Back In The 'Real' World

The press in Britain talk about the months of Parliamentary recess as the 'silly season'. Bereft of truly important stories, like Brown & Blair having another hissy fit or David Cameron cycling to work, journalists have to fall back on writing about fluff like murders, kidnappings and wars. Politicians, meanwhile, sometimes try to 'bury' bad news on days they know it will be ignored. A Labour Party wonk, for example, notoriously advocated releasing some unflattering statistics straight after 9/11. So far the World Cup has seen a combination of the two. A time when some really odd stuff pops to the surface, hoping everyone is looking elsewhere.

The Queen told a Groucho Marx joke during her 'official' 80th birthday celebrations. I don't know why we should celebrate her 80th birthday at all, let alone twice, but I'm eternally grateful to be able to write that sentance. The Queen told a Groucho Marx joke. Just think of that for a moment. The one about getting old being easy providing you live long enough, for the records. Personally I'd have preferred the one about not wanting to join a club which accepted her as a member. I wouldn't want to join a club which accepted the Queen as a member either.

Continuing on the topic of snobs, the Royal Institute of British Architects has discovered it has a budding Albert Speer in its midst. Peter Phillips, a contender in its upcoming presidential elections, is also a member of the ultra-right British National Party. The puzzling thing here is that Phillips - who denies he is a racist, naturally - went as far as to stand for a BNP candidate in local elections in 2003. Now I thought party candidates, even council ones, got their names published and tried to achieve a certain amount of publicity. Yet Phillips' fellow architects are howling that they've only just been made aware of his political views. Proof that unless it's got a portico or a flying buttress (another phrase I love to write) then an architect just can't focus on it.

But the best story recently has been The Guardian newspaper announcing that it's bought a smallpox DNA sequence over the internet. The Guardian, for any American readers, is the Bible for left-wing, socially concerned, hand-wringing liberals like myself. And now it can make smallpox. It claims that the purchase was only made to expose lax regulations, and that the sequence is actually perfectly harmless because it has something called stop codons built into it. But I like to think that just a hint of a threat was intended too. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Guardian carried an interview with Mel Phillips the same week. Phillips is the voice of the Mail, a foaming critic of Muslims and asylum seekers and people with dark coloured skin in general. So perhaps, after the interview, The Guardian took her aside and said, "Mel? Guess what's in this test tube. Now do you really want to carry on calling for Somalis to be thrown into the gas chambers..?"