Great pizza, really stupid marketing

The late Gary Halbert was "introduced" to me by David Ogilvy, shortly after Ogilvy and Mather bought my ramshackle agency on the grounds that no matter how clueless we were, their London direct agency was ten times worse.

(The certainly were: some of their clients wanted their money back!)

David sent me one of Gary's newsletters and asked what I thought. I thought it was extraordinarily good, and used an example from it in a book on how to write a good salesletter.

Gary was the maverick to out-maverick all mavericks, and quite a few people have thrived by copying his stance of the fearless, no bullshit, warts-and-all guy who tells it like it is.

Sadly, we only started corresponding just before his early death. I really regret I never got to know him, because the world is too full of dull people.

He had an admirably simple approach to matters, exemplified by his definition of the one marketing weapon you really need to succeed if you're opening a restaurant. It is a starving crowd.

Well, where I live in Chelsea there is a starving crowd, and one restaurant is being amazingly dumb in not catering for them.

Lots of Italians live here - and unlike the ones I live with many are filthy rich. One in our block spent far too much money buying a three bedroom flat which was in perfect condition, ripped the whole lot out including the beautiful floorboards and spent another fortune remodelling the whole place.

So what do Italians like? Pizza. Where does the best pizza come from? Napoli. And today my fair companions squealed with delight when they learned that across the river in Battersea - three minutes away by car - Pizza Metro, an excellent Neapolitan restaurant, does home delivery.

But not to Chelsea - far richer than Battersea, with the biggest crowd of starving Italians you can imagine.

Crazy.

Be ye never so high, the law is above you ” – Lord Justice Denning

The antics in parliament brought that to my mind. I know he said it, but I can’t find the reference anywhere.

He also said: “The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country”.

Twenty odd years ago after one of my periods of self-inflicted recession I owed the tax man a weighty six figure sum. In due course the bloodhounds were on to me, and I was summoned to meet two officials.

You might imagine they would be in the traditional investigative roles of Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty. This was not the case: they were Mr. Nasty and Mr. Extremely Bloody Unpleasant.

It was very, very worrying but in the end I did not try to bluff it out and claim I’d been perfectly justified in not paying the taxes. I told the truth: I am downwright incompetent. I admitted I was wrong and we came to an agreement about how I was going to pay it all off.

This seemed to me fair and reasonable even if the men in question didn't. The key exchange took place when they said to me, "You owe us £XXX,000" and I replied, "No, I don’t. Then they said to me, "Prove it."

Every one of the wretches who has been accused of stealing our money, starting with Brown and Cameron, should be forced to prove they didn't, and if they did, forced to pay back the money with interest where appropriate.

They should be subjected to the normal procedures which operate when somebody is guilty. Can anyone tell me why not?

I just like this one

Somehow it epitomises a characteristic all employees of large corporations should painstakingly nurture, cultivate and cherish.

Endless drivel about branding from the intellectually impoverished

The other day I read two things whose almost ludicrous contrast was so revealing I had to write to you about it.

The first was a paper by an Italian surgeon about some highly complex heart operations. The second was a piece in a Malaysian marketing publication announcing that somebody or other had been appointed "brand ambassador" for something or other.

What a vast gap there is between the extremely demanding and worthwhile things some people are doing and the world in which most marketers operate, where the absurdly trivial is imagined to be important.

I was reading the surgeon’s paper because I had been asked to make sure the English in it was correct, and I am now something of an expert on various pieces of technical language about heart surgery, none of which I understood more than vaguely.

What I did understand was what he was doing was extremely difficult and required a high degree of intelligence and hard work. Compare that with someone who when asked at a cocktail party what he does for a living replies, "I’m the ambassador for Poopo's toilet tissue or Farto's haemorrhoids relief".

Don't laugh. I once met a man who had a job defined on his visiting card as Being Volkswagen. Better than Being Tampax, I guess. What do you think?

Don't You Believe It! Sound sense from Mr. Anderson

I dropped a few names I respected the other day, and here's another.

I've never actually met Mike Anderson and I don't owe him any money, but here's a couple of things everyone ought to think about - and despite being such a bloody know-all I certainly hadn't thought of the first one.

He tells about a magazine rep who wanted to flog some space. He goes on:

"I think her patience with me is wearing thin for two reasons.

First, I keep insisting that I have no interest whatever in her "special features", adding that if we advertise in her excellent magazine, it won't be because they happen to be running a feature on advertising, on direct marketing or anything else.

