Quentin Letts at the Daily Mail has obviously been asked to take London Mayor Boris Johnson down a peg or two in the light of the Olympic/Paralympic Borisfest.

Quentin has decided, therefore, to suggest that Boris is OK for a little light relief but would be no good in those situations where tough choices have to be made or brows need to be furrowed. So, in his piece on Cameron’s speech to the House on the findings of the Hillsborough Report he finished off with a dig at Boris.

Some people are currently bigging up the Mayor’s prospects. They should get real. This overdue, moving speech was one that Boris Johnson could never have given.

Mr Letts also reminded us that Boris needed to apologise as well

He once insulted Liverpool and his name was mentioned a couple of times towards the end of yesterday’s session. Should he once more apologise to Liverpool?

Actually he apologised at the time and he did so again today. But that is not the point. There is obviously a measure of irritation around Cameron’s circle about the mayor’s popularity and Quentin has probably been persuaded to spread a little poison.

Did the crowd’s reaction to Boris at the final parade of the Olympians annoy the Cameron cabal? Of course it did. But what always sticks in the throat of the Cameroons is something much more hurtful to the soul……Boris has gone before the electorate of London twice over the last five years and each time has won a mandate to govern. Cameron failed to do that in 2010 and as a result is stuck in a coalition with Clegg and Cable…

Oh dear, Dave – that must hurt….time for someone to ring Quentin again…

The UK Daily Mail has been very pursed lipped about Prince Harry’s naked romps in Vegas. Naturally, unlike the very low class Sun, it has not published the actual photos – after all the DM always steers clear of suggestive stories/pics about women (see its websites regular right hand sidebar…lol..) However it has kept the story on the front burner to highlight editor Paul Dacre’s air of disapproval and today we learned that no less a figure than Prince Charles will be sorting Harry out…

Charles, we are told, is going to have a serious chat with Harry

Although they have already spoken over the phone, Harry will be asked to explain in person how he ended up playing a sleazy game of ‘strip billiards’ with a group of strangers in a hotel suite.

Great news….and maybe Harry will then ask Charles to explain how he ended up regularly bedding his ex girlfriend Camilla while still being married to Diana.

There is a huge amount of moral blue water between a bachelor having some fun with a bunch of pretty girls and a husband quite happily betraying his own wife…..

It’s official – the BBC obviously decided to start openly pimping for Obama from the beginning of May and, unsurprisingly, the oleaginous Mark Mardell was selected to kick off the campaign with a shameless piece of brown-nosing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Since the BBC is financed by a compulsory surcharge levied on practically every household in the Britain you can now add the UK taxpayers to Obama’s list of campaign donors.

His team won’t allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.
Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.
This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.
There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

Fortunately at the moment the media influence of the left leaning BBC is counter balanced by a lively and disrespectful right wing press so readers of the UK Daily Mail were able to get a different perspective from Toby Harnden.

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.
Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’
A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

Once the BBC had a reputation for fairness and balance that was unrivalled in any other part of the world. Sadly that gold standard of reporting and commentary has been replaced by a left wing bias more reminiscent of a Polish TV station in the early 1970s.

You know what is even more worrying? They no longer feel the need to even pretend to be neutral….

Forty something UK “journalist” Samantha Brick should be scored a perfect ten for achieving maximum publicity with minimum talent. Her cri de coeur about the downside of being so beautiful has impacted the world like a tsunami – why it’s even been picked up by the leading American political website at Hot Air…

I’m tall, slim, blonde and, so I’m often told, a good-looking woman. I know how lucky I am. But there are downsides to being pretty — the main one being that other women hate me for no other reason than my lovely looks.

True, most of the reaction has been scornful and positively insulting but Samantha doesn’t care. Playing out the old showbiz adage that there can never be such a thing as bad publicity Ms Brick will reap a golden dividend of TV appearances, radio interviews and magazine articles. A book and probably a film will almost certainly be on the way as well.

Some achievement for a woman who changed career midlife from being a self proclaimed “top TV executive” (large pinch of salt needed here) to a lifestyle scribbler after having decamped across the channel to marry a Frenchman.Within microseconds of marrying Pascal she had become an expert on all things Francais, pumping out, via the UK Daily Mail, articles on stepmothering, household management, cooking and keeping slim a la Francais….oh plus “trying for a baby” and little sideswipes against former colleagues and, naturally, her first husband.

Every article is shallow, derivative and self obsessed – in other words perfect material for the Daily Mail which appears to thrive in its crusade to portray women as emotionally unstable airheads concerned primarily with their clothes, waist size and the workings of their internal pumping systems. It’s a misogynistic approach which irritates not only feminists but also those of us who appreciate the strengths and values of the women in our lives. But it has not harmed the financial viability of the Daily Mail so why should they care?

It’s called Polyfilla journalism partly after the DIY product so handy for filling up gaps and holes in walls and ceilings and the Polly Filler character in Private Eye “a vapid and self-centred female “lifestyle” columnist, whose irrelevant personal escapades and gossip serve solely to fill column inches”. Editors abhor empty spaces in their papers so a whole legion of Samantha Bricks earn a generous living regurgitating and slightly reconfiguring articles on sex, fashion, marriage, divorce, careers and diets. Most pass easily down the memory hole but sometimes, as in Brick’s latest piece of vacuous scribble, they hit a mother lode of controversy which generates publicity and sells extra copies.

