Friday, 31 July 2009

Members must get down 'n' dirty

OK, all you townies, listen up. Every year, at around this time, there’s something called the Country Land and Business Association Game Fair. I went along in a lovely little motorhome thanks to the wonderful Caravan Club, with my fellow campers Jimbo and Baz. The Game Fair is the biggest country fair in Europe. It has all sorts of stands featuring hunting, shooting, fishing, falconry, farming, shepherding . . . and all those other things people get up to in deserted rural places. Aside from enjoying the rural experience, the Game Fair is also about protecting people’s rural rights. Things like the hunting ban are a lot more complex than they first look. In fact, I’m against the ban because the research shows it actually stands to increase animal suffering. But there are all sorts of other issues at stake. Animal welfare, people’s jobs and the protection of our environment all rest on the choices made by politicians. Unfortunately, a lot of MPs are happy to blabber on about rural things. But they don’t bother to get out there and talk to the country folk who know the effect these badly thought out decisions can have. Sitting in London making laws about the countryside without actually listening to country people, is like giving Daily Sport babe Gemma Massey advice on bras to wear without ever having seen her boobs — it just doesn’t work!
YOU may have heard some talk about me and my very good friend, Katie Green . You’ll know her, she’s the nice model who lost her job for being too fat. Well, it’s ridiculous. She’s not fat. She’s 5ft 10 ins and a perfect 12. If she was any thinner, you’d be able to employ her as a garden rake. That’s why we’re running a campaign to “give a big zero to size zero”. It’s bonkers for the fashion industry to make girls believe that looking like a skeleton is cool or fetching, but that’s what some of them do. We’re hoping this campaign will get that message across. You can sign up to on the website which is katiegreenofficial.com So go on! It’ll only take you a minute, and anyway, the pics on it are definitely worth a butchers.
THE good folk of Norwich were left without an MP after Labour’s Ian Gibson was effectively (and pretty unfairly!) booted out of Parliament over the expenses business. So party bosses, MPs and campaigners flooded in from all over the country in the weeks leading up to the by-election. Cameron’s Tories came out on top with a plucky young lady called Chloe Smith who thrashed all the other contenders (not literally with a stick, though). So the Conservatives have got themselves an extra seat and a little boost in the run-up to the General Election. They must be feeling pretty good about themselves right now. But it’d be a dangerous time to get complacent. Every party knows a week is a long time in politics and the General Election probably won’t be until May 2010, almost a year away. You never know what could happen between now and then. Gordon Brown could enter the Big Brother house to reconnect with the public, the Tories might make George Galloway their leader in retaliation and my local pub landlord, Richard Bell, could become Prime Minister. If all those things do happen, I’ll throw a party down at the Three Stags and Tory Dave can serve the beers.
HANDS up if you’ve ever heard of Erich Honecker. He was the dictatorial twit who ran East Germany when it was its own little communist country from 1945-1989. Erich wasn’t a particularly nice chap. But he did have some very cool stuff, including a great big propeller-driven plane so he could visit his commie buddies. It had been sitting abandoned since communism collapsed at the end of the 1980s. But this week Honecker One has come back into use — as a luxury hotel. A Dutch fella found it somewhere in East Germany, bought it and shipped it to Holland. There he ripped out the insides and put in a posh bedroom, a sauna and a hot tub. Now he’s charging couples to come and stay in it. The cockpit has been left intact, but that’s dangerous. Anyone might be able to fly off with the whole hotel – and then it’d be “chocs away” and “Auf wiedersehen,” pet!

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