Think about it. How do features come about in most publications? I strongly suspect they come about because the advertising manager or sales manager has sat the sales team down and said something like this:

"If we do a feature on computers, there are 325 computer companies we can approach for advertising!

On home building, there are 22 builders. etc."

The point is, this is completely sales driven, not market driven. The market - the prospects that actually buy computers - hardly petitioned the publication to run a feature. And if the market didn't ask for it, why should we assume they'd be interested in reading the feature when it appears?

My second digression with my sales rep friend came about on her last visit. She brought in a "hot" new piece of info entitled "successful marketing tactics" which "proved" that following a year long study, researchers have concluded that a marketing message must penetrate the mind of a prospect a total of nine times before that prospect becomes a customer.

Her document (which not surprisingly she said is a terrific sales tool for her in selling ad space) even went onto say the reader won't even see two out of the three times you advertise, so therefore you have to advertise 27 times to get a customer.

RUBBISH! RUBBISH! RUBBISH!

Interpreting statistics in this way is very dangerous. It borders on dishonesty. What you should be told is this: "Every ad should be designed to get a measurable response. And if those responses don't pay for the ad, don't continue running it!"

Now, "pays for itself" may not strictly mean you get all your money back up front. It may mean you get enough leads to make it profitable in the "back end" when they convert to long-term customers. But never keep running an ad with the hope that it'll somehow start working after 27 times ... or 9 times or even 2 times.

Test your ads constantly, and insist they work every time!

Bang on, Mike.

Ad agencies often give you all that malarkey about "we're building awareness - just keep pissing away - er, I mean investing - money, it'll work in the long run."

As Keynes noted, "In the long run we are all dead."

I can tell you, gentle reader, that other things being equal the first time you run an ad, you get the hottest prospects, then the second time, the not quite so hot - etc.

What you have to do is manage the pauses between insertions.

How long you make them depends chiefly on two factors: the size of the circulation and the interest of the product. The smaller the circulation, the longer the pauses should be. Conversely, the more universal the interest, the shorter they can be.

The same principle applies to space size. But I am rambling, as usual - and forgot to comment on the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, besides being a useless crock of shit, is a thief. Stick him in jail with all the others.

The Toad, who is so bent he'd fall off a corkscrew, used to make great play about his father being a clergyman. Clearly he never came into much contact with the ten commandments starting with Thou shalt not bear false witness.

You can find Mike Anderson at mike@lowriskmarketing.com.

Another genius hits me with a piece of who-gives-a-flying-fuck marketing

Since a malign fate* has forced me to keep working**, I subscribe to all sorts of things in the hope that I might learn something. Many are very instructive - too many to mention really.

The best are written by entrepreneurs who've set up their own businesses with their own money. They tend to give simple practical help - though too many are of the "I'll make you rich like me in the twinkling of an eye if you just attend my eye-wateringly expensive seminar" variety.

Nobody knows more about the techniques of selling with words than Gary Bencivenga or Clayton Makepeace. Michel Fortin often makes me think. So do Perry Marshall and David Garfinkel. Karl Blanks and Ben Wesson are great on Google. And Ken McCarthy is perhaps the best of all thinkers about the internet.

It almost makes me want to retire gracefully. But then I recall all the stuff that's useless - usually aimed at the corporate market. You can recognise it instantly by seeing how much fancy jargon and cliche is used. These people talk about "concepts" rather than ideas, are besotted by the "cutting edge" and "state of the art" and induce dangerous narcoleptic trance in the intelligent human being.

No matter how bright you are, once you spend a while in the corporate maze your senses desert you; you lose all sense of reality and start talking and thinking like everyone else. You begin to fantasize. You start to enjoy meetings and believe they achieve something. If Einstein had worked for Aviva or General Motors he would have become a shambling idiot within months.

But back to my subject. Some sources of marketing advice just plain mystify me.

A man called J. P. Maroney promises me I'll make truckloads through public speaking. When he first wrote, I replied saying I'm not too bad after 30 years trying to get it right, but always glad to learn.

There was no reply, because he just squirts his stuff out like so many others; it's what I call fire-hose marketing. The only reason it pays is because it's so cheap to send out e-mails. (If you write to me and I don't reply, it's a mistake caused by senility or distraction - so write again if it's a serious question).

Anyhow, J. P.'s latest effusion amused me. It read:

drayton,

Do you speak for association?

Conference / Conventions / Retreats?

(If not, but you'd like to you're welcome
to read the following too)

This was followed by the usual stuff aimed at extracting a few $$$ out of me.

