You can always rely on Mike

My son-in-law Mike despite pretending to run a hotel outside Manchester only has one real interest in life: making dreadful jokes.

He has not let me down: I got a message yesterday morning congratulating me on my Sunni disposition.

Nice one, Mike; though my favourite current religious jest, is about the difference between God and the well known tax dodger Bono. The punch-line is “God doesn’t walk down O’Connell Street wearing dark glasses and thinking he’s Bono”.

Meanwhile, Peter Hobday has suggested that poor English stands in the way of making good jokes. I don't agree. Two of the best joke tellers I know are from Bombay and Vienna. Come to think of it, another who makes me laugh regularly is from Ljubljana; and last month in Warsaw a Polish presenter managed to make me laugh even though I didn't understand a word he said.

Anyhow, by coincidence, The Spectator ran a piece last week by two Muslims attacking the suggestion by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Little Witless in the Myre, that the institutionalisation of unspecified aspects of sharia law is ‘unavoidable’.

Which bits he means, I don't know. Stoning women (but not men) accused of adultery to death on the say so of men? Now that stabbing seems so popular here, maybe that would go down well as a spectator sport in some quarters.

Anyhow, as I am in the toils of an insane divorce which so far has cost an alarming amount of money – and will certainly mean my soon-to-be-ex-wife gets about £300,000 less than she would have if she hadn’t wasted so much time I deeply appreciate what a mess the law is in.

Four different judges could even agree on how I had to swear a particular document, and the court even forgot to issue my decree nisi. But I didn’t realize the top law man is a such a complete twat. Maybe he reflects the ineptitude of the entire system. Mind you, when you have a government that comes up with new, generally unworkable laws every twenty minutes, then withdraws them it's probably hard to say sane.

What is interesting about the Spectator article is that survey evidence shows that Muslims themselves dislike the idea of sharia being introduced here. It is only dumbos in the British Establishment, so committed to multiculturalism and as usual going to the wrong people (bogus, self appointed Muslim “representatives”) to get bad advice.

The article reveals that when his followers were persecuted in Mecca and fled to Christian Ethiopia Mohammed said they must accept the laws and customs of their new homes, and not try to change them in an Islamic direction.

And apparently Ayatolla Sistani of Iraq, one of the few voices of reason in that sad country is also a leading sharia authority. He says if you have agreed to accept the laws of a country, you must either do so or leave.

I like that approach a lot more than that taken by our government and the European legislators. This seems to be if you flout the laws of our country and even encourage murder, don’t worry, we’ll pay to keep you here as long as you please just in case the people where you came from find you as detestable as we do.

Meanwhile, people who really deserve asylum and help, poor black women with sick children for instance, who have no braying lobby of the liberal brainless to defend them are shipped back to misery and in the case of the children, death.

All this is another obscene example of the way those with the biggest mouths in any community not only have the least sense; they are utterly out of touch with the rest of us. More to the point, they always end up by landing us in the shit.

In this case the extremists have made life difficult for the moderates; and the government has, rather than ameliorate the problem, sown discord between communities and, as usual, managed to make life worse for all of us.