the humour of the late left-wing Labour MP Tony Banks, “known for acid tongue and sharp wit“, who “will be remembered for his hilarious insults“
“Tory MP, Terry Dicks, was dismissed as “living proof that a pig’s bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to Parliament”.
The former sports minister, who became Lord Stratford last year, showed reputations did not intimidate him when he accused Lady Thatcher of having “the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor” during a Commons debate.
He added to that by calling the former Prime Minister a “half mad old bag lady” on another occasion.
Former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke was “a pot-bellied old soak” while another former Prime Minister John Major was “so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying”.
During the 1997 Labour Party conference he sparked controversy by describing then-Tory leader William Hague as a “foetus”.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats were “woolly-hatted, muesli-eating, Tory lick-spittles”.”
Just let me pick myself up off the floor – that is so funny. And so original.
Although the BBC don’t tell us his brilliant follow-up to the ‘foetus‘ jibe.
“I bet a lot of Tory MPs wish they hadn’t voted against abortion“
First Ronnie Barker. Then Richard Pryor.
Now, as the BBC remind us, another comic genius has left us.
A very mean spirited class warrior.
No great loss.
Tony Banks is dead? Good. Can I have his Chelsea season ticket then?
slightly OT,or things the BBC neglects to explain to the rest of the world’s non-license paying listeners…
How do you Brits get “Mingus”,or “Min” out of Menzies, as in Sir Menzies Liberal Dem Aspirant? Is it the same as “Maudlin” for Magdalen? So it’s now Mary Maudlin with you guys? Or that other baffling one, “Keys” transmuted from Gaius College.
Excuse our ignorance, but we find those distortions almost as hilarious as imagining a dream debate between Louis the Budweiser Lizard and the ever hateful Justin Webb.
Tony Banks – led to more wasting of parliamentary time (on fox hunting and other animal “rights” issues) than any other MP.
But, he ticks all the right boxes for the BBC, so we have to put up with the “man of the people” etc stuff for the next day or two.
LosAngelino –
I wouldn’t be too smug: why don’t Kansas and Arkansas rhyme?
Cheers.
OT
I’ve never understood govt policy on ship building for the Royal Navy, perhaps some of you can help?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/news/032001/04/appledore.shtml
The new Destroyers, Type 45 i believe, have been reduced in numbers from 12 to 8.
But if the Govt used its brain, it could build 14 Type 45s using the US Missile system as it is cheaper and far more effective.
More importantly, because of the reduced costs associated with the system, more hulls could be built thereby saving more Labour voting jobs, lets face it the ships are built in Labour constituencies by labour voters, and yet still New Labour abandons its own?!?
I would have thought at a time when work is stretched, the govt would want to encourage more ships to be built and save thousands of jobs and votes??
Especially in an election year? But there again, they never were too bright..any thoughts?
What a surprise. Tony Banks gets a “Your Tributes” headline on HYS.
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=724&&&edition=1&ttl=20060109095727
A line from the movie Wall Street. And here was me thinking Banks wrote all his own jokes…
So much for the healthy vegetarian lifestyle.
OT
In the blizzard of stuff about Charles Kennedy I note that several mentions are made of broadcasters beiong unable to use him. This, from Jackie Ashley in the Guardian:
“…broadcasters had found it difficult to put him on air at times, and the lies had piled up. ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1682175,00.html
So didn’t these broadcasters feel they had a news story on their hands? The leader of a major political party being drunk on the job? Or is it a case of those broadcasters, amongst whom we must presume Al Beeb, felt it necessary to protect a left of centre leader? Can we imagine a broadcast media keen to cover up for a drunken conservative? No I don’t think so either.
Tony Banks was a rude, self righteous ignoramus whose man-of-the-people schtick is exactly the sort of left sentimentality Al Beeb goes mad for.
I’ve always thought that when people die we should observe the principle “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”.
In Banks’s case, however, as they sometimes say in football circles, he’s lucky to get “nil”.
Presumably the BBC will now apologise ‘unreservedly’ for printing remarks offensive to Conservatives, foetuses and bag ladies – as they have done in the Carr-gate case.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4584218.stm
Even more amusing is the similarity between the responses of the Gypsy council spokeswoman and Laban – i.e. nobody could possibly find that funny harrumph harrumph.
