There will be no whitewash at the Vatican

I’m something of a collector of unpleasant euphemisms, the kind of thing that the late, great, George Carlin called ‘soft language’: I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with […]

The Hemming Agenda

There was time, not so very long ago, when a dreadful spectre stalked the land striking terror into the hearts of new mothers… …the District Nurse. [Da Da Daaaaaaah] Talk to women of my mother’s generation and the impression that quickly forms is The District Nurse came in […]

Homeopathic research – a complete waste of time?

As regular visitors will know, Early Day Motions are the nearest thing that Parliament has to a parish noticeboard, and like the contents of most such noticeboards EDMs are, for the most part, dull and rather mundane but occasionally useful for identifying the House of Commons’ resident idiots, […]

How far will The Sun go for a kiss and tell

27. Mr Spearman raises the alternative argument, verging on the bathetic, that The Sun should at least be allowed to tell the Claimant’s wife what it knows, or thinks it knows. This is a difficult one to follow. NGN is a media group legitimately interested in making profits […]

Welsh Lib Dems resort to bullshit to save disqualified AMs

While the Twittersphere’s obsession with the sex lives of professional footballers continues unabated, a rather interesting tale of electoral incompetence in the Principality of Wales has passed almost unnoticed: Liberal Democrat AM Peter Black has called for “contrition” after two colleagues were disqualified from the assembly less than […]

Suing Twitter

This evening’s news that a professional sportsman who may or may not be the person known as ‘CTB’ has filed legal proceedings against Twitter and ‘persons unknown’ appears to have prompted a degree of bemusement and nowhere more so than over at Heresy Corner, where the Heresiarch has […]

On Dorries

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the cellars of the House of Commons, Nadine Dorries sits hunched over her precious and mumbling to herself about the dreadful iniquities visited on her by those those nasssty twittering leftisssts… Back in the real, the eminent moral philosopher Harry G Frankfurt […]

Are some rapes more serious than others?

Oh dear, it would appear that Grouty the Snout Baron has stirred up a bit of a shit storm: He said some cases of date rape or sex with under-age children might not qualify as rape “in the ordinary conversational sense”. He also refused to agree with the […]

Heaven and the Burden of Evidence

Stephen Hawking, great man that he is, seems to have upset a few people with his observations on the non-existence of heaven: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that […]

What has Dorries got against Worldspreads?

Now here’s a funny thing. When a Member of Parliament makes use of parliamentary privilege to place serious allegations about a company or individual on the public record you’d expect them to have made every effort possible to check the accuracy of their statements before addressing the House. […]