Will Heaven

Imagine a Premier League of cranks and conspiracy theorists. Who do you reckon would top it? It’s a tough call. I think Holocaust deniers would lift the cup, with 9/11 truthers not far behind. But there’s a new lot on the rise, recently promoted from Division One: global warming sceptics. Fuelled by the hype surrounding Climategate, those who believe that climate change has nothing to do with mankind’s release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere have had a storming week – led, in case you hadn’t noticed, by our very own James Delingpole.

Well, brilliant though he is, Delingpole’s about as much of a scientist as he is the captain of the England rugby team. So I was delighted to readHugo Rifkind expertly ribbing him in this week’s Spectator:

Continue Reading

The two latest scandals to hit the NHS have inspired me to make a confession: I was once an IT Installations Technician at a major NHS hospital. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? You’re right, it was. For two months (as a fairly broke student) it was my job to hunt down grimy, half-broken PCs and replace them with brand new ones. I had my trolley, my list, and I knew how to switch on a computer. That was that –  for £7.50 an hour.

In a way, it was an important job. Doctors and nurses were struggling with old equipment, and for the most part they needed the computer upgrades. But aside from being mind-numbingly tedious, those two months gave me an insight into why the NHS is such a drain on the public finances: it is without doubt the most inefficient and overmanaged organisation I have ever worked for.

Continue Reading

Catholics tend to ignore comic news stories about the Vatican, but they are becoming worryingly prevalent – and most of them are entirely the Church’s fault. The latest one reveals that Monsignor Franco Perazzolo of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture has condemned The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second part of a teen vampire romantic fantasy series (I kid you not) which was released yesterday.

As Nick Squires reports, Monsignor Perazzolo said the film was an “an explosive mix” of good-looking young actors involved in supernatural activities. He also reckoned that the film’s occult imagery represented a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message”.

Continue Reading

The world is on course for a 6 degree rise in the average global temperature by the end of the century, the Independent reports today. Fine. That seems like a far-reaching prediction to me, but I’ll bow to the better knowledge of leading climate change scientists. But the Indy is clearly a newspaper which has chosen to prioritise this issue. So take a look at the link at the end of the article. Surely an online advert for readers to buy cheap fossil fuels is a bit of an own goal?

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

Here’s a story which didn’t last long on the front page of Guardian.co.uk: today’s Guardian/ICM poll shows that the Conservatives have a one per cent lead over Labour on the issue of lifting people out of poverty. It’s symbolic, reports Julian Glover: “Labour has lost its crown as the champion of the poor”.

This act of gross usurpation was finished off during David Cameron’s speech on the big society last week, when he claimed that the Conservatives where the “best placed” party to help the poor. But it began some weeks before at Tory Conference. Remember this?

Continue Reading

After watching a few England internationals at Twickenham, you can judge the mood of the crowd after about ten minutes of play. Sitting in the upper stands during yesterday’s match against Argentina, I quickly realised it was not one I would treasure – no thundering echoes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or Mexican waves, but loud boos as England sliced the ball into touch or, worse, simply dropped it. Any anomalous cheers heard by TV-viewers were because of Nike posters attached to every seat in the stadium: they became makeshift paper aeroplanes, and the best reached the pitch.

Continue Reading

John Humphrys will stand in tonight for David Dimbleby on Question Time, after the show’s host of 15 years was injured by his wife’s bullock. Here are the details from a BBC press release:

David Dimbleby will not be chairing Question Time this week – the first he has missed in over 15 years – but he will return next week. John Humphrys will temporarily take the chair tonight.

David Dimbleby was injured yesterday in a minor farming accident. David was loading a bullock onto a trailer when the bullock reared resulting in David being briefly knocked out. He also received a cut to the head that required stitches.

Continue Reading