Unbelievable I Know, But ……

….. I’m actually beginning to feel sorry for Gordon Brown. As I watched Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on Wednesday (I’m sorry but it’s probably the most entertaining thing on telly right now apart from Andy Murray thrashing opponents), I felt a certain sympathy for the man. I know. I know. Me sympathetic to Brown – don’t spread it around.

Here was an academic who had socialism in his heart. Here was a man who was destined to lead his party after the death of John Smith, (the Labour Party leader who died in 1994), and who had ingrained principles of decency and fairness for all. Here was a ‘son of the manse’ who believed in eradicating poverty both at home and overseas. Here was a straightforward Scottish guy who was a brilliant scholar and whose father’s middle name of ‘Ebenezer’ probably meant that Brown junior was always destined to hold the country’s purse strings.

But we all know what went wrong. He went power mad. He was given unfettered access to control the nation’s finances by a scheming Tony Blair and the rest, they say, is history.

A control freak hurling abuse and staplers at his staff when they disappoint him. A surly, mood-prone boss, who befuzzled the rest of Parliament with his economic policies, which were so complex nobody else could understand them, which was probably just as well as it would have shown the man to be a serial manipulator of the facts, as well as the numbers.

Here was a man who had reached the pinnacle of power and who, apparently is very engaging company in private when you can get him off politics (he once dated a Princess to the British throne but she got fed up with his 24/7 politics). The problem is the public don’t see that side of him. All they see is an arch manipulator treating them with disdain (tax increases on the lowest paid, the world’s best pension system ruined) and incredibly as a ‘son of the manse’, a man who would lie as quickly as he would draw breath.

In all the twisted, confused spin he has spouted recently, nothing was quite so cringeworthy (and embarrassing) as his attempt to recover his position on the future outlook for Britain’s economy. Everybody knows Britain is broke. The country is essentially bankrupt. The UK will be struggling to pay off just the interest on its debt, equivalent to £20,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, for years to come. Even the most spendthrift person in the street knows the borrowing has to stop and the spending has to be curtailed. Taxes will rise and services will be cut although there is probably so much waste in Britain’s public services that you could probably make a 20% cut and nobody would notice – except the budget holders!

And so, Brown, lying to his back teeth (and not very nice teeth at that) has been spouting that the Labour Government would continue to spend, spend, spend and grow public services. Every economic think-tank and financial commentator could not believe what they were hearing. The country was broke – continuing to spend wasn’t the answer.

Eventually Brown got the message and so on Wednesday, in that pathetic, belligerent, lying way of his, he modified his position. Spending, or growth in public services, would increase at zero percent. Read that again. Spending and growth would increase at zero percent.

Look at Guido’s Blog where he has the relevant excerpt from PMQs and watch Brown’s front bench colleagues as they try to stifle sniggers at his latest gaffe. Alistair Darling successfully manages to keep his laughter in but his body, jumping about on the seat gives it away.

http://order-order.com/2009/07/01/gordons-zero-growth-gaffe/

Gambetta - Where's Gambetta ?

It was sod’s law. We’d finished every night at 5pm, but on this particular day the client had wanted to finalise the latest draft of the contract and so we’d worked much later than I’d hoped we would. J and the kids would be at the Disneyland Paris hotel waiting for me. Will they have had dinner yet, I wondered. I was only an hour away.

The metro from Levallois wasn’t that busy despite it being a Friday night in one of the world’s most vibrant cities but as the train didn’t go anywhere remotely interesting it was probably normal. Line 3 obviously wasn’t a metro you took to one of Paris’s hotspots. Gambetta ? Where the hell was Gambetta? I needed to change at Villiers to get Line 2 which, in turn would allow me to get the RER to Disneyland. It was a bit of a treck but it would be worth it.

The station before Villiers, the train stopped at somewhere called Malesherbes and I noticed a black guy who got on because he kept looking at me. I’d also spotted two other black guys getting on at the other end of the carriage. They were obviously mates and yet they’d entered the train by two different doors. Something told me to place my foot on my PC bag. It was sitting on top of my holdall which held my clothes for the weekend and making sure it was secure with my foot on it wasn’t a comfortable way to sit but that PC held not only the result of 3 months work with the client but all my personal files – several years worth of data and pictures which were irreplaceable. Why hadn’t I bought that back-up drive last week?

Sure enough, within seconds of the train leaving the station, the black guy who was on his own started asking me a question about something on the metro map. I told him I didn’t speak French but he was insistent. He wanted me to stand up and look at the map and that would have meant taking my foot off of my PC bag. Something was going down here. I glanced in the glass partition which separated my seat from the door and saw one of the other black guys moving down the carriage. The guy at the metro map became more insistent. He was almost begging me to stand and converse with him. As I turned to talk to him, I put my right hand into my coat pocket and left it there. Another glance in the glass showed the second guy starting to lean over the adjoining seat as my attention moved to his pal. I took my foot off of my PC bag and sure enough within a nano-second the black hand had grasped the bag and was lifting it over the seats. As I turned, my right hand left my coat pocket and the razor sharp knife it was holding slashed at the guy’s hand.

Four fingers fell to the floor of the train. The fifth, hanging by a sinewy thread, let go of the PC case. It was just like slow motion. I looked at the bloody stumps on the wooden floor of the train and expected to see them wriggling just like a worm does when you cut it in half, but they were still. Then came the scream. A blood-curdling cry which caused all the other passengers to look round to see what had happened.

Just then the train pulled in to Villiers and I picked up my bags and got off. The guy who had tried to divert my attention with the metro map stood aside as I brushed past him. I continued my journey without incident.

