It's all French to Boris Johnson
The pair would engage in 'frank dialogue', Vale de Almeida said, adding: 'The rule at the time was that you had to ask questions in French and the answers had to be in French. Boris would ask questions about straight bananas in his shaky French and I'd do my best to answer.' This may have led to some of the EU's explanations in Johnson's stories about bonkers Brussels Eurocrats being lost in translation.
The real Banksy
Trouble in the West Country where Arron Banks, who is running as the Reform UK candidate to be mayor of the West of England, says the local Green-led council has banned him from referring to himself as 'Banksy'. Banks, one of the original 'Bad Boys of Brexit ', who helped fund Nigel Farage's campaign in 2016, says it is 'for fear of upsetting the other 'Banksy' who makes his money from stencilling buildings with witty doodles. Banks is not ruling out legal action.
'I've been called Banksy as a nickname for 40-plus years; the other Banksy is a street artist that illegally paints on property,' he says. Banks is now considering stencilling Bristol council offices with a 'Banksy for Bristol' stencil. 'What's good for the goose, is good for the gander,' he says.
Peers' North-South divide
Under-threat hereditary peers lack a North-South balance. 'So far as I am aware, at present we have only one hereditary peer in the House from Yorkshire,' Liberal Democrat peer Lord Wallace of Saltaire told peers. 'The North of England is very under-represented.' Wallace blames 'a tendency for young generations to move to the Home Counties over the years and to go to school in the Home Counties as well. So the regional representation of the hereditaries is not particularly good.'
Time for some levelling-up?
Parliamentary language
Veteran actor Nigel Havers, 73, about to tour the country in a one-man show called Talking B-ll---s, says: 'I wrote an autobiography a few years back and I wanted to call it B-ll---s, and the publisher said 'You can't say that!' I said, 'Why not? It's not a swear word.' Havers points out that it can be uttered in the House Of Commons.
Havers is right. Former deputy speaker Dame Eleanor Laing ruled in 2021 that 'b-ll---s' was acceptable in a Commons debate if not aimed at another MP.
Mel's pulled punches
Shadow chancellor Mel Stride's job is to scrutinise the work of Chancellor Rachel Reeves whenever he can. But the pair get on well, and met for a cup of tea last month. And he does not like the ' Rachel from Accounts ' nickname. 'No, I don't particularly,' he told me on GB News' Chopper's Political Podcast yesterday. 'Personally, my kind of politics tends to be a little bit less personalised. I'm more interested in tackling the things that people are doing or not doing.' I fear Stride's decency is from a different political time.
One club Rice
Sunderland's most unlikely celebrity football fan Sir Tim Rice, who grew up in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, has been explaining his allegiance to the North-East club since the age of seven. 'I saw the name Sunderland... a beautiful sounding word, conjuring images of beaches and palm trees. I thought, 'My team's Sunderland!' he says. With the club currently pinning hopes on a Premier League return, Rice says: 'You can change everything in life, but you can't change your football team. I have remained loyal.'
Easter egg
An early Easter egg has been delivered to Salisbury Cathedral, produced by a peregrine falcon in the cathedral tower. Falcons first nested there in the 1860s and are back again after disappearing for 90 years. Members of the congregation are watching the peregrines sitting on the egg on a webcam. But congregants hearing the flap of mighty wings should be advised that it is not necessarily a Lenten angel but more likely a bird of prey looking for some lunch. Ladies of a certain age are advised not to wear rabbit or fox fur to Easter morning communion.
Radio 4's declining standards
Veteran BBC broadcaster Edward Stourton, 67, tells the Oldie magazine that Radio 4 is getting more middle class. 'I think all of us have become less posh as the years have gone by. When I hear old archive bits of myself, I sound like the Queen.' Still, Stourton is having fun. Asked what he takes with him on his travels, he replies: 'A book. And a sarong, which I wear at home in the evening.' What's wrong with a kilt?
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Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Has France got what it takes to stand up to the Islamists?
