Who the hell are you ...?

If you had to establish which professional groups cause most damage as a result of their bloated, unjustified, overweening, fatuous self-importance, politicians would only be matched by show-business people.

This occurred to me when I read in the papers that Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof are to tell the world's richest nations, the greedy G8, to stop reneging on their pledges to double aid to Africa by 2010.

There are three interesting points here.

The first is, why the hell should people from rich, relatively successful nations want to be lectured by the grotesquely incompetent and mendacious Brown? What gives him the right? He clearly couldn't run a brothel on a troop train.

The second is, why does making a couple of hit records qualify you as an expert on how to solve mankind's problems?

Bob Geldof is clearly a very nice man - certainly compared with Bono, who combines his world-saving lecturing with a deep dislike of paying tax like the rest of us, the bloody hypocrite. But - and here is my third and most important point - there is absolutely no proof that giving aid to the third world does any good except for the who steal it (cf Zimbabwe, Burma and God knows how many other places run by murderous kleptocrats) and a lot to suggest it encourages all the wrong attitudes.

The real and disgraceful problem is that the rich countries make it impossible for the poor ones to export their products by creating tariff barriers, which in turn force all of us to subsidise inefficient European and U.S. farmers.

Which brings us back to the European Union and its manifold stupidities. How pleased we should be that the Poles and Czechs look like turning down the phony constitution I was moaning about last week.