Sunday, October 26, 2008

Go, Nick

As ever, Nick Cohen asks the right questions.  I particularly admire the sentence,  'Those naive souls who worry about political - oh I don't know - decorum then watched open-mouthed as within weeks of allowing the super-rich to pass him round like a half-drunk bottle of Cristal, Mandelson returned to Whitehall and demanded restrictions on the employment rights of working mothers.' Mandelson, I was once told, is a little too fond of Duchesses.

6 comments:

  1. Those naive souls who worry about political - oh I don't know - decorum...

    Pyjamas okay?

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  2. Would you let Mandy near your children?

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  3. If only there were more journalists of Cohens calibre.
    Rod Liddle, on sparkling form, today described the political punk as being like Herzog's Nosferatu, arriving in Britain accompanied by rats and the stench of decay. An accurate description I would say.

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  4. I'm beginning to feel it's like being trapped in a permanent performance of Cirque du Soleil. The first two rounds leave one thrilled by all the "Mandacious Mandelirium" (Jeff Randall). But by about round seven it's not funny any more and one's in urgent need of the loo and an ice-cream.

    A pleasant interlude is provided by Peter Conrad's interview with John Updike in the Observer. Not because of what is said (I am hardly qualified to judge) but because Conrad's style, which used to be brittle and acerbic, has now become supple and colloquial and capable, I'd guess, of drawing far more from both subject and reader. A pleasure.

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  5. A good piece indeed and nice to see someone try to describe exactly who Deripaska is and where he has come from- but describing the multifarious shady crooks hiding from Putin in London as 'dissidents' is a misuse of language, naively takes their self-descriptions at face value, and rather insults the sacrifices and struggles of genuine dissidents against authoritarian regimes, both past and present.

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  6. That guy Deripaska makes Don Corleone look like a fruit! SEE:

    THE MANDELSON INTERVIEW

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