Latest news with #RatsinaSack
New European
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The Sun sends Cole to Washington
Then last month we ruminated on how he had done his American dream no harm by penning a batshit mental piece for his paper about a recent trip to the country in which everyone – waitresses, cab drivers, bellhops, Uncle Tom Cobley and all – couldn't wait to gush about their worries about the state of Britain upon hearing Cole's accent. Last year Rats in a Sack reported how Harry Cole, the Sun's political editor, was desperate to desert these shores for Trumpland. With his Tory contacts out of power, and not being groomed by News Corp bosses as management material, Carrie Johnson's ex-boyfriend was said to be keen on a transatlantic transfer. 'Complaints ranged from locking people up for things they post on social media, the near-endless stream of protest hate and bile in our cities every Saturday afternoon to the scarring legacy of a generation of kids mutilated by the NHS at the Tavistock gender clinic,' wrote Cole, shaking his head at the potpourri of issues complete strangers had fretted about unprompted. Now, finally, 'the wantaway striker's come-and-get-me plea' – as the Currant Bun's sports hacks would once have put it – has been heard. Cole is being packed off to Washington by Sun bosses after being appointed editor-at-large. 'After covering six PMs, a pandemic, wars and all the political skullduggery of Westminster, it's a wrench to leave the Lobby after ten years,' says Cole in a News UK press release, neglecting to mention that much of that skullduggery – such as, say, Downing Street hosting raucous parties while the rest of the country had to stay at home by law – The Sun did its very best to play down. He will write a weekly column for the paper as well as host an evening talk show broadcast on YouTube and the firm's little-watched Talk outlet. With Cole off to cover his hero Trump Stateside, a considerable gap has opened at the paper for a new political editor, still considered a plum job despite the paper's waning influence. Current favourites include Ryan Sabey, Cole's deputy, and Kate Ferguson, political editor for the Sun's Sunday edition, while the Daily Mail's Harriet Line might be an option were the paper to look externally.
New European
22-04-2025
- Politics
- New European
Kemi's incompetence no surprise to Spectator staff
Confronted with a poll of party members on grassroots Tory website ConservativeHome showing a majority think she is failing to deliver any actual policies the electorate can get get behind, Badenoch responded with her usual barrage of bluster, bombast and baloney: 'We are working on the plans! We have policies when we need them! I won't be rushed!' For staff at the Spectator long in the tooth enough crossed paths with Kemi Badenoch – the magazine's head of digital from 2015 to 2016 – this morning's Radio 4 Today interview with Amol Rajan was shudderingly familiar. The motormouth rhetoric coupled with a complete absence of any concrete strategy for containing the rising threat of Nigel Farage's Reform party came as no surprise to those who endured similar spiels in her brief tenure at the right wing magazine. 'She was unbelievably crap,' one Spectator insider told magazine The Fence in 2022. Badenoch operated a 'kiss up, kick down' policy – brown-nosing editor at the time Fraser Nelson and chairman Andrew Neil while being rude and difficult to junior staff. 'She would come to meetings and blether on and on about her long term strategy for success,' another co-worker at the time told Rats in a Sack. 'The trouble is, nothing ever actually happened. She was just a major league jazz hands merchant and utterly hopeless at getting stuff done. None of us could understand why she was in the job.' In a brief post describing her time at the Spectator and its sister magazine Apollo, Badenoch claimed: 'I redesigned and delivered the digital strategy for these two publications.' 'Typical Kemi,' her former colleague told Rats. 'What does it actually mean? And what did she actually achieve? The answer to both questions is: nothing.' Badenoch has been lead of the opposition for six months. Whether she lasts longer in this job than she did at the Speccie remains to be seen.
New European
10-04-2025
- Politics
- New European
Harry Cole's vivid imagination
Now he's done himself no harm by penning a batshit mental piece for his paper which should find favour with immigration officials scouring media types' output to ensure they're simpatico with the MAGA agenda. Last year Rats in a Sack reported how Harry Cole, the Sun's political editor, was desperate to desert these shores for Trumpland. With his Tory contacts out of power, and not being groomed by News Corp bosses as management material, Carrie Johnson's ex-boyfriend was said to be keen on a transatlantic transfer. Under the unwieldy headline 'Americans kept asking me 'What the hell is going on in Britain?' – we need to be very worried by the answer', Cole paints a picture of a recent trip Stateside in which everyone – 'from cab-drivers, bellboys, waitresses and strangers to security guards' – was concerned about the state of the UK under Sir Keir Starmer's apparently dystopian rule. 'Complaints ranged from locking people up for things they post on social media, the near-endless stream of protest hate and bile in our cities every Saturday afternoon to the scarring legacy of a generation of kids mutilated by the NHS at the Tavistock gender clinic,' writes Cole, shaking his head at the potpourri of issues his accent had provoked curiously well-informed bellboys and waitresses to bring up with him. 'But most chillingly, there was a repeated fear of ever visiting over concerns they would be mugged or stabbed,' he adds of the inhabitants of notoriously crime-free America (mass shootings in 2025 so far: 91, with 118 dead and 338 wounded). While conceding that some of this was prompted by 'endless knocking pieces from left-wing US broadsheets' – conjuring up images of cabbies tut-tutting over the New York Times op-ed pages – Cole warns that 'the message is clear: Britain looks totally bonkers at the moment and is serving as a chilling warning for America of what might be'. In particular Americans were apparently desperate to bring up unprompted with Cole the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, a woman convicted at Poole Magistrates' Court last week of breaching an abortion clinic protection zone, US bellboys being famously consumers of the website of the Bournemouth Echo. Such cases were putting off 'the very people we need to welcome with open arms to spend big at our globally loved landmarks', worried Cole, space constraints alas preventing him from noting that inbound travel to the US is now projected to decline by 5.5% this year instead of growing by nearly 9% as had previously been forecast, thanks largely to the conduct of the sainted Donald Trump. Cole filed this 1,000 words of what our American friends would call baloney on April 6 and has since been forced to spend the best part of a week writing about how his hero has knocked $6.6 trillion off the stock markets. What a sad loss to the British media landscape he'll be once Uncle Sam finally comes calling!
