Are we all happy? Dave must be having a laugh

Maurice O'Brien • Published 2 Dec 2010 09:30 0 Comments

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WHATEVER you do, don't let them catch you laughing. One false smirk and Boy Dave's mirth monitors will have your box ticked and they'll be telling us the smile survey results prove we're all beside ourselves with glee.

Nobody knows where they're lurking but, given it's the time of the year when carol singers, old geezers dressed as Santa Claus and bored-looking shop assistants with glittery hair are all striving to be festive, the skylark surveyors could be just about anywhere.

However, if you can't be vigilant, there's plenty to wipe the smile off your face. Take Alistair Darling who, we now learn, waited until his fellow reptiles were General Election campaigning before sneakily signing a treaty committing Britain to bail out debt-ridden Eurozone basket cases. Nasty boobytrap from Mr Nice.

Or trade union stooge Big Ed, depressingly trying to be something he's not, even down to the glottal stops of the Blairite era he wants us to forget, burbling away about people who 'geh on' paying the 'top ray of tax'.

Then there's desk jockey Peter Whitehead, deputy head of MOD financial management policy and development, inflation-proof pension beckoning, writing memos from his designer-furnished Whitehall office instructing the troops that partying must be avoided, and warning: "It is improper to spend taxpayers' funds on Christmas trees, decorations and carol concerts."

How depressing is it that after using millions from aforementioned taxpayers' funds on birth control campaigns to create Europe's worst teenage pregnancy rates, we're only now considering classes to teach children to say 'no'? And whose human rights were safeguarded when Kent shoplifter Sapphia Da-Silva, who drove into a police community officer while escaping and knocked him five feet in the air, has her sentencing postponed so she can take a pre-booked seven-week Australian holiday?

Meanwhile, Britain shivers under the earliest snow for 17 years.

They tell us 2010's the hottest on record and thousands of delegates are burning carbon to head for Mexico and spend two weeks in luxury hotels talking up global warming.

You've really got to laugh, haven't you?

Oops!

-- BEMUSED cricket fans had to wait for Australian jubilation to subside before watching lucid television analysis of the shock dismissal of England skipper Andrew Strauss off the third ball of the Ashes series.

The truth, however, was instantly available to BBC Test Match Special listeners when commentator Jonathan Agnew explained: "He's holding his head in his left hand as he walks off for nought."

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