ran out of ammo and i was left impatiently twiddling my little pink thumbs till the two minute buzzer sounded, the overall outcome being my defeat by a margin of just one point at the hands of three-an-a-half year-old heidi hole from cleckheaton who had the foresight to answer on the obviously more favourable subject of ‘babygrows’.

my feckless choice of subject vexes me to this day. incidentally, trailing a poor third in the contest was 31 year-old ernst blowfelt, a draughtsman from ormskirk. not surprisingly he chose to answer on ‘draughts’.

given his west lancashire upbringing one might have expected him to have sat in a few but his performance was dismal. it further transpired that in readiness for the general knowledge round he had been boning-up on military history. what a sap. but i digress, soz.

july 12: invented fusion cooking.

1988: at six i was the talk of the street when, skipping ‘o levels’ out of boredom i passed eleven subjects at ‘a level’, (all at a-star obviously) in a day. by this time i was devoting my evenings to helping make ends meet by offering private tuition to second and third year mit stragglers.

1989: a tedious four-month sojourn to melbourne university followed where without opening a single book i gained a first-class honours degree in crass-pig-ignorance. (i was denied a distinction having failed to attend crucial modules on ‘chuckun another shreemp on the baarbee’ and ‘pourun a coldie’).

nonetheless my reward was dinner at the savoy grill with madonna and sean penn, which i must admit i did not enjoy as the atmosphere was strained to say the least and i was on pins the whole evening. for the record, madonna is useless at small-talk.

departing australia since there was nothing else they could teach me, i was in the process of applying for funding to study at harvard when out-of-the-blue, man u called: “would you like to join the first team squad for training with a view to signing a lucrative contract?”

i was sure i could do better and decided to wait for other more tempting offers and let the reds sweat.

as it happened, after my bedtime story that evening, i was drifting into a contented sleep when ‘tap, tap, tap’ on the bloody window pane! you’ll never guess who it was. only (apologies to the late peter cook) luis felipe scolari begging me to dig him out of a hole at palmeiras. not surprisingly i told him to bugger-off and contact my agent at a more reasonable hour.

so imagine my surprise when the following day, whilst i was putting the final touches to my draft paper for a comprehensive and lasting settlement in the middle east, and the big brazilian was nursing his bruised ego at his hotel, a begging letter arrived from real madrid.

i left it a couple of days before opening it, and another couple before faxing them a grudging acceptance, but to be honest i’d always preferred the playing surface at the Bernabeu and they were offering me twice as much as man u.

and so to spain where, while the rest of the squad were out eyeing-up crumpet, i was able to leverage the downtime between training sessions and matches and utilising the pleasant and spacious bernabau canteen, wrote a 50,000 word dissertation entitled ‘advanced masters in bullshit’ for which i was awarded harvard’s prestigious post-graduate degree in applied mendacity, emerging as a fully-certificated pathological lying git in a record three weeks, whilst practising throw-ins with the jam roly-poly.

1991: during a long weekend back in civilisation i was mooching the royal box at ascot when who should stroll in but mikhail gorbachev in the company of the lovely raisa.

always a sharp dresser, mickey was sporting a trademark savile row suit, but on this occasion teamed, not with the customary armani silk tie, but a short, admittedly beautifully-crafted italian kid hide tether. i could see at a glance that he was near the end of it.

when, i puzzled, had i last seen him dressed this way?

ah yes! it was in 1986 on the front steps of the hofdi house in reykjavik as he emerged, spitting blood from the last session of the abortive ‘start’ talks.

by chance i had been appointed to reagan’s advisory team and although sadly able to contribute little during the open forums, as the microphones were all four feet above my head, i was able to negotiate the solution in private, shortly thereafter.

but i digress, again, soz, again.

sensing that the tether was on this occasion dangerously tightened, on the flimsy pretext of a quick anglo/soviet slash, i drew gorby into a sideroom: “whats the prob mickey?” i enquired gently. and it all came flooding out.

russia was going to hell in a hand cart. “no shit sherlock” i intoned sympathetically and while i ordered another round of double remy martins on his tab, the great man let rip his litany of woes.

well, obviously he had the misfortune to have been born in soviet russia, but hey, shit happens.

but to endure forty years among poisonous party apparatchiks and lick-spittles, working his way assiduously to the pinnacle of the oligarchy only to find the whole ill-thought-out mess imploding on his watch. shit!

in nearby romania, golf-buddy nicky ceauşescu and his ravishing wife elena had all-too-recently been summarily tried and shot dead for objecting to the absence of applause at their latest serving of totalitarian drivel.

meanwhile, at home, normally-docile citizens were beginning to demand more-regular supplies of sausage to dunk in their vodka! what the hell’s a guy supposed to do?

