MajorBloodnok, Agony Aunt Dear Finding_Memo,
Well, funny you should ask that but it appears that the #Frenchgate memo went through quite a few draſt s before it hit on the sure-fi re winning formula of trying to associate the SNP negatively with the Tories, even though that is precisely what the Lib-Dems, Labour and indeed UKIP have been doing for the last fi ve years. In fact the only people not tainted by accusations of hob-nobbing furiously with the Tories are the Tories themselves.
Dear MajorBloodnok,
I understand that the Scotland Offi ce has accidentally on purpose ‘leaked’ a memo, which, after exhaustive and objective analysis by the BBC, apparently turns out to be a devastatingly well-timed exercise in trying to discredit Nicola Sturgeon. The gist of the BBC’s reporting has been that, if you sort of squint at it out of the corner of your eye and disengage all your cognitive faculties, Nicola Sturgeon’s preference is David Cameron as UK Prime Minister.
for
Clearly the First Minister and the French Consul have fl atly denied this but of course, as mere foreigners, their word is not worth much when weighed against the probity and honesty of anything printed on headed paper by the British Government and the BBC. I was thinking though that there must be a lot of these civil service memos in the system just waiting to pop out at entirely coincidental moments and I was wondering if you were aware of any to which the BBC hadn’t yet devoted a whole weekend of slavish and unquestioning speculation?
Finding_Memo
Most of the draſt s I’ve been privy to are somewhat outlandish, but a couple do stand out as being entirely plausible, the most believable one being a record of a conversation between Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, where both of them agree that Miliband isn’t Prime Ministerial material either. They therefore go on to decide to secretly support Cameron for PM, by making Jim Murphy leader of the Labour party in Scotland, thereby absolutely guaranteeing that Labour won’t have a majority at Westminster aſt er the election.
Dear MajorBloodnok,
I was watching the various leadership debates in the run up to the general election and was struck by the quality and consistency of the audiences. Even the BBC’s one-man audience on 10 April was noteworthy. Is there some sort of selection procedure that the broadcasters use or are the audiences eff ectively a broad and representative cross- section of the public?
I_Moustache_you _a _question
Dear I_Moustache_you _a _question, Broadcasters never leave anything to chance (I mean look at who used to get the most scores in “It’s a Knockout” all the time? Hint: he’s in prison now) and therefore they do select the audiences based on previous elections or other criteria pertaining to the empirical end of the political- science spectrum.
For example in the main televised
debates, the SNP’s six-month lead in the polls since the Referendum was thought too much of an ephemeral surge to be considered meaningful and therefore both the BBC and STV, when choosing their audiences, selected them on
Personal Astrologer to the Great and the Good... and Jim Murphy and what they are telling us.
But I
’m not one to complain but this week’s predictions have been seriously aff ected by the prospect of 7.6 billion black holes that have suddenly appeared on the political horizon, sucking all life, light and reason out of the stars, so we can only speculate on their alignments
96 May 2015
what makes these predicted black holes so remarkable is that they are considered by offi cial mediums as being signifi cantly more potent than the 10% share of the 98 billion black holes that we already have, implying that, for the fi rst time ever in the history of the world, a national government would have to borrow money to cover them.
However, being (temporarily) unable
to interpret the stars this week, I have fallen back on more primitive means of predicting the future such as sit ing around the weegie board (not looking good for Labour) and my personal favourite, consulting the entrails. Although less common now this ancient technique is proving extremely prescient, as the signs are all clearly pointing to the likelihood that the Labour Party in Scotland will be completely eviscerated at the General Election.
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