Mice plague ‘God’s reply’ to Tesco gay gift
“Nothing has gone right for Tesco since they decided to support Gay Pride,” says Green. “Their only hope is to repent of that decision and put their trust in God.”
Green blames Tesco’s gift of £30,000 to London Gay Pride in November 2011 for the mouse infestation. He also says this has led to a drop in sales and profits, a poor performance over the Christmas period and a plummeting in share prices.
Some said this could be an April Fool’s Day joke but Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, believes Green is not known for his levity.
“In comparison with years of famine, plagues of locusts and pillars of salt, the Good Lord can’t be very displeased if all he has arranged on this occasion is a minor infestation of mice at Tesco Metro in London WC2,” says Summerskill. “I’m a little surprised that Mr Green and an organisation that styles itself ‘Christian Voice’ doesn’t have other things to think about in Easter week.”
Green also claims that a shopper in Birmingham saw baby mice falling out of a crisp packet in Tesco’s Aston store. The mice have been multiplying speedily, so no one can say they are homosexual.
Can Prince Michael patch things up with Mongolia?
Move over Prince Andrew, aka British trade ambassador Air Miles Andy. Prince Michael of Kent has been invited by the President of Mongolia to visit his country this month. But could it be a royal visit too far?
The trip is the work of former Labour MP John Grogan, who chairs the Mongolian British Chamber of Commerce. Only a year ago the British Government was accused of luring a senior member of the Mongolian security services to the UK so that he could be arrested under a European warrant for the alleged kidnapping of a Mongolian dissident in Le Havre.
Bat Khurts, head of Mongolia’s National Security Council, thought he was coming to Britain for high-level government talks about sharing intelligence on Muslim fundamentalists. When he arrived
he was arrested at Heathrow and held at Wandsworth prison for extradition to Germany on kidnapping charges, where it was thought he would stand trial.
When, after nearly a year, Germany received Khurts, they withdrew the charges and released him almost immediately, thus securing preferential trade terms because they blamed the Brits for the affair.
Prince Michael’s visit is designed to patch things up.
CMJ’s Lord’s party may need bouncers
Will there be fisticuffs at Lord’s next Thursday when former MCC president Christopher Martin-Jenkins launches his memoirs CMJ: A Cricketing Life? The book covers tricky issues, notably the byzantine dispute at Lord’s over proposals to develop the ground put forward by Robert Griffiths QC and supported by Sir John Major, which threatens to become a major talking point at MCC’s AGM at Lord’s on May 2. Sir John resigned from the committee when the proposals were dropped.
CMJ enters a coded plea to Test Match Special producer Adam Mountford to restore his colleague Mike Selvey, former England bowler and Guardian writer, and also accuses former England players such as Geoff Boycott and Michael Vaughan of talking too much and labouring points.
Let’s hope CMJ has invited Major, Mountford, Selvey, Boycott and Vaughan to his book launch. He has been suffering from ill-health recently, which explains his absence from the TMS team in Sri Lanka.
Our man with a tin hat solves Falklands tale
The mystery behind the most famous report from the Falklands conflict can now be revealed. Brian Hanrahan’s famous line, “I’m not allowed to say how many planes joined the raid, but I counted them all out and I counted them all back,” has now entered history and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
The Londoner can reveal the number was 20 — the maximum force of Harriers the two British aircraft carriers could deploy.
This was discovered by Robert Fox, the Standard’s defence correspondent, who reported the campaign for the BBC alongside Hanrahan, who died in 2010.
After working in the BBC studios last week to put together a report on the 30th anniversary of the war, Fox told me he came across an uncut earlier version of Hanrahan’s commentary which stated that there were 20 planes in the raid.
The number is significant. In the CIA’s secret intelligence despatches about the conflict, the Americans marvelled at how the British managed to win the air combat with only 40 Harriers. In fact the British fought mostly with half that number.
*Wagner lout alert at the Barbican. A young man was seen swigging a bottle of lager in the highest-price stalls seats for the Mariinsky Opera’s performance of Wagner’s Easter opera Parsifal. Until recently, audiences were encouraged to resist applauding the work due to its perceived holiness. One doubts Wagner would have appreciated the auditorium smelling like a Bierkeller.
The audience for the one-off performance by the St Petersburg company included John Gummer and family and Claus von Bülow, though the latter only lasted the first one-and- three-quarter hour act. Perhaps he needed a lager.
War of words breaks out between critics
The capital’s theatre critics weigh their words with care and are always on the lookout for colleagues who use them inappropriately.
Many hundreds of hours were expended not so long ago trying to establish whether Tim Walker, the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls, had been guilty of making “coded fattist remarks” in his reviews about Ian Shuttleworth, his opposite number on the Financial Times — the matter was twice vainly referred to the Press Complaints Commission.Now Walker himself has reason to take offence. Mark Shenton, chair of the drama section of the Critics’ Circle, has referred to him in a blog as “the Sunday Telegraph’s chief theatre cretin”.
“This man is entitled to his point of view,” says Walker, “but I don’t think it is funny to use a word that is normally employed to describe someone who is mentally and physically handicapped due to a thyroid deficiency as a general term of abuse.”
*“The New Testament tells us so much about the character of Jesus’, says David Cameron. Is this the most banal thing he’s ever said?” inquires Damian McBride on Twitter. Would this be the same Damian McBride who was forced to quit No 10 following an attempt to smear Conservative MPs exactly three years ago? Old habits die hard.
No expense spared by Ken
In the interests of transparency, Boris Johnson has published the expenses claims of his predecessor and rival for the current mayoral race, Ken Livingstone.
Startling items for which the council tax payers of London were left to pick up the tab included a claim by Livingstone of £256.98 for a new pair of shoes. There was also £130.73 for several taxi trips to a dentist. Ken also took 14 people out to dinner at the 2007 Labour Conference, which cost us £629.31p.
But the most eye-catching item was a £466.35 dinner in Havana with his Cuban translator.
Restaurants in Cuba are not noted for their extravagance. How was it possible to run up a £466.35 bill for dinner for two? They must have had a lot of mojitos.
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