“take a chill-pill mickey” i said: “whizz down to your dacha in the crimea and keep your head down: i’ll give you a bell when i’ve sorted it”.

well, to cut a long story short, i made a couple of calls and a few days later mickey waltzed back to moscow, handed over the nuclear button to yeltsin and everything was ginger-peachy.

1992: tiring of the superficial and over-rewarded world of professional football i enrolled for a stanford university correspondence course, and just six weeks later i was awarded a doctorate in quantum mechanics with a chocolate brownie and large fries.

emerging blinkingly from the cloistered word of academia i applied to join mi6. naturally i was accepted but left after just nine days as i couldn’t stand all the lying.

1993 to date: barman, ring’o'bells, streatham, n. london (own bow-tie and cocktail shaker).

1986: third place at the world chess championships, bangkok losing in the semis to boris betterthanme who was crushed in the final by victor shitot and sadly shot himself that night.

1988: won the womens high board competition at the seoul olympics but was later disqualified for cross-dressing.

1988: six weeks at starfleet command teaching klingon as a foreign language.

1989: single-handedly wrapped the pont neuf, paris in a drab grey fabric one night after a skinful of creme de menthe and a bad kebab.

1989: unlocked the berlin wall liberating the entire population of the gdr with a key from my auntie maggie’s old wardrobe.

dark-horse steve millerband announces his audacious campaign, catchily straplined “i’m a joker, i’m a smoker, i’m a midnight toker” and looks likely to eclipse the lack-lustre efforts of his warring siblings in short order.

who’d o’ thought it?

the shy, retiring late-night political pundite having earlier received the backing of stand-in leader harriet harperson garnered more vital votes previously pledged to her only left-leaning opponent when he withdrew from the race.

charmingly, she also received the vote of front-running opponent david miliband, of the well-known duo ‘edband’. condescending? lui? he might as well have stabbed her in the eye with a fork.

of course the chances of an abbott victory are vanishingly small but her presence at the debates over the next three months (god help us) might at least introduce the few remaining blairites to some of the basics of socialism. or not

at least she’ll add a touch of much-needed colour (none intended obv) to this otherwise bland line-up of westminster careerists and maybe give us a giggle or two along the way at their expense.

and in the event of her (certain) failure she has at least the comfort of her career as a concert pianist to fall back on.

middle ‘c’ anyone?

over breakfast, last monday, right out of nowhere i said to the bemusement of the present mrs rant:-

‘that laws geezer; he’s done something bad.’

‘who she said? what are you talking about?’

undeterred by her characteristic failure of comprehension i explained that i was referring to david laws, newly appointed chief sec to the treasury.

now as to the origin of this information or how i had garnered it i had, and still have no clue, but so it came to pass, which makes it all-the-more unnerving. swipe me!

still, since we’re on the subject i might as well give you the benefit of my wisdom on recent revelations, be they never so prosaic.

first, mr laws seems to have been well-front when brains were being dished out.

okay, so he bats for the other side: not my cup of tea but hardly a hanging offence in the 21st century.

but then his problems, if we are to believe everything he says, probably date back to the 20th century; not that it makes much difference.

anyway, despite the brevity of his tenure in office the politics junkies among us have been left in no doubt as to his brilliance and his multi-millionaireness. nothing wrong with that.

so let’s look at the details here, in so far as we seem to have them.

for the purpose of concealing his gay relationship he claimed expenses presumably comparable to those of a person renting a room in another’s home when had he been open about his relationship he would have been able to claim perhaps double the amount in question.

on the one hand this suggests a certain persisisting perversity in the rules surrounding mps’ expenses claims.

but it also suggests, at least to me, that a mind as sharp as mr laws should have seen this coming and realised that the wise choice would have been to simply claim nothing.

in the words of the prophet: ‘they can’t touch you for it!’

but you don’t get to be a multi-millionare at his age without a preference to bag a quid here-and-there when you get the chance.

in summary: chances of:-

1. concealing your sexual preferences and leading any kind of relaxed lifestyle … tricky.

2. doing the above as a high-profile member of the cabinet … in prurient 21st century britain … next to impossible.

3. doing the above having broken the rules on mps’ expenses … vanishingly small.

at this moment david laws displays many of the characteristics of peter mandelson so he’s a long way from being politically dead-and-buried and must be grateful for the gracious words of his prime minister and party leader.

though what they must have said in private about his crass screw-up less than three weeks into the coalition he had such a prominent role in crafting one can only imagine.

still expect him back before to long; the coalition can ill afford to do without him.

let’s hope that, unlike mandelson, he doesn’t screw-up a second time. anyhow, if he does i’ll at least make the effort to let you know beforehand

cheery bye soothsayers.