You can’t turn your back for five minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I used to think. Whenever I took a holiday, I always worried I might be missing something.
Not any more. These days you can safely turn your back for five or six weeks and nothing much changes. It’s almost as if I never went away.
This summer I decided to take an extended break, after 30 years writing this column. Frankly, I’d had enough of trying to find something original to say about the same old nonsense. I didn’t want to read, let alone write, another word about Brexit.
I’d had it up to here with grandstanding politicians, lobbyists and campaigners, flaunting their faux virtue and peddling their prejudices.
Nor did I want to end up like the ageing rock star in Randy Newman’s song I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It).
I have nothing left to say
But I’m gonna say it anyway
Thirty years upon a stage
And I hear the people say
Why won’t he go away?
So off I went, fervently hoping against hope that by the time I stumbled back to the wordface, the world would have moved on.
With Parliament breaking up for the recess, maybe the political class would all calm down. Sanity might prevail. Some hope. These people never take a day off.
I’d only been gone a week when news of Mother Theresa’s attempted Brexit betrayal at Chequers filtered through, forcing me to interrupt my slumbers.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: ‘I’d only been gone a week when news of Mother Theresa’s attempted Brexit betrayal at Chequers filtered through’
When even that craven effort to keep us in the EU in everything but name was contemptuously rejected by the chief Brussels negotiator Michel Barnier, I wrongly assumed it was safe to return to my sunbed.
But like rust, Project Fear never sleeps. Barely a day has passed without yet another horror story catapulted into orbit by the Remoan camp and being treated faithfully as gospel by the slavishly pro-EU sections of the media.
I can’t be bothered to revisit them all here. The latest involves portable toilets being placed every five yards along the M20 to accommodate the thousands of lorry drivers who will allegedly be stranded for hundreds of years on the approach to Dover after we leave.
It’s not called the silly season for nothing. This kind of alarmist drivel deserves to be filed along with the ridiculous ‘racism’ allegations which greeted Boris’s burka remarks and the confected outrage over Jamie Oliver flogging Jamaican jerk rice.
Frankly, these so-called ‘stories’ should be laughed out of court. They’re not worthy of serious comment. The reassuring reality is that, outside the political/media bubble, nobody’s taking the slightest bit of notice. Be honest, how many conversations about the predicted Brexit apocalypse have you had this summer?
When I started writing this column, news was something which actually happened.
Today it has been reduced to what somebody says, usually on social media, and the tiresome Twitterstorm which inevitably follows. This isn’t news, it’s froth and bubble, mere noise.
Elsewhere the same old stories I’ve been writing about for donkey’s years have been coming round again on the hurdy-gurdy all summer. Labour riddled with anti-Semitism (more of which elsewhere). Check.
Police abandon the streets. Check. The first column I wrote headlined ‘Mr Plod has lost the plot’ appeared in 1989.
Prisons in turmoil. Check. How many Porridge spoofs off the back of these reports have I written over the years?
Brexit scaremongering must be ignored as ‘silly season’ sees outrageous stories being circulated, according to Richard Littlejohn (pictured: Theresa May’s cabinet at Chequers)
I must admit I got a warm, nostalgic glow yesterday when I read The Times’s front-page splash about South American criminals moving in on London. Been there, done that. More than 30 years ago, when I was on the Evening Standard, I spent a week with the Met’s dip squad on the trail of South American pickpockets who were targeting shoppers in London’s West End.
Seems that Los Desperados have graduated to housebreaking these days.
Long hot summer caused by ‘global warming’. Of course it was, just like 1976, before climate change had been invented.
Anyway, since I arrived home last week, it hasn’t stopped raining.
Still, the good news is that the Whitehall committee which meets every Monday morning to give me something to write is due to reconvene next week after its own summer break.
Insiders tell me they’ve been secretly working on a wealth of new material. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
There are battles still to be fought and won, bucketloads to be tipped, pomposity to be pricked, and plenty of politicians to be pilloried and brought down to earth.
It’s good to be back.
Bodyguard is not a TV fiction for Labour’s Jewish MPs
Bodyguard is the new critically acclaimed drama from the BBC, starring Keeley Hawes. It centres on a fictional female Home Secretary and her close protection officer.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, Jewish Labour MPs have been offered their own bodyguards to protect them from militant anti-Semites at the party’s conference next month.
Who could have imagined that Jewish politicians in Britain would ever need professional minders to guard them against their own so-called colleagues?
Actually, I could.
Keeley Hawes stars in BBC drama Bodyguard about a Home Secretary who has a close relationship with her personal protection detail
Eleven years ago, I made a TV documentary exposing the new anti-Semitism coming from an unholy alliance of the hard Left and extreme Islamists. I’ve written about this vile threat frequently.
Few took me that seriously at the time, but they do now.
Ever since terrorist stooge Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum thugs took over Labour, anti-Semitism has gone mainstream.
If this hatred was directed at any other racial or religious minority, the police ‘hate crime’ squad would be working overtime and feeling collars.
But Labour’s anti-Semites appear free to operate with impunity. Perhaps the Home Secretary, the DPP or the Met Commissioner would care to explain why. Bodyguard may be a TV drama, but for Jewish MPs it’s becoming a way of life.
Airport bars turn into Wild West saloons… at 7am
Stag and hen parties are taking off from airports in the UK to cheap destinations for booze fulled weekends – although some never make the flight
The worst part of flying is not the journey itself, it’s the airports — at least in Britain, where every terminal has been turned into a glitzy shopping mall.
After you’ve endured security, you’re forced to run the gauntlet of garishly lit duty-free stores, staffed by aggressive saleswomen in Coco the Clown make-up spraying you with assorted scents at seven o’clock in the morning.
Now you also have to contend with a new horror — drunken stag and hen parties. This year, I followed a bunch of dopey birds in pink tutus, complete with pink fairy wings and princess tiaras.
They were bound for the bar, where no doubt they were planning to get tanked up on prosecco before boarding their budget flight to goodness-knows-where. Always-open bars airside were once a mark of civilisation. Now they’re turning into early-morning Wild West saloons full of revellers in fancy dress.
So I can sympathise with airline chiefs who want to bring airport bar hours in line with those on the outside and introduce a two-drink limit.
Most violence and unruly behaviour on planes is associated with earlier consumption of booze.
The latest call to restrict opening hours comes just days after a drunken passenger dressed as Tinkerbell and a companion in a Bob the Builder outfit were removed from a Poland-bound flight by armed police at Stansted.
Incidentally, the passenger in the Tinkerbell costume was a man.
Bring on the Oompa Loompas!
Thanks to all of you who wrote wishing my mum a very happy 90th birthday. She was thrilled. On her birthday, we went to lunch in a typical, classic American steakhouse, all dark wood and dim lighting. You needed a torch to read the menu and a miner’s lamp to find your way to the toilet.
After paying the bill, I found my way through the gloom to the Gents, only to discover Mum washing her specs in the sink. It was so dark she couldn’t read the sign on the door.
Fortunately, I was the only other person in there. ‘Mum, you do know this is the men’s room,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry,’ she replied. ‘If anyone asks, I’ll say I’m identifying as transgender today.’