Alas – that’s not the way it happened. I did stand up to talk to the guy at the metro map. I did lose my PC bag and I did spend the whole weekend in Disneyland Police Station making statements and cancelling bank and credit cards and organising new ones. And the client wasn’t very happy either! J and the kids, however, had a ball.

The Cyclists Are Back Again

J nudged me on Sunday morning and said, ‘I’m off to church’. ‘No you’re not – the road’s blocked for the annual cycle-fest’, I replied. And so it came to pass that we couldn’t move from our house on Sunday morning because the main road leading to and from the various villages on the D2210 (road) was being reserved exclusively for the lycra brigade.

It was some race or other allowing the French to indulge in their national passion (other than food) at the expense of all us ex-pats who actually pay for the roads in the first place.

Strangely enough my very first blog was about the race several years ago when I knew nothing about this obsession and managed to cause quite a bit of agro with the police who patrol the D2210 looking for ex-pats they can shoot with the flimsiest of reasons.

Read it at the link below.

http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/another-fabulous-day-in-paradise.html

The Infiltrators

A couple of weekends ago we had lunch up in the mountains with my sons, my brother and some friends. It was there that we met the bikers, one of whom was our friend’s brother. He and his four mates all work for the Metropolitan Police and all of them have really interesting jobs, ranging from the drug squad, the ‘football hooligan’ squad and one guy was a deep undercover agent working for a very secretive group within the Met called SO10.

Unfortunately, I was at the other end of the table from the ‘bikers’ but one of them, Alan, kept nipping outside for a cigarette and my family, all fervent football fans, questioned him incessantly on his work and what it was like following football hooligans around the country, making sure they behaved themselves. His stories were both frightening and hilarious.

J, on the other hand, was seated next to the guy who used to work for SO10 and spent the whole lunch talking to him. At one stage she fired up her iPod Touch, which is always a bad sign cause it means she’s spending again and sure enough when we got home, she said the guy in question had co-written a book about his experiences as a copper inside SO10 and she’d actually ordered it whilst they were chatting – talk about being pretentious!

A week later the book arrived and given that I’m quite interested in that sort of thing (undercover ops) I started reading it immediately and couldn’t put it down. Phillip (his name in the book - not his real name) described how he joined the police and then became involved in SO10 – the deep undercover squad. He went on to relate some of the operations he’d been involved in and their outcomes.

The fascinating thing was that ‘deep undercover’ generally means infiltrating gangs and gaining their trust and this usually takes months to achieve. The book described the various ways and means he became involved with the gangs and the undercover lifestyle he had to adopt to fit in with his ‘targets’. The fancy, fast cars. The pockets full of cash. The days without sleep. The totally nasty characters he had to befriend in order to gain their trust.

The final operation in the book was a Midlands drugs bust which, and you could tell, was going to go horribly wrong, and it did.

If Phillip did not exaggerate in the book, then the Midlands crime squad to which he was seconded for this particular operation, were a bunch of bumbling amateurs, even to the extent that the money they provided him with in order to ‘buy’ the drugs on offer was unbelievably wrapped in plastic with the words, ‘Midland Police’ on it! You couldn’t make it up!

I won’t go into the details of how the operation went wrong just in case you buy the book but needless to say it did and big time. Phillip was shot twice in cold blood by one of the gangsters, but miraculously he survived (he must have, I had lunch with him) and of course, as the crooks were known, they were caught and tried. The problem is that as with all these ‘crimes against the person’, the crooks will be out of prison long before Phillip has fully recovered from his injuries. They’ll go back to making money from drugs and Phillip will have been pensioned off.

If you’re interested in undercover work then the book is a great read. THE INFILTRATORS can be found on Amazon and was available when I wrote this blog, postage free at the special price of £5.99.

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

I had another post all ready for today but I couldn’t let Jacko’s passing go ‘unblogged’. It seems every blogger has had their say about his demise but I’ll simply say that in my opinion, the guy was a genius, albeit a troubled genius, but nevertheless, probably the greatest entertainer ever (when he was in his prime about 10-15 years ago) and if you think I’m going over-the top a bit, think of his dancing (amazing), his singing (excellent), his songwriting (prodigious) and his acting. His acting?

On Friday and Saturday, MTV were playing Michael Jackson DVDs 24 hours a day as a tribute and I just set our recorder to ‘go’. I ended up with about 10 hours of Jackson videos, much of the material repeats, but in editing it down to a 2-hour compilation, I watched his acting in those videos and I was very, very impressed. Don’t listen to the music or the lyrics and try and get the amazing dance steps out of the way and just look at the guy acting. He was incredibly good.

Of course, like many geniuses, Jackson was a troubled person. The hangers on, the constant media pressure, it all conspired to make the guy a bit of a weirdo and of course his health suffered. I’m afraid as soon as I heard about the 50 concerts in London’s O2 arena, I said it would kill him and I don’t take any satisfaction from being proved right, as it would appear.

A couple of final things to say is that when my youngest son was staying with J and myself in London, J took Timmy to Wembley Stadium to see Jackson perform live. I just wish I’d gone with them - I now feel jealous as I missed the chance to see one of the world's greatest entertainers. Then he was in his prime - it must’ve been about 1990.

And a couple of weeks ago when we had a house full of kids, I went downstairs and there they all were – dancing to Michael Jackson. His music lives on even in today’s kids, whom we normally associate with Rap, House, Garage, Shed, Bungalow etc etc!

Anyway, I think M Jackson is probably in the best place for him now. There’ll be no hangers-on up there. Nobody pushing drugs down his throat. No accountants insisting he does 50 concerts to clear his debts. Just St Peter asking for his autograph.