intermission

Politics in Britain hit the vodka early yesterday. But to cap a pleasingly surreal British week, the Mail gives us a straight up lefty popcorn interlude, while the PM tries to remember where he consumed his baked goods.

Comments

[Alex]

He's done that thing when suddenly everyone else sees the ridiculousness that's been obvious but denied for years. Like someone turned off the fnord-generator.

[Shackleford Hurtmore]

I feel dirty. I just signed up to be able to comment on the Daily Mail website just for that story. No wonder the commenters are usually angry people. The captchas are particularly difficult.

[Martin Wisse]

It took the better part of a decade with Blair, but Cameron's inborn talents win out.

[dsquared]

It is an interesting difference (not exactly interesting but, you know) that while Blair was really quite good at sport and was always doing things like playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan, Cameron is visibly really embarrassingly shit at sport. Bit of a bummer for him that we've got the Olympics really.

[belle le triste]

British advert culture, meanwhile, has for a decade and some been rammed full of doughy but game ad-dads who are loveably shit at sports and loved ANYWAY by their sports-mad kids and tolerant laundrybot wives. Even purely as a PR type, DC has crap antennae. Being hopeless is endearing here, if you only do it right.

[Phil]

sports-mad kids and tolerant laundrybot wives

No, "tolerant laundrybot" is the wrong era - YM "benignly contemptuous Caroline-Quentin don't-know-how-she-does-it but-if-she-didn't-it-wouldn't-get-done ask-a-busy-woman Überfrau wives". One of the things I liked about Scott & Bailey (although not enough to carry on watching it) was that they're a bit shit on the having-it-all front; most people are ('all' is an awful lot to have).

[Cian]

Being endearingly hopeless requires self-deprecation. He's way to arrogant for that to work.

[belle le triste]

Meanwhile, elsewhere in "trying to explain the marketing campaign and making things far worse" news, a Turkish brand discovers that selling shampoo with amusing clips of H1tler may have been an error.

[ajay]

OT: this Panorama thing about the ON Digital hack. Blimey.

[john b]

I'm quite amazed by the extent to which the NDS thing hasn't been stressed as a thing in the mainstream British or Australian media.

It's worth noting, also, that it was broken by an Aussie hack who works for the AFR - approx equiv of FT - run by Fairfax - approx equiv of GMG if they ran Graun and FT - but who had to take a sabbatical on the BBC's money to properly track down his hunches on this one because Fairfax didn't want to rock the boat too much. A good counterexample next time anyone's on a "Guardian did X, what has the BBC ever done" kick.

Also, "hacking to enable copyright theft" could end up the one which goes beyond "oh, dick off, we can't be arsed arbitrating" and "yes, this is indeed a foreign corrupt practice" in the US courts.

[ajay]

Also, "hacking to enable copyright theft" could end up the one which goes beyond "oh, dick off, we can't be arsed arbitrating" and "yes, this is indeed a foreign corrupt practice" in the US courts.

It wouldn't, I think, because the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is really only about bribing foreign officials. But you're right in the wider sense that this could stir up massive amounts of trouble.

The crossover with dodgy ex-coppers at NDS struck me as well. What odds would you have given last week that News Corp employees have actually (say) conspired to murder on its behalf? What odds would you, O Bayesian, give now?

[Cian]

Jesus. I don't think has got any coverage in the US at all, as of yet.

I fully expect to hear that everyone else does it, its not even really a crime and wasn't ON TV run by a black teenager in a hoodie, so really what can you expect.

[chris williams]

Fedorcio out. Yes!