Some Guy Behind A Desk

Here at Bounded, we take research pretty seriously and our policy research team has really been putting in the hours. In fact, we are offering our expertise to all media outlets as The Association of British School Leavers.

Seriously.

Any newspaper running a story on the subject of, for example, University fees, or voting preferences amongst young voters, or drug use, or Post-Compulsory Examination & Accreditation Standards, can now ask Sordel and - as a representative of The Association of British School Leavers - I am authorised to give a view on that in the name of the Association, for attribution.

Sordel has been inspired to do this by the Taxpayers' Alliance which, as you will be aware, regularly comments on public policy and which, since it has a name, must be a thing. Personally, I always assumed that it was a bit like Mumsnet ... which, for all I know about Mumsnet, it might be. It is, after all, Britain's Non-Partisan Grassroots Campaign for Lower Taxes and Better Government. They say so themselves.

They're on Question Time and everything, so it must be true. (Note to BBC producers: The Association of British School Leavers is able to furnish spokespersons for broadcast events.)

Yet, for a grass-roots campaign, The Taxpayers' Alliance does not have especially "grass roots" origins. A rather elderly article from The Guardian informs me that they are or were actually funded by a small number of affluent businessmen. Nothing wrong with that, of course: millionaires are taxpayers too, after all, nearly as much as the rest of us.

The representatives of the Taxpayers' Alliance are also, quite probably, taxpayers. (Sordel did, at some point in the distant past, leave school.) But they aren't exactly canonical examples of your concerned taxpayer. For the most part they are right-leaning policy wonks & bloggers, much as one would expect of an organisation with a professed hostility to increased public sector expenditure.

If you want, you can join the grassroots side of their campaign, although on their site the section on Our Branches is "Coming Soon". (We at The Association of British School Leavers hope to get details of our University Liaison Programme up even sooner. Watch this space.) Careful how you use that site, though, because if you happen to leave your name there, then you just joined their campaign.

There is absolutely nothing sinister about any of this, except for the fact that our response to a story might be very different if the newspaper decoded its source slightly more than it does.

It's not The Taxpayers' Alliance, speaking for millions. It's not The Association of British School Leavers. It's just some guy behind a desk.

The Land of Plenty

Who would have thought that Kevin MacKenzie was so keen on chocolate?

Kevin (no, that isn't a typo: I'm docking him an L for evident stupidity) appeared last week on the BBC's flagship outlet for hot air and vapidity, Question Time. (QT may be the flagship, but the fleet is now so populous that even the Israeli navy would struggle to stop every vessel in its course.)

Anyway, Kev is no stranger to nautical strategy, having been editor of The Sun at the time of the infamous "Gotcha!" headline that announced to the world the sinking of the Belgrano. So one awaited with breathless anticipation his comments on the worst maritime catastrophe since BP left the cap off the toothpaste tube.

A catastrophe that befell, not only those who died on the ship, but Israeli foreign policy.

The water had been somewhat muddied previous to Kev's contribution by Matthew Parris, the disarmingly charming and diffident columnist who had begun by announcing his complete boredom with the Middle East and intention to steer well clear of discussing it.

(Nice chap, Mr. Parris ... Sordel would have him to dinner. Both him and his deeply untroubled conscience.)

Kev, however, is not one to charm, to disarm, to equivocate. No shirker of opinion, Kev.

So, he advanced the familiar arguments on Israel's behalf, and then added this:

It seems that we have been overstating the hardship experienced by Gazans. Because there is surplus supply of Snickers.

Chocoholic Kev has a list of essentials that stops with one, and he bears an abiding grudge against Kraft for acquiring Cadbury. No Dairy Milk man, he. It's Snickers that delights the Mackenzie palate, and any aid agency that can ship him a box can rest, its humanitarian task complete.

Praise God and pass the peanut. Monkeys love them.

(Whether Mr. Parris also partakes of a quiet snicker is dubious, since he has grown tired of endless debates as to confectionery preference and is keeping his own counsel.)

Interestingly, the Snickers bar is a taste that Kev shares with the Israeli spokespersons who had used this same factoid on News 24 earlier in the day. Clearly they are of one mind with him that a nation has nothing to fear that has been visited by deliveries of what Wikipedia informs Sordel is the biggest-selling chocolate bar of all time.

It turns out that - just as economists use the price of a Big Mac & fries as a universal standard of parity for cost of living - so the ubiquity of Snickers is a barometer for international human rights. In Iran and North Korea, the snicker is seldom seen but often dreamt of.

Personally, Sordel is partial to Whole Nut, and is grateful that he lives in a country where the choice is not made on his behalf at the border.

The Arena of Antagonism

Devotees of gladiatorial combat on television will have enjoyed the last few weeks, during which the red corner has been pitted against the blue corner with a regularity not seen since The Jerry Springer Show.

It all began with a warm-up: the Resident Intellectual vs. Mrs. Brown's Little Boy, during which Andrew Marr enquired about some health issue to which it would doubtless be legally hazardous to allude too specifically. This was the appetizer, however, to a discussion of the same on Question Time, during which overweening windbag David Starkey grappled to the mat Preening Coxcomb Ben Bradshaw. These two combatants (one blue rinse away from playing the ugly sisters in an exceptionally well-cast run of Cinderella at a seaside town) provided the most compelling man-on-man horseplay since Alan Bates and Oliver Reed went at one another in Women In Love.

Better was to come, however, for in the Main Event Ian Hislop was being oiled up for a round or two with Sordel's favourite Brownie, Yvette Cooper-Balls. I have alluded to the Stepford perfection of YC-B in previous blogs. She is like the youngest matron in a boarding school: an object of fascination to boys and masters alike yet given to a defensive frostiness only thawed in the communal imagination by suspicions of illicit liaison with one of the unattached housemasters. In an environment where personal attractiveness is a secondary consideration and gender itself barely a prohibitive one, YC-B is about as comely as Labour ladies come.

Hislop, however, is no respecter or of the fairer whatever. His career on Have I Got News For You? has been founded on the sneer of startled loathing with which he meets every guest on the show, as though the only way he would even tolerate their company is if he were well-paid beforehand. Evidently he holds the duo Balls in special contempt, because it was without a blush that he accused the distaff ball of riding to a political career on the coat-tails of her husband.

At which Stepford perfection - as it always will - short-circuited and YC-B have a look that could have only been more perfectly emoted had her eyes glowed red and a spring popped out of her left ear.

Shame on you, Mr. Hislop. A low blow indeed.

This, then, is an era in which hard thoughts are given voice, as when the Resident Intellectual put it to David Cameron that he was a bit of a toff.

Yet for all the political combat, the crowning unpleasantness of this purple patch comes not from a political programme but from The X Factor, for it was here on Saturday that Danii Minogue decided (and I forget whether the predominant metaphor here was wrestling or boxing) to take off the gloves completely.

It is difficult to see exactly what prompted Danii's animosity to Danyl Johnson, but it may have something to do with a proprietorial anger at someone else choosing to spell their name in a non-standard way. Whatever the reason, she chose to greet the 27-year old's first performance on live television by alluding to tabloid stories that he is ... well, I'm guessing bisexual or bi-curious.

(Sordel doesn't read tabloids ... and if that sounds snobbish, he doesn't read broadsheets either.)

So, this is what we've come to.

It seems a long way to travel in a short time to go from an entirely reasonable question as to whether the Prime Minister is healthy enough to do the job to an (at best) tangential reference to the sexual orientation of a virtual nobody who may at some future point wish to resume his regular career as a teacher.

Maybe, though, the British Public has grown tired of the bread and only a genuine circus will do.