Thursday 6 May 2010

For the best laugh I had all day

I just want to thank the person responsible for the page layout yesterday at the bottom of page 5 of the Independent newspaper, Election Guide 2010.

I'm not talking redesign. I could witter on there about the leading and letter spacing. No, it is for the following reprinted opinion piece about Balls, which is in itself gratifying to the likes of me and penned by Matthew Norman, but especially delicious for the practical page turning intrusion:

28 April: Matthew Norman - 'Will Blinky Balls consign Labour to history?'

On Monday's Newsnight Blinky Balls barely blinked at all. No doubt he noticed the line in a newspaper piece about him, that wakeful rapid eye movement is the body language for 'pathological liar'. ... Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation. If Pixar set out to create a CGI character to embody everything the public has learned to despise about its political class, they'd be thrilled to come up with this lizardy schemer, who may have slipped through a tear in the fabric of space-time himself. Certainly he seems best suited to skulking beneath stone archways, in a purple robe, sibilantly sidling poison into the bloodstream of the medieval Vatican. ... If he has a political philosophy, it is the domineering, top-down, we-know-best,

- Continued on page 6 -

infantilising statism of Gordon himself ... For Mr Balls, it is football thug tribalism – a with-us-or-against-us Manichean sensibility next to which Mrs Thatcher seems a proto-Cleggian champion of consensus.

I loved that. Continued on page 6. This is a gag that could run and run, and of those of us who've suffered him, we could fill pages and pages of wicked wonderful on the perils of the hideous Balls - Continued on page 7 - unredeemed by any human feature, odious and smarmy, slipping into power with double tongue and corporate suit - Continued on page 8 - and we could continue, we could.

But I am so fingers crossed that Balls does not.

3 comments:

kelly said...

That has made me laugh. Nice to see others noticing Balls for exactly what he is!

Getting creeped out by Jeremy Vine on the BBC from time to time and really hoping that the election swings in our favour.

sharon said...

Downunder we are currently watching the results come in with great interest!

Grit said...

kelly, i missed it first time round. so i am glad they reprinted it. but it is exactly right.

hi sharon! well, what now, eh? we're looking for someone to come and govern us. come and do it, we need someone level headed and cool in a crisis. you could do that. you definitely could.x