WEDNESDAY A.M.
The ten-day battle is over, a pall of smoke lies over the blasted field, the wounded moan pitifully and families kneel in prayer over the corpses of their loved ones.
The Loyal Ulster Mounted Media is in full retreat as Michelle O’Neill stands at the head of her troops, face blackened and tunic torn, but otherwise unharmed after the latest Battle of Blame.
Another bloody encounter in the Shinner Wars is over, this one over who knew what, when and where. It wasn’t as long or historic as the Bobby Storey Battle of 2020, which history will actually remember as more of a siege; but it’s important nonetheless because it highlights the admirable determination of the Loyal Ulster Mounted to take on the rebels whenever the opportunity presents.
Indeed, such is that commitment, such is that courage, that even as they fled the field, they launched a rearguard action, although the skirmish was over as quickly as it started and an agreement was reached – namely that a £500 plane ticket to Portugal isn’t worth dying in a ditch for.
It’s not over – it never is. The keyboard commandos will regroup and soon the air will again be filled with the clatter of machine guns and printing presses, the airwaves thick with the smell of gunpowder and concern.
And who knows? Their plucky efforts may one of these days be rewarded with a senior Shinner head instead of a press office head.
Jacob takes the nuclear option
SQUINTER’S current audiobook companion on his evening walk is Truss at 10 by historian Anthony Seldon – an account of, well... Liz Truss in Downing Street.
It’s a compelling and fascinating read and what particularly struck Squinter is that though Truss was only kicked out of office two years ago, the 44 days it took her to lose to a lettuce were so bizarre and surreal that it feels like the whole thing happened in another era.
SHOCKER: Jacob Rees Mogg's had an energy brainwave
The tales of her ineptitude are legion, but on a personal level she emerges as a desperately insecure person constantly worrying that she wasn’t up to the big job and as shocked and bewildered by her elevation to Downing Street as the rest of us.
Squinter’s only halfway through, but in the keen competition for best anecdote, the preposterous Jacob Rees-Mogg already looms large.
In a brainstorming session days ahead of taking the big job, Truss had a posse of economists and colleagues gather at her home to discuss radical ideas for the government plan that would be her downfall. On the question of energy, Rees-Mogg told the room that what was needed was more and smaller nuclear power stations. He addressed the little matter of price and time by pointing out that a British nuclear sub could be sailed up the Mersey right away and plugged into the Liverpool grid.
The man once known as the Honourable Member for the 18th Century is no longer an MP.
Shocker.
Stormont’s back in black
THEY’RE cleaning Stormont up. If you feel like inserting your own jokes at this point, please do so now and we’ll move on.
Cleaning and repointing of the Portland stone is to get under way shortly, at what cost we’re not told. We’re not told either whether the work will be carried out only to the front of the building – the only bit that Jo Public actually ever gets to see – or whether the mess at the back is finally going to be cleared up.
What? You didn’t known theres a mess at the back of that beautiful, grand, grade A-listed wedding cake on the hill? Let Squinter fill you in, so...
DIRTY JOB: Stormont's getting a makeover – but how much of it?
Stormont’s easy to spot, as anyone walking or motoring through certain parts of town will know. There are particularly good views of it from the Glen Road near St Mary’s and All Saints schools. It’s because the building occupies a very strategic site, but it’s mostly because of that distinctive light-coloured stone (English, natch), with which you’ll be particularly familiar if you’ve ever walked up that sloping mile-long drive. What you won’t be familiar with is the back of the building, which is a bit of a grey-black mess thanks to... the Nazis.
Fearful that the Luftwaffe would manage to do what the Ra always failed to do, the Orange, sorry, unionist government painted it black so it wouldn’t be quite so visible to German bombers at night. But they didn’t go for masonry paint as they feared that would be too hard to get off. Instead they absolutely slathered the thing in a thick mixture of tar and cowshit, because obviously that would come off at the lightest scrape of a stiff brush, right?
Victory in Europe Day was quickly followed by Disaster at Dundonald Day. The cleaning job was so devilishly difficult they only did the front. So, Stormont is lovely out front, filthy out back.
Feel free to insert even more jokes here.
Well, bless my soul!
TO blustery Ballymoney on Saturday on an errand of such eye-gouging inanity that it shall not detain us.
The town looks as if it has accepted the inevitability of its own decline since Squinter was last there at some indeterminate time between Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister and the second Covid lockdown. Shuttered premises and charity shops dot the main street like bad or missing teeth and the startling lack of shoppers as midday approaches suggests that locals don’t like the changing vibe and vista any more than Squinter does.
At the top of the town former DUP MLA Mervyn Storey is at the head of about a dozen people, reading scripture to no-one in particular in between some solid pieces of advice about this and that – eternity, mostly.
Over a cup of tea and a scone five minutes later, Squinter’s reading the leaflet he’s been given by one of Mervyn’s Christian comrades, in search of some reassurance that the hereafter may still be an option for him should he decide at some stage that the hereafter exists, he finds only disappointment.
In a list of Mervyn’s Calvinist can-dos and can’ts, No.3 reads: ‘Resist the temptation that there is something you can do to save your own soul.’
Turns out Calvinists don’t think a person can be saved by good deeds or even by turning to God because everything is preordained. So what’s the point of being good?, Squinter wonders.
Or indeed of being Mervyn?
Free Gear Keir vows to give it all back – or some of it at least
KEIR Starmer didn’t do anything wrong in accepting luxury suits, designer glasses and various other largesse from his fabulously wealthy pal, Lord Alli and others. But he’s giving the money back anyway. Or at least some of it.
He’s not giving back the cost of the corporate sports tickets, mostly because he wants to keep going to watch sports in heated seats.
BBC politics correspondent Nick Watt told Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight on Tuesday that some Labour ministers have their heads in their hands over Starmer’s lack of politican nous. It’s not just that Starmer doesn’t have any political talent, reported Watt, it’s that Starmer doesn’t know he doesn’t have any political talent.
Attempts by colleagues of Free Gear Keir to explain away his love of high-end sweg by pointing out that the Tories were worse is perhaps the most hopeless PR strategy of the past decade – and remember those were the Tory years. He knew full well that every slurp he took from the trough would be gleefully fallen upon by the Tory media.
And yet he stuck his head in anyway.