I can't reply to his machine for sending out bilge asking "Is the inability to write English essential to success as a public speaker? Or are you just a lazy, careless bugger?"

So I thought I'd stick it up here for fun.

* An expensive divorce. ** Please don't say "But you love it, Drayton". This is only half-true. Occasionally I get clients I'd like to kill - then I want to retire and live in a wine bar. *** By the way, Steve, I will put up the 78% letter - which incidentally got enquiries at 1/20th of the usual rate - eventually. It will form part of a little venture I'm about to launch.

Pigging it up

I was talking yesterday at an Ordnance Survey conference. Don't ask me what it was all about, but if you're in marketing you know that maps are very important for targeting.

Although many people liked my usual selection of tawdry jokes, the best speaker of the day was Gerald Ratner. If you ever get a chance to see him, do. Absolutely hilarious and wonderfully self-deprecating.

(For those who don't know who Gerald Ratner is - get on the internet. He is a very unlucky man, really.)

I was told they were going to have a Hog Roast the night before the conference, but I couldn't make it. I'm a pig for hogs and I was sulking about this till I learned that the swine in question didn't turn up.

Two footnotes on the subject of swine (you can guess some of what's coming, can't you?)

1. I see most of the pigs in Parliament still can't tell the difference between right and wrong - especially Gordon Brown, who condemns one person (Hazel Blears) for doing something almost identical to what he condones in another (Hoon - a slimy creep, by the way - I was in a meeting with him years ago).

2. My dear friend Daz Valladares who is from those parts tells me that in Kalina, a Bombay suburb, they used to have the festival of St. Roque. Part of the fun was a game where the men of the village formed a circle within which a pig was set free. The person who captured it was allowed to take it home.

Concerns about Swine Flu caused this harmless East Indian custom to be abandoned. What a shame.

Daz says he went to school with someone from Kalina, and "it used to be a quiet place with tamarind trees and quarries which used to fill up with salt water when the tide came in. These were crystal clear and deep ponds. I enjoyed swimming in them."

There is something very touching and sad about that, don't you think? Not as sad as the way even small places far from anywhere are being persecuted by bureaucratic idiots. They are probably related to the idiots who destroyed the homes of those two adorable Slumdog kids.

Legal profession? Did I get my prepositions wrong? Really weird!

Thanks so much to everyone who replied so quickly to my cry for help this morning.

Here's what's weird.

What I asked was, can anyone help me with stuff about marketing for the legal profession? But everyone then wrote telling me how hard it is to market to the legal profession.

Actually - a small boast - we have not found it hard to market to them. Our biggest triumph last year was a mailing to 1500 lawyers (on a shit database) that produced two sales worth over £150,000 between them - and a total of over £1,000,000 and counting.

This may be the most profitable piece of direct mail I ever had a hand in - and I mean "hand": I hand-signed the letters.

So - thanks - but does anyone know anything about marketing for lawyers? All help gratefully received.

And be careful. It won't take much for me to boast about the letter I wrote last month that got 78% response. But you'd never believe me. We all know nobody reads direct mail any more, don't we?

Can any of you give me hand here?

Do you know anything about marketing for the legal profession?

I know at least one of you does, but I'm wondering if anyone else can help.

In a fit of folly, I've agreed to write a book on the subject. I have a fair bit of experience, but if you have any case-histories or wisdom to impart, please let me know.

The deadline is tight, and meanwhile I have a business to mismanage, copy to write and a few speeches to give and videos to make. Am I mad, or what?

My e-mail is Drayton@Draytonbird.com.

Jerry meets the President

An old colleague, Jerry Reitman, is involved with a charity that raises money for hospitals in the US and around the world (last year $245 million) that treated 17 million kids.

Once a year, they have an Event in Disneyworld to honour kids who have been treated - one from each state and from Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia with family and siblings. They call these children Champions, and afterwards the US Champions go to Washington. This year Jerry, a past chairman of CMN, was invited. The children had a tour of the White House, then they and their families went to the South Lawn, and met the President.

Jerry said, He was great. He shook hands with every Champion, took a group and individual pictures and spent 20-30 minutes there...and even took questions from the kids. He then said to the kids, "I have go back to work in the Oval office but you know what, we have a new swing set just outside the oval office" and he pointed. "Would you like to try it out...it hasn't had much use so far."