In the early 1990s, an underground organisation was launched called the Barbie Liberation Movement (BLM). Its mission statement was a 'commitment to challenging malign systems', by which it meant the patriarchy. The BLM was inspired by a talking Barbie doll, launched in 1992, who had 270 platitudes, one of which was 'math class is tough'. Outraged feminist groups forced Mattel Inc, the makers of Barbie, to remove what they described as a sexist slur. Now, though, may be the hour for the Barbie Liberation Movement to reform and once more fight the patriarchy. This time, however, the patriarchy is different. It no longer consists of ageing white men with their outdated views that science and maths are subjects best left to boys; it's Islamists, whose view on women make the men of Mattel in the early 1990s seem positively progressive. Last week, an Islamist mob forced the mayor of Noisy-le-Sec, a Parisian suburb run by the Communists, to cancel a screening of Barbie, the Hollywood blockbuster starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. They liked neither the feminist nor the homosexual elements in the film and threatened the mayor that there would be trouble if the open-air screening went ahead. The mayor succumbed to the threats, provoking an angry backlash among France's political class. Aurore Bergé, the minister for gender equality, said it was more than just a thuggish threat from a group of young men: it was an attempt by Islamists to 'infiltrate' society and impose their values at the expense of the Republic's. Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, also used the word 'infiltrate' and said the objective of the Islamists is 'to tip the whole of French society under sharia law'. In the face of such dedicated fanaticism, said Retailleau, 'the slightest retreat…is unacceptable'. The mayor of Noisy-le-Sec has promised to show the film – which was requested by residents of his district – at a later date; but rather than admit he was wrong to cave in to the Islamists, Mayor Olivier Sarrabeyrouse has tried to blame the furore on his political adversaries. At a press conference he declared: While I continue to condemn in the strongest terms the acts that I have described as obscurantism and fundamentalism, I condemn even more strongly the political exploitation and speculation, the racist and Islamophobic hatred that has been pouring out of the right and the far right. Sarrabeyrouse also pointed a finger at journalists, suggesting there were more important matters in the world than Islamists curtailing freedom of expression. I regret that you journalists are still arguing about our local issue, even though a few days ago, several of your colleagues were cowardly murdered by the Israeli army. Sarrabeyrouse doesn't appear to understand what is at stake; or perhaps he does and he knows, like others on Europe's political left, that pandering to elements of the Muslim vote is the only way to be re-elected, as they have long since lost the support of the white working class. The French call this 'clientélisme'. In June this year the official magazine for all France's elected mayors published a warning ahead of next May's municipal elections. Headlined 'Muslim Brotherhood: the risk of 'clientelist deals' in municipal elections', the article relayed the key findings of a recent government report about the Muslim Brotherhood in France. The secretive Islamist organisation had embarked on a new strategy, warned the report, which they described as 'municipal Islamism'. The Brotherhood would stand some of its members in next year's elections while also organising ''clientelist transactions' aimed at satisfying certain specific segments of the Muslim electorate'. Mayor Sarrabeyrouse will have a hard time trying to convince France that his critics are 'Islamophobic'; the threats made against Barbie are just the latest in a series of ugly incidents this summer. In June, a pop-up store opened in Lyon selling Islamic clothing. Stating that it catered to 'modest Muslim women', the shop refused entry to any customer whose head was uncovered. In July, a cinema in Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris, cancelled at late notice a documentary about freedom of expression inspired by the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff a decade ago. It was reported that the cinema felt that the film violated its 'welcome charter', which 'prohibits political events'. This hadn't prevented the cinema from showing a film a week earlier about environmental activism. At the end of July, a 28-year-old woman was beaten up at a station south of Paris by a man who called her a 'dirty whore' for wearing a short skirt. The man's wife, who was wearing a North African djellaba, joined in the attack. Nine years ago this month, I wrote an article for Coffee House headlined 'France is right to ban the burkini'. That summer, young women had begun appearing on French beaches wearing the Islamic burkini; coming only days after an Islamist had murdered 86 people at Nice, the authorities banned the garment for fear it would provoke a wider French public still in shock after the massacre. I argued that the French were right because the burkini was just one strand of an Islamist strategy of intimidation. I referenced the case of a Muslim waitress in a Nice bar who had recently been assaulted by two men for serving alcohol during Ramadan. I also mentioned the young woman in Reims, beaten by a pack of furious teenage girls who objected to her sunbathing in a bikini in a public park. At the time Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, warned of the emergence of a police of morality, and said: 'If we do not put an end to this, there is a risk that in ten years, young Muslim girls who do not want to wear the veil or burkini will be stigmatised and peer-pressured.' Last year in Montpellier a 13-year-old Muslim girl was beaten unconscious outside her school gates in Montpellier by a fellow pupil who felt she dressed too liberally. The Islamists haven't mellowed since 2016. Quite the opposite. They sense that France, and Europe in general, is weakening. They haven't the stomach for a fight. Most European politicians, like the mayor in Noisy-le-Sec, just want a quiet life. Better to submit than to stand up to the Islamists.
The Sun
2 hours ago
- The Sun
Trump Zelensky meeting latest: Don says Ukraine can end war ‘immediately' in talks today as Russia launches more strikes
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Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
We led a delegation to investigate Europe's targeting of free speech. What we saw shocked us
Instead of fixing a surging migrant crisis and stagnant economy, the UK and EU are even trying to censor American critics of their policies
