“The British National Party are always whining about how the ‘media pigs’ distort their honest yeoman words into sinister neo-fascist claptrap, and demanding they be given serious consideration. The other night, listening to the midnight news on Radio 4, it seemed to me that they’d got what they asked for.

“It was a dispassionate report about a meeting of BNP candidates for the European parliamentary elections. Nick Griffin, the party fuhrer, had said that he didn’t mind picking up protest votes because of the expenses scandal – the British public had every right to protest.

“Now, it won’t be long before Labour MPs and ministers crawl out of the non-ideological woodwork where they spend most of their time hiding, and begin their own plainting. They’ll be telling the electorate that we must vote Labour, however disillusioned we may be with the Government’s record, if only to keep the BNP out.”

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

“If there’s any drawback to political schadenfreude I’ve yet to discover what it is, and while pessimism may not make you popular it sure as hell means you’re likely to be right more often than those who, following Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

“So, we come to Gordon Brown, who, for years in advance of his ascent to the highest office in the land, I was stigmatising as the Anthony Eden de nos jours.

“It didn’t need much historical acumen to grasp the parallel, for, like Eden, Brown had spent the best years of his career waiting for a golden apple to fall into his generous lap, while lacking either the courage to fight for it, the guile to swipe it, or certainly the principle needed to say, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers’, and walk away, hopefully together with a sizeable chunk of his party.”

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

“The name ‘Sir Jim Rose’ sounds like a solecism to me – surely if you accept a knighthood your moniker should reflect your nobility? Either style yourself Sir James Rose or stick to Jim. Still, not only does his very name embody a linguistic error, but Rose – a former head of Ofsted – has the temerity to be launching a campaign aimed at ‘helping’ those who don’t speak like what they oughta.

“It’s all part of his overhaul of the national curriculum for 7-11 year olds. Rose’s proposals place a strong emphasis on teaching children to ‘recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English’. A Government-backed report has identified what it terms ‘word poverty’, and suggests that up to 50 per cent of primary pupils in some areas have speech and language difficulties.

“The solution is for speaking and listening to be considered as subjects in their own right; Rose’s recommendations will build on the £40m Every Child a Talker programme which was launched last year.”

Read the rest of this article here.

“What on earth got into the heads of United Nations officialdom when they decided it would be a good idea to hold a conference on racism in Geneva? I shouldn’t imagine that Ban Ki-moon had much input, because like most UN Secretary Generals, he’s nothing much besides a superannuated politician and placeman.

“In Britain we bump our duds ‘upstairs’ to the European Commission – globally they get bumped up to the UN. If Ban had any opinions worth holding, beyond a flabby attachment to multilateralism, he wouldn’t be in the job.”

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

“The emails were ‘inappropriate and juvenile’, while the sending of them is among ‘such actions (that) have no place in public life’. So Gordon Brown grovels, like a wounded Cyclops, goaded out of his No 10 cave by those brave Argonauts, the Tories. Meanwhile, the media is falling over itself to huff and puff – yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many commentators and politicians being so surprised by so predictable a happening.

“I don’t believe anyone who takes any interest in British politics can have been remotely shocked by the antics of Damian McBride and Derek ‘Dolly’ Draper – the latter may now be a qualified psychotherapist, but clearly this transference was only ever psyche-deep; for underneath his conscious pose as a principled pundit, there lurk the instincts of an immature – yes, the PM had it right – anorak.

“McBride is another of the same genus: the obsessively politicking nerd, willing to go to any lengths in order to advance his party, much as a rougher lad will crack the opposing football team’s supporters’ heads, in the erroneous belief that this adds lustre to his own side. I first saw these types smearing their opponents, rigging ballots and briefing journalists, when their candidate was up for election as blackboard monitor at primary school. There’s something about politics – and elections in particular – that seem to attract them the way excrement does flies.”

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

“Is it only me, or is anyone else getting a weird feeling of ‘Dubya Lite’ coming off the shapely form of Barack Obama as he tools Air Force One around the world, a-meetin’ and a-greetin’?

“It was bad serendipity indeed that bouffant-haired nutter Kim Jong-il chose to launch his duff ICBM on the same day Obama stood up in Prague and committed himself to a world without nuclear weapons, but even so I remain unconvinced that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions really are the biggest threat to peace that we face.

“Let’s step out of the comfort zone of Western power just for a second and try and see the world from a different perspective: here we have the man who has his finger on the trigger of the biggest nuclear arms stockpile in the world, gaily telling us that the proliferation of these weapons must be stopped.”

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

“Surely the thing that really rankles about Richard Timney’s habits is not that he watches pay-per-view porn, but that he’s such a crap bookkeeper? With keyboard-clackers losing their jobs like Tommies going over the desktop no one can afford to have makeweights on the payroll like Timney, but Jacqui Smith has been dobbing him somewhere between 20 and 40 grand a year to play the part of her ‘constituency aide’.

“I don’t happen to think pornography is a victimless crime: on the end of that remote control button is not some free-spirited – yet entirely well-adjusted – nymphomaniac, but a collection of miserable and tranquilised emotional zombies.”

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

“I’d quite like Tony McNulty to resign from the Government and piss off back to Harrow. I treasure a vision of the pock-faced former Brownite hatchet man mooning about the parental home like an overgrown adolescent.

“No doubt from time to time one of his old parents would say to him: ‘D’you know what you’re going to do with your life now, Tony?’ And the former minister would just shrug his shoulders and mutter, ‘Dunno’.”

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

“I can never see the smug, lipless face and carefully cultivated blond tresses of the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell — let alone read his name in print — without wanting to bodily remove him from the greasy pole he’s so intent on shinning up. There seems little the man will say that isn’t for the express reason of furthering his career.

“Take alcohol, for example. It’s not that Purnell displays any more liking for intoxication — legal or otherwise — than the rest of his Westminster colleagues, it’s simply that Purnell and booze go hand-in-hand, cavorting across the grey fields of contemporary public-health policy.

“It was Purnell who introduced 24-hour drinking to our sozzled land, and by golly, he’s not about to let go of the idea that it’s a — ‘hic’ — good thing. This alone explains why he has been first among the equally tipsy Labour ministers who’ve lurched to criticise Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, for daring to suggest that there should be minimum unit pricing for alcohol in Britain.”

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