The kids screamed and said yes. The President returned to the Oval office; the kids, their siblings, their families went over to the Swing set (more than just swings of course) ...and for the next half hour had a great time. (While the Secret Service went bonkers)

The swing set is about 75 feet from the Oval office...and we could see the President (through the bullet-proof glass) and who I presume were his secretaries or staff, looking out the window and smiling.

And then unannounced, unexpected, the President came out of the Oval office in shirt-sleeves and asked the kids how they liked the swing set...they all screamed again and he then returned to work. There were no outside press allowed. No CNN, NO networks. No Video. Of course everyone had a camera and took pictures by the thousands I'm sure, and the official White House Press office.

When Jerry met him, He asked what I did, and was as cordial and approachable as he appears on TV. He is totally unassuming, down-to-earth, and easy to speak with...although for someone as loquacious as me, I was a little tongue-tied!

As he was leaving to go outside to the kids, I said, "Oh by the way, Uncle Steve says hello!" He turned and said, " Uncle Steve?" And I said, " Steve Shields. He is my friend and next door neighbor, and was over for dinner last Saturday and said, if I met you to say hi, and to say what a great time he and Kay had last weekend when they stayed here at the White House."

And then the president knocked me out, when he said, "Get outa here. You really live next door to Steve...Steve and Marion and the family had a great time..."

(Steve Shields is the brother of Michelle Obama's mother Marion...Marion Robinson, whose maiden name was Shields).

Frankly, I have no idea whether Obama will be a great president. No doubt he will make dreadful mistakes. Who doesn't? And his room for manoeuvre is small. But you get a lot to like. The fact that there were no news reporters there struck me.

The website to remember is www.childrensmiraclenetwork.org.

Hypocrisy and the pyramid of folly

"We know no situation so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality" said Macaulay.

The current torrent of revelations reminds me of kids when someone smashes a window. Nobody owns up. "He did it". "No I didn't - she did!" I did NOT! He did."

The only difference is that with the kids, there was usually only one guilty party. The people running our little world are all guilty.

Take the greedy buggers in the City. One said the other day that you wouldn't get the best staff if you didn't offer the best bonuses. “Many of these people work incredibly hard.”

What are you talking about, Alistair Brown of Mastercard Advisers - and who do you give your crappy advice to? There’s a girl serving pizzas in Icco in Goodge Street who works harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. I bet she’s on a minimum wage with no bonus. And she’s infinitely more attractive than any of you vultures.

Paying the biggest bonuses only gets the greediest staff - as we have seen. The best financial man around is Warren Buffet who certainly doesn't operate on a maximum greed basis. When I worked for Ogilvy and Mather they paid so modestly compared to many others that they joked that you needed a private income to work there. You did it because you wanted to be the best and work with the best. The man who ran Grey - one of their competitors - made obscene amounts of money, but his agency was no fun and no good.

The politicians have been busy blaming the City for things going wrong. But now a group of eminent economists have revealed that the useless (government-appointed) regulators are more to blame than any share gamblers. Having dealt with the Financial Services Authority, I believe them.

And who would believe politicians anyhow, when the biggest thief of the lot is the “Justice” Minister? But can you credit what you read in the papers? Journalists are the biggest ponces and freeloaders ever. “You cannot hope to bribe or twist - thank God! - the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to."

And as if life isn't miserable enough, the bureau-Nazis want to make it harder to enjoy yourself - and starve the roots of the music indutry. There's a new piece of misery-guts nitpicking called Form 696 which publicans and managers of other small venues are being forced to comply with. They must give police a pile of useless information , including the names, aliases, private addresses and phone numbers of all musicians and other performers appearing at their venue, and the ethnic background of the likely audience.

The ethnic background? Whose sweaty,politically correct arse ARE you marooned up, you utter morons? If the audience came from Mars what the hell is that to do with you?

If those responsible don't obey this insane request they could lose their licences or even get fined or imprisoned. This idiocy already applies in 21 London boroughs, but people in the music business fear it will be copied in other cities. All too likely. Then the police will spend even more time on bureaucratic crap and even less chasing criminals. It will also will make putting on live bands next to impossible for most small venues. An 'open mike' night could not happen under such rules.

Please join this group to protest against form 696 and other totalitarian dementia which could kill off live music everywhere. Please sign the petition on the 10 Downing Street website at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Scrapthe696

But all this is symptomatic of why so much of the world is up the creek. Everything is driven by an utter inability on the part of those in charge to distinguish, even vaguely, between what matters and what doesn't.

There is a sort of upside-down pyramid of folly. The higher you get, the bigger the fools, the more unable they are to tell right from wrong, the more disastrous the consequences and the more those below - us, folks - suffer.