Inappropriate for broadcast on the BBC sure, but most definitely funny.
Not as funny as Phil’s line though, which I will be shamelessly stealing henceforth.
Cheers!
LA,
Because “Menzies” is derived from Scots/Pict words, rather than English ones. (or thereabouts – not sure of the exact detail)
Quite a few place-names in his constituency similarly confuse the Sassanachs. eg the port written “Anstruther” pronounced “Ainster”
Mark Steyn scores another direct hit.
Issues you may expect Al Beeb to cover but will not……….
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760
O/T
Little of it online (or so I can find) but last night and this morning the Beeb (5Live) were banging on and on and on about the Hajj pilgrimage.
As if joe football public (i.e. me) cares…
Los Angelino:-
Re Ming.
This goes back to the days when English had 28 letters rather than 26. The two extra letters were the double consonants yogh and thorn. Yogh was the letters gh run together to make one, while thorn was th.
Yogh looked a bit like a letter Z with a tail that curled underneath it below the line, rather like a number 3. Thorn looked like a letter P with a longer upstroke, so that the loop on the right hand side of the P was in the middle of the upright rather than the top.
When printing came to Britain, typesetters used yogh and thorn along with the other 26 letters. Both were very common characters, so they quite often ran out of them and had to improvise. One way was to press a Z into service as a yogh and to use a Y as a thorn, because they looked so similar.
The name ‘Menghies’ was originally spelt m, e, n, yogh, i, e, s. Printers started spelling it ‘Menzies’, but the name was never ever pronounced that way, with a Z. It was always a GH, so ‘Menzies’ is properly pronounced ‘Mengies’.
That said, today you do hear people actually called Menzies pronouncing it with a Z, simply because to do otherwise baffles people.
Likewise, nobody ever referred to – for example – the French as “ye cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. The “Ye” at the beginning is in fact just good old “the”, spelt thorn, e, but typeset as y, e. So people did not refer to Ye Olde Green Manne, ye marketplace, or anything like that. ‘Ye’ with a Y was the plural or polite form of ‘thou’. ‘Ye’ with a thorn was ‘the’.
Printing killed off these two letters since in printed matter it was easy enough to have a stack of preformed GH and TH characters. Having them as extra letters no longer saved time so they were gradually dropped. You don’t see them much into the 1500s.
I believe it was the same story with Fs and Ss. 600 years ago in English script an S had a long vertical middle section with a curl at the top and bottom, and an F was the same with a cross-stroke. Early printfaces shorted the S so it would fit onto one line but carried the s/f similarity over.
The most preposterous English name I have ever come across is Featherstonehaugh, which is pronounced “Fanshaw”. I shit you not.
Fo now ye knowe why yere if fo much confufion over yif fpelling bufineff. Even we limeyf find ourfelvef yorouzly puzzled by ye whole ftrange fubject.
t_c_c
Wonderful!
Cheers!
Extensive coverage on the news about nasty Japanese whalers catching whales and contribution made by Greenpeace to stop this including a collision at sea.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1711024.stm
Meanwhile back in the real world Japan and China are snowed under
“The cold spell has engulfed much of Japan since December.
Kyodo News agency reported that heavy snow has killed 63 people in Japan and injured 1,040 since December.
Chinese soldiers clear snow Thursday to retrieve a truck stranded in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Heavy snow in the area and temperatures as low as -45 F have forced the evacuation of almost 100,000 people, the state weather bureau said Friday”
Which do you think is the more newsworthy?
Probably not the latter because
1. You can’t pin global warming on snow, and
2. Bodmin Moor Police have not opened a Gold Control Room.
Odd, I thought he was dead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4593888.stm
t_c_c – my hero. I’m humbled to be in the company of such erudition.
Cockney
Inappropriate for broadcast on the BBC sure, but most definitely funny.
For me the funniest thing about the death of Lord Stratford is the claim that he was somehow “a man of the people”.
Don’t you just love it when all those egalitarian socialists accept peerages?
As ever with Authoritarian Socialists (T Banks), they dont want to abolish the Monarchy, they want to be the King.
