A plan to increase VAT to 20 per cent, raising an estimated �10billion a year to help plug the yawning hole in our national finances, is being 'very actively considered' by the Tories, it's reported. A spokesman sought to dismiss the story.
But taxes will have to rise. And government spending has to fall. All sensible people know this. The Government says we must spend our way out of recession. Meanwhile, it's delaying spending cuts until after the next election.
The state of our finances - the staggering public debt bequeathed to our children and grandchildren - takes second place to Labour being in power. You wonder if there is any public crisis grave enough to alter this cynical modus operandi.
Appropriate? BBC1 controller Jay Hunt
● Surely it can't be appropriate for BBC1 controller Jay Hunt to have her husband employed on media training work by the Corporation after her ex-husband was also hired by the BBC as a consultant, even if she did not appoint them personally or decide how much they should be paid. And especially since the BBC spends �45million a year on training at four centres, employing 220 permanent staff.
The official line is that Ms Hunt (pictured) - and others at the BBC who have relatives employed by the Corporation - complied with the rules and have nothing to apologise for. If that's the case, we need to have a look at the regulations.
I suspect those who draft rules of 'compliance' leave grey areas of ambiguity to keep colleagues happy. There was a 'big bang' moment of self-enrichment at the BBC when the then director-general John Birt decreed that some
production should be out-sourced. BBC employees scrambled to set up companies, which continue to exploit this opportunity.
There can be no objection to them leaving the BBC and later offering their freelance expertise. But it's another thing for families to have one foot inside the BBC and another outside gaining from the connection.
The tricky thing about the BBC is that it is neither fish nor fowl; neither a properly public body, paid for by the taxpayer, nor a private enterprise company. Some of its senior people undoubtedly exploit this ambiguity.
Notoriously, some of its so-called stars negotiate far larger salaries than they could command in the private sector. Others supplement their huge fees by exploiting their BBC fame outside the Corporation via speeches, advertising and book deals
And they call the BBC 'Auntie', suggesting it's an unworldly old girl!
Clarkson and the great Top Gear tease...
Jeremy Clarkson drove an Aston Martin into the sunset in the final episode of this season's Top Gear - the 13th series - telling the camera he was sad because everything in the modern world conspired against this beautiful, powerful, expensive car.
Some of his fans fret this might be Clarkson's farewell to the show.
Meanwhile, his colleague Richard Hammond crashed his �110,000 Morgan AeroMax in a low-speed Gloucestershire accident, and the third member of the show's trio, James May, is about to publish Car Fever, a book about motors adorned by a blurb from Radio Times saying the author is 'the best thing to come out of Top Gear'.
What, better than Clarkson? Rivalry among TG's presenters is one of the show's attractions, but Clarkson is top dog. Sometimes their banter has an edge to it, although I suspect the worst of it is edited out.
Tall Clarkson mocks Hammond's shortness and what he sees as May's lack of worldliness. Hammond draws attention to Clarkson's hair-retention difficulties.
As it happens, Hammond and May have let their hair grow longer than might be considered suitable for men of their age. Is this to emphasise Clarkson's thinness on top?
As a confirmed petrolhead (two and fourwheeled variety) I'd miss Clarkson on Top Gear, and his inflammatory comments elsewhere. So I hope the elegiac closing in the Aston Martin was merely a tease.
The Queen steps into the future
The Queen, according to courtiers, does not wish to end the tradition of underlings walking backwards as they leave her presence, despite modern health-and-safety concerns. So while most staff and visitors won't have to do it any more, two courtiers will maintain the practice - Charles Gray, Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, and Wing Commander Andy Calame, Her Majesty's equerry.
So will the Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, after presenting Her Majesty with the Queen's Speech at the state opening of Parliament. 'Different traditions and practices have evolved over time,' muses a royal spokesman.
Quite so. As far as I know, no courtier or visitor has fallen over while walking backwards, although the late Lord Hailsham, while Lord Chancellor, was given an optout when he became doddery on his pins.
So the new rules seem precautionary. Some of HM's subjects will doubtless find them regrettable, an act of lese-majesty, perhaps.
But it was a shrewd move to ascribe the reforms to health and safety. Everyone knows that H&S cannot be resisted, even by the Queen. If the changes had been suggested on the grounds that they were undignified for staff and visitors to take their leave of the monarch in this way, it might have encouraged trouble makers to cite the myriad other ways in which interface with the sovereign puts staff and visitors at a humiliating disadvantage.
● Famous at ten for playing the title role in the film Oliver!, Mark Lester, now a 51-year-old acupuncturist, emerges from obscurity to claim he is the father of Michael Jackson's 11-year-old daughter Paris.
'I gave my sperm so he could have kids and I believe Paris is my daughter,' says Lester, a long-term friend of Jackson, to the News of the World.
Charles Dickens, who created Oliver Twist, had a talent for writing fascinating characters - his miser, Ebenezer Scrooge; the crooked Fagin; feckless, self-deluding Mr Micawber; bitter, abandoned bride Miss Havisham; fawning lawyer Uriah Heep.
All plausible individuals when compared with Michael Jackson.
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