Thus, if you let a man run finances (G. Brown, Fuckwits Anonymous, or for that matter G. Bush, Lifetime President, Fuckwits Anonymous) who can't understand that spending more money than you have is stupid, well, you end up working like a dog for the next 20 years subsidising that one man's stupidity. And pay him a pension after he stole yours.

One mark of our lack of moral compass nowadays is that anyone here should really wonder - even for a second - whether the crooks in politics who've been found out should be prosecuted. Of course they should. Vigorously. Take to the streets if they aren't!

Oh, and if you're thinking, "well, it's much worse with Berlusconi", or, "look at those bastards in Burma" just remember: "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Next, I'll give you the Barack Obama story I promised.

If they can't write English, how good could their service be?

One of my colleagues wrote to an internet firm misnamed Articulate to ask three very simple questions.

This reply came back from some wench in Customer Disservice:

I've personally reviewed your case and have determined that it will require attention from a Tier 2 Customer Support Engineer who specializes in cases like yours. I've escalated your case for further analysis.

Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding. We look forward to resolving your case!

Regards,

Ms. Halfewytte

The questions my partner asked were so simple that it makes you wonder what the Tier 1 Customer Support Engineers do. Clean Toilets? And while I'm on about it, why the bloody exclamation mark?

But why does this sort of thing drive me into fits of juddering rage? I have been dealing for five months with two idiots who talk like that all the time, interspersing such language with requests for meetings about fuck-all. They are also haughtily ignorant about what we do. Every time I get an email from one of them I want to smash my computer into tiny shards.

Am I just getting more and more bad-tempered? I am actually rather a happy soul. Should I not be taking pity on someone who thinks it right to come out with such tripe? Would it not be more helpful to suggest people like that seek fulfilment with a job in local government?

Anyhow, I am torn about what write about in my next post. We have a striking policewoman from Naples called Nadia staying with us who makes me laugh and wonder why crime is so popular there.

Last time we met she was helping us to clear her sister Pina's house in Woking.

We got rid of a lot of stuff, some of which she sold to a Chinese family. I still can't understand how she did it. They spoke very little English, and hers whilst hugely and hilariously expressive is pretty incomprehensible, especially when she gets excited, which is most of the time.

So that's all I can tell you about her really. Next time I'll talk about what an old colleague thought of meeting Barack Obama. Very interesting.

An old joke pressed into valiant new service

A man died and went to heaven. As he stood in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him

He asked, "What are all those clocks?"

St. Peter answered, "Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock will move."

"Oh," said the man, "Whose clock is that?"

"That's Mother Teresa's. The hands have never moved, indicating that she never told a lie."

"Incredible," said the man. "And whose clock is that one?"

St. Peter responded, "That's Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life."

"Where's Gordon Brown's?" asked the man.

"Gordon's clock is in Jesus' office. He's using it as a ceiling fan."

My pal Andy Owen sent me that. But you know what? Nobody in my little home gives a shit about Gordon Brown.

They are far more concerned with whether Brad Pitt is leaving Angelina to get back with Jennifer Aniston.

So let me make my views clear. Whilst Angelina is very sexy, I have always rather liked Jen (that’s what us Grazia readers call her). All she needs is a little bow in her hair to remind me of my Maltese dog, Chiffon, whom I loved dearly.

Nevertheless, I do not share the views of one Grazia columnist who said she was squealing with delight all day at the thought of Jen and Brad recapturing the lost magic they once shared.

I was thinking about all those kids Brad is leaving behind. I still feel bad about my first divorce.

What a man! Compare him with today's bunch of fairies

Forty years ago I lived in Shepherd Market, in Mayfair, then famed for its large number of ladies of pleasure, though I was always too cheap – or health-conscious - to bother.

Round the corner in Piccadilly was (and still is) the home of Lord Palmerston, one of our greatest Foreign Secretaries. One hundred and fifty years ago, he managed the foreign relations of the British Empire, which at that time covered a fair portion of the earth’s surface.

Somehow he was able to do this with the assistance of a remarkably small staff, answering all important messages personally, by hand. He was assisted by two under-secretaries, a chief clerk, six senior clerks, ten clerks, seven junior clerks, eight other clerks attached to particular duties, a librarian, a sub-librarian, a translator, a private secretary, a précis-writer, and a printer.

So that was 41 people in all running the foreign affairs of the largest empire the world had yet seen. Rather less than the number idling away their days in most of the myriads of dreary offices that clutter every municipality or support so many of the pointless committees that squander this country’s money on politically correct tripe.