Lord Stratford (“…..but call me Tony”) MY ARSE.
Lord Stratford (of Stratford) had the courage of his prejudices, and tolerated that of which he approved.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home when he was Lord Home (pronounced “Hume”) ie reputed to have met Sir Robert Menzies (pronounced as written, not “Mingies”) and observed that it was strange the way some people said “Menzies” and others “Mingies” at which point the nuggety Aussie observed that, yes, it was indeed strange, just as some people say “Home” and others “Hume”.
Phil
LOL! Spot on!
And indeed presumably the English branch of French author Michel Houellebecq’s family are the Welbecks.
TCC –
I’m newish at this lark – what does LOL mean?
Thanks anyway!
Phil, it means Laugh Out Loud. if something is very funny you may see ROFLOL (rolling on the floor laughing out loud). You wont see that here though as nothing is ever that funny!
It seems to me that tolerance of Tony Banks’s (and Denis Skinner’s) ‘wit’ is actually a form of class condescension. No middle class politician of Left or Right would be indulged that kind of boorishness (and neither would a working class Tory MP), but coming from a self-styled prole of the Labour benches we are expected to laugh and think him a pretty clever little fellow ‘considering his background’.
The problem with making such allowances is that we implicitly demean the rest of the industrial class he (supposedly) sprang from; whereas the only class of people he ever truly represented was a psychological type that is to be found in all socio-economic strata – that of insecure little tossers.
Phil J
ROFLOL
I am advised not to speak ill of the dead – I make no comment about Tony Banks.
As for Sir Menzies Campbell QC I find him a supercilious lawyer of very moderate intelligence who considers himself an authority whereas most listeners/viewers just consider him an arrant bore with the pomposity of a barrister.
Charles Kennedy was holding a disintegrating party together, now it will split but it is not clear if it will split ideologically between right and left or geographically between Southern England and the Northern Kingdom.
Fo now ye knowe why yere if fo much confufion over yif fpelling bufineff. Even we limeyf find ourfelvef yorouzly puzzled by ye whole ftrange fubject.
the_camp_commandant | 09.01.06 – 11:35 am |
Thanks, very interesting.
For me the funniest thing about the death of Lord Stratford is the claim that he was somehow “a man of the people”.
Don’t you just love it when all those egalitarian socialists accept peerages?
Anonymous | 09.01.06 – 11:58 am
His father was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw !!!!
I suppose it was a People’s Republic after the Communists got control.
Tony Banks (Lord in name only)
[rest of comment deleted]
Edited By Siteowner.
Criticise, defend, or (within limits) display your sardonic wit. But don’t fill up the comments with mere expressions of dislike. – NS
Off Topic:
BBC reports on the death of a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader in an airplane crash, following a similar incident a month ago in which a c-130 crashed after a first pilot refused to fly the plane, citing technical problems.
Says the Beeb:
“Because of US sanctions, Iran cannot buy spare parts of its ageing military and civilian fleet – something that puts lives in danger as air crashes become increasingly frequent, says the BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran.”
-http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4594104.stm
So it’s America’s fault? Surely it’s Iran’s fault for flying unsafe aircraft – something that no democracy would permit!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4591230.stm
‘The current sports minister, Richard Caborn, told BBC News the peer “left his mark in sport, football in particular”, and is a “man of conviction who got his very serious point across”, but is “never bitter and never personal”.’
No. Never. Perish the thought.
Excellent comment by ‘Gerry, Edinburgh’ on the first page of the BBC’s Have Your Say section:
“He had the courage of his prejudices, and he tolerated that of which he approved.”
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=724&&&&&edition=1&ttl=20060109130314
OT
They really are rubbish. Look at this…
“Battle lines drawn over Supreme Court”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4586068.stm
Normal stuff but look at this…
“FROM OTHER NEWS SITES”
Latest one is Arab News (so that gets top billing) at 6 hours ago.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=72644&d=2&m=11&y=2005
No, if you hit the link I wonder if you can spot the cock up? Yep, its a story from Nov 2nd 2005.
Thats a very very long 6 Hours.
Muppets.
Carol Sarler writes in The Times about the “Today” programme’s poll of who runs Britain being hi-jacked by UKIP.