She might not have much talent or sense of perspective but she deserves a brief salute for her chutzpah, surely…..

How do I know in my bones that the coverage of the 2012 US election will be total crapola, not just from the card carrying rainbow and unicorn lefty luvvies at the BBC but also from the “official” so called right wing media?

Like any sane, well balanced and nuanced English conservative populist I hardly ever bother to get my information about US politics from the established UK media.. BBC (MSNBC in drag), Telegraph (Country Club GOP), Mail (National Enquirer)…or the right wing blogosphere.. ConservativeHome (Douthat/Brooks/Frum), Spectator Coffee House (Frum/Brooks/Douthat)

Why should I bother with yesterday’s stale bread when I can go to Hot Air, Stacy McCain, Dan Riehl and Prof Jacobson to get the just baked bagels? Or fly around the Twitterverse with @SissyWillis, @pepper_10, @ginthegin and other wild Tea Partiers/Palinistas

It was from Hot Air & Co. that I first learned about the Tea Party as early as February 2009, long months before it appeared on UK media radar. It was also from those sites, articulating a fierce anger, not just against the Obama stimulus and healthcare plans but also against the Douthat/Brooks/Frum nexus of GOP choirmasters that I began to realise the strength of the fireball that hit Washington in the 2010 mid terms.

Until well into 2010 the UK media and blogs were following the Brooks line of working with Obama and the Democrats because they had won so overwhelmingly in 2008. Avoid outright confrontation and maybe, in 2016 or 2020 an Obama- lite GOP figure might be able to slip into the White House – the Huntsman scenario.

Palin, of course, was sniffily dismissed as an airhead. Herman Cain was blanked when he was an outsider and still is being relatively ignored even though he is currently pushing out Perry in the polls. Neither of them passed the David Brooks trouser crease test.

At almost every stage the UK media and “official” blogosphere has got it wrong about the US political scene.

Which is why I am dreading the forthcoming coverage of the 2012 primary and presidential campaign

We could really do with a UK website that totally ignores comments from NYT, WaPo and the official newsletter of the DNC, Politico, and the legions of lobbyists, consultants and seedy academics paraded by Rentaquote.

There has been progress – the relatively new Commentator isn’t interested in what David Frum opines, Spiked is wildly anarchic poking it’s rapiers from both the left and the right into the pompous and self serving political/cultural media elite and Biased BBC continues its never ending crusade against the smug, arrogant North London dinner party cartels that run the BBC. But it’s an uphill battle against a powerful network of establishment quislings who rely on the collective mental inertia of a an intellectually disenfranchised population more easily seduced by watching the degrading antics of publicity seeking clowns and charlatans and being politically masturbated by the politics of greed, envy and ignorance…..

We are beset by snakes – why isn’t there a mongoose around when you need one……

I suppose I can always dream….

Sarah Palin could be set to lose both her marriage and her political career after the release of the explosive biography on the Tea Party darling.

warbles airhead hackette Rachel Quigley ( @rachelq82 ) at the UK Daily Mail, referring to the recently published “book” about Palin written by Joe McGinniss. Quigley proceeds to list several of the allegations mentioned in the book and also references articles from the “National Enquirer”, an American supermarket tabloid.

With McGinniss being spit roasted even by such Palin unfriendly sources as The New York Times and Michael Smerconish one might fairly ask of Ms Quigley why she wasn’t a little more curious about the author’s credibility and motivation.

But then elsewhere the Mail publishes a vomit inducing puff piece which essentially allows McGinniss to offer a weasel defence against the criticism of the unattributable nature of his “sources” and you then begin to realise why a third rate scribbler like Quigley was wheeled in to pen such unmitigated rubbish.

She was probably ordered to write it (most likely in crayon on a large sheet of drawing paper) by the mysoginistic editor Paul Dacre who believes that women are best suited to be in the Mail’s right hand side bar to be ogled or derided for their appearance while the chaps do the heavy lifting of running the world.

Unlike the Mail, which has ever been a rag, the UK Daily Telegraph has always claimed to be a serious paper of repute. But the DT has consistently and gleefully treated Palin with a degree of contempt and disdain that almost rivals that shown by the liberal left media of the USA. So they have put their own third rate scribbler, Nick Allen ( @nickallen789 ), on the McGinniss beat with instructions to keep the pot boiling.

A few days ago Mr Allen was as high on his McGinniss crack as Rachel Quigley, prophesying that the book would destroy Palin’s political career. But sadly even the myopic Allen had to weave an element of truth into his National Enquirer musings when he was forced to admit that there was some evidence that support for her was growing rather than crashing.

We now await with bated breath how ace reporters Quigley and Allen react to the latest evidence which tends to buttress the belief, widely held outside the medieval chambers of the Mail and Telegraph, that McGinniss is merely pimping the delusions, lies and unfounded rumours being constantly recycled along the wilder shores of the blogosphere by a group of dysfunctional misfits…..

Is that crickets I hear?