Besides doing a great job, Palmerston found time for a private life so full that he was known as Lord Cupid, and was cited in a divorce case at the age of 79. Compare him with David Miliband, will you? (For overseas readers who will never have heard of him, Miliband is a long drink of water posing as today’s Foreign Secretary – though nobody gives a hoot except him.)

The splendid story that Palmerston died at 80 whilst pleasuring a maid on a billiard table is not true, but does give one something to aim for. In fact he was alleged to have said on his deathbed, "Die, my dear doctor? That's the last thing I shall do!"

However it is true that he refused to move home to Downing Street because there were fewer pretty women to look at. What an admirable man. He knew what mattered.

This is not what one could say about the blotch-faced, lurching, left-wing thug Michael Martin, currently posing as the Speaker of the House of Commons. This oaf is a disgrace to one of the greatest, most honourable offices in what was once a great country and a reproach to the Bliar who put him there, thus flouting a long tradition which called for someone from the other party in the post.

Yesterday, when even the shiftiest of political rogues was pretending to contrition at having been caught stealing, this wretch (who wasted a heap of public money trying to prevent his own peculations being unearthed) spent more time blaming the whistle-blowers than his fellow trough hounds.

How long before we become Europe's version of Nigeria?

No shame, no honesty – and absolutely no bloody clue

If you’re not British, you may not know about the Gurkhas.

But for nearly two centuries they have fought and died for Britain. No braver soldiers exist.

Their reward from Britain has been – nothing, except a statue in Whitehall. They have had no rights to domicile here. Many live in dire poverty. Some who are here get deported.

Now, again, if not British, you may not know Joanna Lumley. Here she is seen with Tul Bahadur Pun, a Gurkha who won the VC fighting for us. As the picture suggests, besides being a great comic actress she is remarkable in many ways. She has been fighting for the rights of Gurkha soldiers who fought for us. Every decent person in this country backs her.

Now, just guess who tried hard to stop her? Do the words “Great Bloated Loony Toad” ring any bells?

Ten days ago even Members of Parliament, the majority normally blind to much beyond the trough they have their snouts, in defeated this government on this issue.

Years ago, this would have led to the government resigning. But not now.

And no wonder, for yet another series of disclosures reveals just how just about all of them, from the Toad downwards have been stealing money. He - as cheap as you'd expect - did a little £6,577 scam by paying his brother for "cleaning services" and claiming twice for a plumbing bill.

It’s hard to know which is worse – their shiftiness or their dire incompetence. For last Thursday, having finally given in and been forced to the right thing by the Gurkhas, Brown said he would take "personal charge" of things. So two Gurkhas were denied the right to stay.

On two other matters of competence, first, the Bank of England has just printed another £50 billion of bank notes. This is what they used to call “debauching the currency.”

Second, Barclays Bank has just improved its profits by 15%. This was done by cutting costs.

Memo to Rotting Haggis: you don’t improve your finances by pissing away money. Even the doziest of bankers know you do it by spending less.

All you have to do is look around and eliminate every public service job that cannot be shown to add value. We managed without them before you and the Bliar arrived. We can manage again.

Drivel rules, OK?

After his loony starring roles on U-Tube I think we can agree, can't we, that the Great Bloated Toad is a spitting mad megalomaniac. Like the Michael Jackson of politics, but without the talent.

It appears to be catching.

Gloriously unaware that we have a teeny weeny financial problem in these parts, our witless, shifty, not-as-good-as-a-wank Home Secretary, "Jacqui" Smith is still determined to piss away £5 billion on identity cards which no independent authority thinks will achieve anything.

What a waste this is! Surely she knows better than anyone how much useful household bric-a-brac the money could buy.

Incidentally, aren't you amused by the way Cameron and the Toad are all claiming to be like Obama. They deserve to be put right.

This is how it is, you sad pair of bastards, so you can tell the difference in future.

Obama speaks with a strong American accent, Dave. Didn't go to Eton, had to work his way up from nothing, doesn't keep having his bike stolen because a) he's not stupid b) he doesn't need to keep trying to seem like an ordinary bloke and c) he drives around in a bomb-proof car.

Now for you, Gordon. Obama is the nice one, remember? The gentleman. The one who shook hands with the policeman outside 10 Downing Street when he came visiting. Not the self-centred, graceless, marooned-up-his-own-arse twat who didn't? Got that?

By the way, any chance of you doing the moonwalk on your next show?