Live by the Sword
I haven't never posted anything by Richard Littlejohn on the blog site before because The Mail columnist is a nasty piece of work, a bit of a bully, the journalistic equivalent of a radio 'shock jock', if you ask me.
But the scorn which Littlejohn is pouring over the head of Ed Miliband is not only deserved, it's all self inflicted and finds an echo in the same kind of political 'monstering' that takes place in the pastes of the Labour supporting Mirror newspaper on a regular basis.
Not only that it's no worse than the ridiculous scaremongering and personal attacks mounted against the Yes campaign on a daily basis, during the Scottish independence referendum.
Not only that it's no worse than the ridiculous scaremongering and personal attacks mounted against the Yes campaign on a daily basis, during the Scottish independence referendum.
By RICHARD LITTLEJOHN - The Mail
If you go down to the Heath today, you’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the Heath today, you’d better go in disguise.
Otherwise, you may find yourself being accosted by a weird-looking man with a toothy grin attempting to engage you in intimate conversation.
If he invites you back to his place to look at his bust of Karl Marx, run a mile. Don’t look back.
Labour leader Ed Miliband used plenty of anecdotes from people he had met while out and about in his speech at the party's conference
You’re in grave danger of being ‘outed’ as a closet Labour Party supporter. You just don’t know it yet.
Don’t worry, the man promises. Relax. You’re not alone any more. We can do it.
Together.
Stick with me, comrade, and I’ll make you a star. Your name will be dropped into the leader’s speech, your picture plastered across social media. You’ll be on television and in all the papers.
Whenever Ed Miliband wants to meet ‘ordinary’ people, he leaves his home in fashionable North London, crosses the road and strolls on to Hampstead Heath.
This vast public open space has long been a popular destination for close encounters and dangerous liaisons.
Earlier this week, police scrambled a helicopter after reports of a woman screaming in distress. Turned out to be a man and a woman coupling noisily in the bushes.
The only surprise was that it was a man and a woman. The Heath is best known as a notorious gay dogging venue.
But this is the first recorded instance of party political dogging. Miliband has been soliciting complete strangers for intellectual intercourse. Take 36-year-old Gareth Edwards, an unsuspecting software engineer, who had gone to the Heath for a quiet picnic. Next thing he knows, he’s befriended by a sympathetic stranger.
Yes, it’s Mister Ed, anxious to know what Gareth thinks about Austerity Britain. Soon Gareth is pouring out his heart about his five-year-old daughter and his struggle to make ends meet.
A few days later, Ed is sharing Gareth’s worries with the world, telling the Labour conference, to wild applause: ‘He’s earning a decent wage, he can’t afford to buy a home for himself and for his family, he’s priced out by the richest. He thinks that unless you’re one of the privileged few in Britain, the country is not going to work for you.’
Those wicked Tories are grinding poor Gareth into the dirt. What hope does he ever have of owning a £2.6 million home near the Heath like, er, Ed Miliband?
Perhaps that explains why Gareth voted Lib Dem last time.
Oops!
Maybe Miliband will stand a better chance with the two pretty girls heading off for an open-air swim. Beatrice Bazell and her friend Helen Goodman were hoping to meet the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead they had to settle for Mister Ed.
Seduced by his charm, they complained that they were ‘falling into a black hole’. That’s Highgate Ponds for you, girls.
Miliband mentions 'Colin' as he pledges more NHS spending
Ed decided to share Beatrice’s tale of woe with his delegates in Manchester, painting a picture of down-trodden students crushed by this cruel Conservative-led government.
Unfortunately, Miliband chose the wrong victim. It has now been revealed that Beatrice and her sister Clemency come from a privileged middle-class, Oxfordshire background and had more than £250,000 lavished on their private school education.
You don’t get many Clemencys to the pound in Doncaster.
Beatrice’s dad, Barnaby Piercy Bazell, a 61-year-old chartered accountant, said: ‘She went to a good all-girls’ school. It’s fair to say her studies cost me a great deal of money. She might be feeling a bit gloomy about the job prospects of people her age, but she can have no complaints.’
Beatrice, who got straight As at A-level and has a first-class degree, attended the same £13,500-a-year St Helen and St Katharine school in Abingdon as the Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron and her aristocratic sister Emily Sheffield, deputy editor of Vogue magazine. I don’t remember Miliband mentioning that in his speech, do you? Still, nothing’s too good for the workers.
We have, of course, been here before. Last year, a Labour party political broadcast featured as its ‘modern face of poverty’ a woman who was quickly unmasked as a Left-wing celebrity blogger and Guardian food columnist called Jack Monroe.
One of Labour’s other poster boys for poverty was a charming chap called Beresford Casey, a former advertising agency executive who now runs an upmarket chain of burger restaurants called Haché, a posh French name for mince, where a ‘scotch steak burger topped with celebrated Reblochon cheese’ will set you back a very reasonable £10.95.
Would you like fries with that?
Mr Casey lives in a house in Primrose Hill, not far from Ed Miliband. Last year it was valued at £1.5million. Today, you can bet your life it would fall foul of Miliband’s proposed £2million ‘mansion tax’ threshold.
On Tuesday, I said Miliband doesn’t know the difference between Barnet and Barnsley. The circles he mixes in are just as rarified as Cameron’s wealthy Chipping Norton set.
That’s why, when he goes in search of ‘ordinary’ people, he looks no further than Hampstead Heath, on his front doorstep, surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in London, let alone the rest of Britain.
It is the natural stomping ground of multi-millionaire Marxists and Labour luvvies who have made a fortune in the arts and entertainment.
Maybe Miliband goes looking for ‘ordinary voters’ like an explorer with a giant magnifying glass and a butterfly net.
So when he stumbles across a software engineer out for a picnic, he thinks he’s discovered a new endangered species.
The girl he found in a Lucky Bag during a photo-op in Bolton was paraded on the conference floor in Manchester like a pygmy from a long-lost tribe somewhere in the Amazon.
Twice, Elizabeth Shepherd was forced to stand for applause. Look, everybody, it’s a real working-class person.
Oh, well done, Ed. She’s perfect. Quite exquisite. Where did you find her?
Hampstead Heath, I think. Or that may have been the other one. Brittany, Beatrice, something like that. They all look the same to me.
And at six o’clock, their mummies and daddies will take them home to bed...
If Two Jags was Tory he'd be nicked for hate crime
Two Jags describes Labour frontbencher Chuka Umunna as ‘Chumbawamba’ and it’s dismissed as a joke. But just imagine if the remark had been made by a Conservative or Ukip politician, not a Labour peer.
The Left would have seized on it as a deliberate racial smear. The BBC would have led all its news bulletins on the story.
Channel 4 would have dispatched the intrepid Michael Crick, complete with Chumbawamba ice bucket, to chase the offending Right-winger down the street and shout through his letterbox.
There would have been questions in the House and demands for resignation. Almost certainly, the police would have wanted in on the act. An arrest for ‘hate crime’ may well have followed.
Umunna was justifiably angry when an unfunny UKIP tweeter called him a ‘Spear Chucker’.
Yet when a Labour politician makes a crass remark about a black colleague, it’s no big deal.
Two Jags isn’t remotely funny. He’s a nasty, thin-skinned thug, who punched a voter in the street but seems to have a lifelong Get Out Of Jail Card.
Which only goes to prove yet again that being Left-wing means never having to say you’re sorry.
