Where to start?

Oh I dunno, you turn your back for a few weeks getting your arse handed to you by the lunch-hungry public and the world and his civil partner fall over themselves to ladle blogworthy soup into my news-hungry bowl (that image worked better in my head than on the page, I realise). Should I have posted about Cambo deflecting attention from his mates at HSBC enabling fraud by pointing the finger at fat people? Possibly. A despairing state of the nation address about the England cricket teams almost heroic cock-ups in the World Cup? Perhaps. I should certainly have written something about the Telegraph’s disgraceful attempt to use the suicides of News UK employees to distract from its own appalling kowtowing to aforementioned fraud-enablers HSBC. Yes, should definitely have done that.

I could have written about the first signs of spring in the garden, the rhubarb shyly poking its pinks spears up. I could have written about how I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, and loving every syllable. Possibly a little sketch of a short trip to reconnect with an undermet branch of the family. These things could all have happened, but somehow I could never make it to the keyboard, the inertia was paralysing, there never seemed to be the time.

So praise the skies, one and all, for the honourable member for Kensington and Chelsea, Sir Malcolm “I served every fucking year under Thatcher, that’s how much of an amoral fuckpig I am” Rifkind. Hilariously caught out by C4’s Dispatches cheerfully NOT breaking any parliamentary rules with a degree of gusto and avarice not witnessed anywhere outside a Black Friday sale at Asda. And as, to be fair, he wasn’t breaking any rules, he might be within his rights to defend his ground before realising that the quiet coughing of the PM’s office and the non-returning of his despairing calls translated to “Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out, Malky”.

Y’see, the best part about this story is that, technically, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Nor has Jack Straw. All this “consultancy” (hem hem) is entirely within the rules. But whereas Straw had the nous to recognise that the public mood is currently distinctly anti elites lining their pockets and start apologising fast, and vociferously, Rifkind stood his ground. It was brilliant, the sight of an Old Tory completely failing to realise that the world has changed around him. In fact, not only did he stand his ground, breathtakingly he had the nerve to suggest that an MP’s salary, at a mere £67k was a bit on the low side, so this sort of thing is fine. There is a relevant point to be made about MPs getting less than say, surgeons, or top end GPs or some headteachers, but in the teeth of what looks like a cash for access scandal is not, perhaps, the best time to do it. As a display of arrogance and utter inability to understand public reaction it was like a return to the dog days of the last Major government, when MP after MP was caught either with his fingers in the till or his dick somewhere it shouldn’t be, and each of them reacted with the same hilarious cocktail of contempt for the public, outrage that his probity should be questioned and total lack of self-awareness that the honourable member for Kensington and Chelsea has displayed over the last couple of days. Hats off Rifkind. No school like the old school.