“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.   More...

“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.   More...

“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.   More...

“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.   More...

“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.   More...

“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.”   More...

“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.   More...