Between a Rock Bottom & a Hard Place
Something of a mixed bag tonight….gags, thoughts and speculation held over from previous posts that didn’t quite make it. At times it may be hard to separate the three, but that’s all part of the fun.
Do you ever get the feeling that, when it comes to Bourses, ‘market sentiment’ might be an oxymoron? Surely anyone with sentiments good or bad makes judgements, thinks, has a constructive bit in the Right Cortex and cries during a movie now and then? I got the feeling this afternoon watching BBCParliament Live that David Cameron is an oxymoron, but that feeling wasn’t as strong as the disenfranchised alienation I felt listening to the thoroughly undeserved respect he got from his Commons audience on the subject of EU ‘renegotiation’. The only bloke on display who I felt got anywhere near the truth was Bill Cash. It could be that we could start a movement to change the connotations of Cash for Questions forever as a phrase in UK political life.
However real people might think, it’s hard to deny that Cameronian spin has now reached rock bottom.
One question I’d pay cash to get answered is why a certain DJ once famous for Radio Caroline pirate broadcasts and marrying pretty starlets is the latest victim to be questioned by Captain Plod for alleged paedophile tendencies. It beggars belief that the Met’s Newscorporate Police think trying to drill 4,000 holes in a 1966 Lancastrian town is more important than multivariate miscarriages of Becky Redtop Justice in 2015, but then anything can happen when the political denominator is the mob. One person who’s been directing the mob towards crucifixions in recent years is Marcus Bilius Tomtit, the renowned Surreygate copper of yore. The Slog can now exclusively reveal that the Tomtit bird (it’s double cockney rhyming slang) has penned a new rousing anthem for his followers. It goes like this:
I torred I taw a paedophile a creepin’ up on you
I did I tor a paedophile – there’s more than just a few.
For every phoney paedophile I accuse of a crime
is more money for tomtit birds who grovel in the grime.
Genius I tell you – sheer, rock-bottom genius.
Of course, it is true to say that many within our odd élites seek out anuses they must not have, but it’s a surprise to see such thoughts as onscreen supers at Bloomberg Television. However, while ‘Oil investors look for new bottom’ may at first sight have seemed like Peter Mandelson in search of Jeffrey Epstein’s latest offerings, it turned out that the Bloomers were talking about crude rather than KY.
Life is full of such disappointments, but rarely more so than in the promises of corporate banking commercials. One that continues to intrigue me is for Bank of Indian whose strapline asserts that it will be ‘With You all the Way’.
You’re kidding: all the way? What, like all the way to the bail-in? In my day, there used to be a saying in the advertising business, “Nothing kills a crap product quicker than great advertising”. It seems to me that BoI’s agency is out to kill the brand slowly; but the bigger question here is why would anyone – corporate or private – believe that any bank anywhere is even remotely likely to be with you all the way?
At last – after many decades of attempting salvage – bank advertising has reached rock bottom.
And so at the end of The end of the Day, I leave you with this ecouraging news: the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is telling us tonight that the European Union shot its hubris bolt ages ago, and now represents nothing more than a confused and truculent old git. He writes:
‘The point of maximum danger for British parliamentary democracy was 13 years ago, the high-water mark of EU hubris and triumphalism….It is now obvious that the EU had bitten off more than it could chew, and the Ode to Joy anthem at the closure of that giddy Convention marked the moment when the European Project flamed out as a motivating force in history and began descending into the existential crisis we see before us…The region is ankle-deep in debt deflation, defenceless when the next global downturn hits….monetary union has proved malignant and incurable, splitting the eurozone into bitterly opposed camps of creditors and debtors…David Cameron’s exchanges with Brussels seem oddly irrelevant in the face of Europe’s self-inflicted catastrophe….There is nothing wrong with [David Cameron’s] menu of demands. It is useful that Britain’s special currency status has been nailed down, if only to keep the European Court honest. The EU’s Donald Tusk has shown goodwill….We must decide whether we are better off managing the eternal headache of our relations with the Continent inside or outside the EU”.
But as with so many of AEP’s pieces, the question remains open. I fear for his bum’s condition in the light of so much fence-sitting: ‘They’re all tossers and we can bend them to our will, but my God what a mess they’re in’.
In or Out? This is my view: if the EU consists of toothless wonders, then they’ll be desperate for our business whether we are EUers or not; and if the sclerotic Brussels Sprouts are doomed, then better to be on the continental shelf than on the sea bottom that was once Atlantis.
Well…what can I say other than if Britain accepts the EU’s sea bottom, then it too has reached rock bottom.
The Slog 