WHEN I dumped this column in the editor’s laptop yesterday the deadline was long gone, my copy horribly late. I had more important things to do first, I told him.
Like writing a letter to the Press Complaints Commission asking why I should I have my privacy invaded by a publicity-hungry, cash-obsessed celebrity barrister who has spent the last twelve years making her children’s nannies sign confidentiality agreements?
And why the woman who left Downing Street with a verbal two-finger salute at the media – “We won’t miss YOU lot!” – then races into print in that low-life rag The Times (and the only slightly more respectable Sun) to ruin my breakfast with revelations about her contraception arrangements and the day her baby filled his nappy at the White House. Not to mention her teenage son sicking up and sleeping it off in Leicester Square (Er, didn’t she once tell us not to mention that? – Ed.)
Yes, it was a busy morning. When I should have been keeping Higher Authority happy with my weekly report on the doings of The Byreman and Jock the Cock I was actually firing off an angry email to the Law Society to ask if practicing lawyers (and a Recorder to boot!) like Cherie Booth-bloody-Blair are allowed to invade their own privacy (and mine!) even if it IS for a million quid or more.
I know, I know . . . just the evening before I had been telling Berwick Civic Society members – who donated £50 to the Josie Grove Leukaemia Fund for the benefit of my advice – that if you don’t approve of a newspaper’s contents the solution is, quite literally, in your own hands. In my case, the offending newspapers are now lining our compost bin.
But there really is no escape from ‘suicide bomber’ celebs bent on lobbing Semtex-like lumps of their private lives wrapped inside otherwise humdrum headlines to destroy the peace and quiet of this reader’s privacy: no sooner had I dumped the Cherie-sodden rags down the garden than That Woman popped up again for half-an-hour’s free advertising on Woman’s Hour!
It gets worse: every weekday morning on Radio Four next week That Woman will be reading instalments of her autobiography in the Beeb’s Book of the Week spot.
I for one won’t be listening and I appeal to like-minded protesters to join me in a powerful alternative: Banksy’s Blair Switch Project.
At ten every morning from Monday to Friday next week, having cancelled the offending newspapers, I will switch off Radio Four and carry out a discussion based on the sensible news headlines that occupy the pages of The Journal,
You can hear me, message me and talk to me live at www.banksy.fm until we both run out of things to say.
And you won’t hear a word from That Woman, I promise . . .
BROKEN promises being a speciality of mine, I can’t resist asking why, if the Blairs conceived Baby Blair sans contraception at a royal residence, they didn’t do a Posh ’n’ Becks and name him after the palace?
After all, as one of the boys in the Milfield Sunday Domino League was heard to say: “If we’re talking about naming kids after the place they were conceived I’d have to call my three Melrose Sevens, Kelso Races and Ford Anglia!”
Calling a baby ‘Balmoral Blair’ doesn’t sound quite so bad after that, does it?
WHILE we’re playing name games, an email from my old pal Dick Herkes in Chester-le-Street informs me that his granddaughter and her friends at Fyling Hall School in Robin Hood’s Bay have added a cockerel and two hens to the pets’ corner . . . and called them Ken, Tucky and Fried.
Something tells me those chickens are heading for an unhappy ending!