New European
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Daniel Hannan, the world's worst television reviewer
That review was on the Conservative Home website, and penned by noted cultural critic and self-styled Brain of Brexit Daniel Hannan. Rather than the script, direction or performances, none of which Hannan appears to have much interest in, the Tory peer was worked up about the story being about a young boy being accused of killing a girl after consuming hateful misogynistic content online, rather than his own personal hobby horse of Muslim grooming gangs. The Netflix drama Adolescence has met with record ratings and pretty much universal acclaim. Except for one TV reviewer, however, who slammed the show for, er, being about something else rather than what he thinks it should have been about. 'It's quite an achievement to write a drama about violence against women set in a post-industrial town and to make the culprit a working-class white boy,' he fulminates. 'Have we truly forgotten the abuse of thousands – almost certainly tens of thousands – of underage girls in the grooming scandal?' He added: 'No, the documentary waiting to be made is about how some immigrant communities cling to attitudes that are at odds with those of their new country, and how pusillanimous the police, social services and local government are in confronting that fact.' Leaving aside that Adolescence is not, actually, a documentary, his entire review is fury that its focus is on something completely different from another, unrelated, scandal. Rats in a Sack eagerly awaits Hannan's review of another recent hit featuring crime in a northern town. 'The makers of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl are clearly trying to distract from the failures of the grooming scandal by trying to convince a credulous British public the true enemy in our midst is a penguin passing himself off as a chicken by wearing a red rubber glove on his head.'
New European
14-02-2025
- Politics
- New European
Dubai Dicky gets a mauling from Julia Hartley-Brewer
A stopped clock, as the saying goes, is right twice a day, and it is with that in mind that Rats in a Sack can report that… Julia Hartley-Brewer has found herself on the right side of history. Reform deputy leader Richard Tice probably thought he was on a pretty safe wicket when he went on Harley-Brewer's Talk (formerly TalkTV) show yesterday to recite his party's established foreign policy position that Donald Trump is right about everything. Unfortunately for Dubai Dicky, the occasional MP for Boston and Skegness, he found himself coming under some surprisingly hard questioning on his party's backing for Trump's unilateral peace deal in Ukraine. 'Which part of Britain would you give away if we were invaded and you wanted to negotiate a peace?,' asked Hartley-Brewer. 'None at all, none at all,' responded Tice. 'Oh, so you wouldn't want to give away any of Britain? But it's ok to give away a bit of Ukraine?' asked the presenter. 'Hang on, it's not us giving it away, Julia, it's Ukraine,' said Tice, fundamentally misunderstanding the question, Trump's negotiation and the entire invasion more widely. 'Ukraine doesn't want to give it away,' explained Hartley-Brewer, speaking like Joyce Grenfell to a particularly simple child. 'Ultimately in Northern Ireland, there was a negotiation to stop the killing,' said Tice. 'It involved horrendous compromises that lots of people didn't want to make.' 'We didn't give away territory,' said Hartley-Brewer. 'That's also correct,' conceded Tice. 'How long would you fight for this country?,' ended Hartley-Brewer. 'Until I'm dead,' insisted Tice. 'Well, exactly,' said the presenter. 'That's what the Ukrainian people would ideally do if they were given support.' If it were a boxing match Tice's corner would have thrown in the towel after 30 seconds. Perhaps he should make an official complaint via Talk's international editor – and his girlfriend – Isabel Oakeshott next time he's visiting her in the Gulf! Things were a little more sedate later in the day on Kevin O'Sullivan's show. Interviewing Milly the Furry, an American woman who likes dressing as a sports mascot, about the popularity of so-called 'furry culture', O'Sullivan posed such tough questions as 'Do you have lots of furry friends?', 'When you do get together with your furry friends, what do you get up to?' and 'Do you frolic?' Perhaps Tice would prefer that kind of grilling next time.