The moment we heard it we knew that there aren’t enough people to reach that conclusion who would recognise Barroso if he fell on them. It turned out that our chums at Ukip, with fellow Eurosceptics, had “encouraged” supporters to vote, in order that the rest of us would be shocked into Brussels phobia.
She goes on to paste the BBC for its smugness & self-absorption.
You’d mind less if these projects were clearly labelled as light entertainment. But when the nonsensical “result” is discussed in much the tone used for the result of voting in, say, Afghanistan, it is a joke too far.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1976380,00.html
I feel sorry for Tony Banks’ family and send them my condolences.
But British politics will be better off without him, he was the sort of populist hippy that is dangerous with any sort of power.
Two thoughts re Sir Menzies –
Perhaps his name derives from the former ruling Imperial Chinese Menzies dynasty.
And this limerick:
There was a young curate of Salisbury
Whose conduct was halisbury-scalisbury.
He walked about Hampshire
Without any pampshire
Till his vicar compelled him to wralisbury.
Cheers
says the BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran.”
Have a heart – if you were a woman representing the homosex liberal BBC in the capital of Medieval Mullahdom wouldn’t you be repeating the party line ?
Look here “Almost every time I enter the foreign ministry building in Tehran, I am told to pull my headscarf further forward to cover my hair. My colleagues say it’s because I look Iranian and the staff don’t realise I am a foreigner. What surprised me at first when I arrived here for the BBC five months ago, however, is that I dress like a nun compared with half the women in north Tehran. They have mastered the art of balancing a headscarf on the back of the head, while teetering around on the highest of heels, sporting the tightest overcoat possible and looking quite glamorous. I have …”
“Born to an English banker father and a half-Pakistani, England-born and bred mother in London, and married to an Iranian whom she met when she joined the BBC World Service Radio (South Asia region) in 1989, does Frances feel she is the right mixture of hybridity to work in South Asia, as she had done for BBC in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kuala Lumpur, and now, in the Middle East? Did her South Asian Area Master Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the London University prepare her for her Asian experience?”
What! No BBC Outrage
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/08/INGODGHE4H1.DTL
The BBC responds to WEb campaigns, it sources its news from packages prepared by lobbyists, and unless The Guardian has prepped the story in the morning edition you will not get the BBC to sniff it………….I somehow cannot imagine that idiot Gary Yonge of the Guardian ever getting off his race hobbyhorse so we cannot expect the BBC to act at any mature level.
The single biggest impediment to rational and coherent adult debate in the United Kingdom is the State Church of Disjointed Thought and Adolescent Narcissism embodied in the acronym BBC.
Thnx Venichka, Phil, and especially tcc.
As for you Kulibar Tree, Arkansas(North American Indian lands) was “settled” by the French, a group still not especially keen on pronouncing about half the letters in their own language. Kansas was settled at a much later time when English, a tongue with far fewer silent letters, was firmly established in the area.
The BBC News24 desk reporter has just stated, after a bomb scare in Washington DC, that the high alert level is due to “the situation in Iraq”.
So what was the situation in Iraq that existed on 9/11?
The BBC are determined to re-write history to make us believe that the threat from Islamic terrorists only arises from deposing Saddam Hussein.
OT
Good piece here about Conflict tourism by Western ‘Peace Activists’
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAEF8.htm
Don’t expect this particular aspect to be examined by Al Beeb
Losangelino –
But wasn’t that your very point? A word spelt one way, but pronounced another?
Take a more common example: how do you cope with a word like “colonel”?
Cheers.
Rick on BBC’s Frances Harrison’s suggestion that Iran has no views on foreign women’s clothing.
I am told to pull my headscarf further forward to cover my hair. My colleagues say it’s because I look Iranian and the staff don’t realise I am a foreigner.
Seems they are not so free & easy in Saudi.
Air crew on the only British airline that flies to Saudi Arabia have been told not to wear crucifixes or St Christopher medals on flights there so as not to offend the country’s Muslims.
Stewardesses at BMI have also been told to cover themselves in the long abaya robes that Saudi women have to wear in public before they disembark in the capital Riyadh. In some instances, they are also advised to wear a headscarf.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/09/nbmi09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/01/09/ixhome.html