“It’s not just Harriet Harman, it’s the whole tarnished gang of New Labour ministers that make me feel that I’ve stepped into a time machine and been whisked back three millennia to ancient Judea. If these Pharisees had their way, Sir Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin would be wearing a pair of goat’s horns as he was herded, bleating furiously, over a nearby cliff.

“True, the High Priest Gordon Brown and his Archimandrite Jacqui Smith have moved to distance themselves from Harman’s more outrageous assertion that retroactive legislation might be employed to shear the Goodwin’s golden fleece, but our so-called leaders remain wedded to the idea that they can somehow maintain their own authority by scapegoating the bankers.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column here.

“A union between a compulsively attention-seeking and ignorant racist wearing a dress donated by Mohamed Fayed, and a golf-club wielding thug, which was attended by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, together with assorted superannuated pop singers, while Max Clifford span a line and wangled publicity deals from Richard Desmond’s OK! magazine and Living TV.

On the face of it the wedding of Jade Goody and Jack Tweed was every single little thing every right-thinking man and woman in this country has come to loathe – the very recrudescence of the canker that infests the social body.”

To read the rest of Self’s First Post column, go here.

“Twenty-six-year-old Kirstie Booker was killed in a car crash in 2006 and her organs were then used to help no fewer than five people. However, her mother has spoken out this week, seemingly suggesting that the way the NHS allocates such organs should be subject to a different ethic.

‘I find it offensive,’ says Eunice Booker, ‘that one in four of the livers donated go to alcoholics. If there are two people side by side wanting a liver, and both have the right tissue match, and one is an alcoholic and one isn’t, there’s no contest – you take the one who’s not an alcoholic, they are more entitled.'”

To read the rest of The First Post column from February 18, go here.

“Last week David Cameron pledged to send his three children to state schools, saying it was ‘crazy’ to pay large sums for private education. Presumably he’d like his parents to have a refund on his own Eton fees – which at today’s prices would amount to a cool £156,000 – on the grounds that such privilege hasn’t really got him that far in life.”

Read the rest of February 12’s First Post column here.