Let It Rot

The bones have pretty much been picked clean on Liz Truss’s choice to walk out to M People’s Moving On Up yesterday. Plenty has been made of the fact that the lyrics are all about kicking someone out. The song’s writer is livid his song was used by “lying freaks”. The song’s singer is a vocal advocate against the government’s Rwanda deportation policy – and her son also happens to be a Labour councillor.

But other than that, a solid choice.

The one bit of related M People trivia we can toss into the pot? Heather Small had a little ritual she liked to perform whenever she was about to take to the stage. She’d knock back a drink of neat vodka, then shout “LET’S DO THIS FUCKER!”

The Daily Mirror kicked off Black History Month with a resounding clanger, illustrating an article about Kwasi Kwarteng with a miscaptioned picture of a completely different black man.

The Mail On Sunday took great relish in covering their rival’s mistake (and subsequent apology) publishing an article entitled: “Left-Wing Paper Grovels Over ‘Kwasi’ Photo Gaffe”.

It’s lucky for them that fewer people spotted the MailOnline making a very similar gaffe themselves just a few days later. When announcing that John Fashanu would appear on the upcoming series of Dancing On Ice, for hours their online story was illustrated with a picture of John’s late brother, Justin.

Oops!

Which leading Tory once told a group of holidaying Brits in Prague that they liked to masturbate at their desk of a morning to help “clear [their] mind for work”?

Liz Truss drew up a big long list of her enemies on stage yesterday, which included Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, North Londoners, podcasters and possibly Jamie Oliver (TBC). We can add another group to the list too: face-painters.

Norfolk constituents recall a local tale of the time Liz visited Stow Hall Gardens for a charity open day. It was the usual sort of English country fete but sadly for her kids, they weren’t allowed to take advantage of all the attractions on offer.

Liz was heard refusing their pleading to get their faces painted, saying “No, we’re not that kind of person.”

One of the flak-catchers sent out on the morning media rounds recently has been Chris Philp MP. Watching him sweat his way through tough TV interviews has been especially fun for the people who endured working with him at McKinsey back in the late 90s.

They remember him once getting the mother of all bollockings from his bosses while working on a project for B&Q, after he created a presentation slide complaining about how he – a McKinsey man – was getting paid less per hour than the B&Q “oiks” he was having to share an office with.

He’s now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

The Tory conference kicked off with its traditional MPs v Lobby Journalists football match. This year’s fixture proved especially popular as the venue was an actual Premier League ground, Villa Park.

Tory MP Karl McCartney didn’t want to squander the moment just playing with his colleagues though, so asked if he could invite a group of his family and friends to play too. He was told he couldn’t – but instead of taking no for an answer, a furious Karl kicked up a huge fuss demanding they be allowed.

He was told no again, but he went ahead and brought them anyway – causing another massive scene at the door. All of which prompted grovelling apologies from his teammates who uniformly agreed that he was a “total cunt”.

Duran Duran have had a big year: inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, playing the Queen’s Jubilee, headlining the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games. Now they’re about to release a new concert movie, A Hollywood High.

“All of these things make us feel much more important than we really are”, Simon Le Bon told fans, “but that’s OK. It’s an occupational hazard in this business.”

He’s not wrong. An old EMI exec told us that when he worked with the band Nick Rhodes had a policy that he would never stay in a hotel with brown walls. Mostly, that demand was easy to accommodate. Except for the one time the band were in a small Italian town which only had one hotel – and all its rooms were brown.

Did Nick relax his rule for that one night? Absolutely not. The hotel’s poor housekeeper had to pin white sheets across every inch of the walls in order to stop the strops.

Followers of the ongoing soap opera that is GB News might be wondering whatever came of that weird little plotline last week when the channel’s Saturday Boy, Darren Grimes, appeared to get fired on Twitter one morning, only to then pull a Lazarus late afternoon and announce he’d be back on air as normal at the weekend.

What was going on there? Well, it seems Darren had been called into a misconduct hearing with the COO last Monday, which practically everybody in the company took as a sign that he was being handed his papers.

What they didn’t bank on was Grimes having someone to fight his corner – but he had a representative in the hearing. A man no stranger to the attention of HR departments… Dan Wootton!

“Lying flat” (or “tang ping”) – the concept of not doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by – was synonymous for a while with disaffected Chinese youth, before being adopted and circulated by media around the world.

Now that the concept has gone mainstream, China has abandoned it in favour of a new outlook on life. Today anyone who considers themselves cool is practicing “bai lan” – or “letting it rot”. So instead of passively doing as little as possible, you should strive to just give up entirely and do absolutely nothing at all.

FYI: “Bai lan” is the Mandarin term to describe the time in a basketball game when you play deliberately badly so the game ends quicker and you lose faster.

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