A Musty Odour

Abhijit Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka will share my platform at the Inaugural Congress of the Cockroach International. While it seems to have gone by the by that I used to be quite widely known as “Speedboat”, “Let’s have a look at what you could have won”, there are still those who call me “The Cockroach” because I would survive a nuclear war. Release in India is a victory for cockroaches everywhere, our biggest since we outlived Alexei Navalny.

Ah, Russia. What would our lords and masters do without her? To distract from the fact that he was up to his neck in the sale of Greater Manchester to Abu Dhabi, Andy Burnham has revived the old screech that the Russians had mesmerised 17,410,742 into voting for Brexit. The foreign interference that I remember  was by Barack Obama on the other side, complete with his only ever known use of “queue”, which is a not very American word for a very British concept.

It has been a remarkably short three weeks, which is how long it takes, for Vladimir Putin to supply Donald Trump with enough diesel to last the United States a grand total of 13 hours. Among the many points that that makes, Ukraine’s bombing of Russian oil refineries is now at least potentially an attack on the United States. There is plenty of oil in Canada, and the Americans, or at any rate the Trumps, now control Venezuela. But it had to be Russia. Of course.

If Burnham is so concerned about Russian mind control over how the British voted, then why is he getting rid of photo ID for voting? He does not in fact want to do that very welcome thing, a reversal of something that we could all then have forgotten politely in the way that we had drawn a veil over fixed-term Parliaments, an embarrassment that I am sorry to have brought up here in polite society.

Rather, Burnham wants the digital ID that will also be necessary for his ban, fully supported by the Conservative Party, on social media for the under-16s. That would be provided by Whitehall and White House favourites such as BlackRock and Palantir, tying the whole scheme directly to Trump, and thus, perfectly openly, to Putin. But heaven forbid that, this side of Jackdaw and Rosebank, we should buy Russian oil or his gas. Did the Ukrainians blow up Nord Stream for nought? As ever, we told you so. But Volodymyr Zelensky is bang to rights just as the AfD is preparing for power. Think on.