The Godfather Part 4

Whether he be Grendel to my Beowulf or as grapes were to Tantalus, I promised in my book (remarkably still available on Amazon.com - they have even added a Look Inside feature) I shall chase Tony Blair surer than a shadow chases the sun or Dominique Strauss Kahn, skirt. No need, the man, now in semi-retirement but working part time to bring peace to the Middle East offers himself up as a target not even Robbie Earnshaw could miss. (What is it with British centre forwards called Robbie: statistics suggest Messrs Keane and Fowler seem to have scored many goals but never when I was watching.)

Not only has the devout statesmen been exposed as a close personal friend of Colonel Gaddafi's head of Intelligence, it turns out that he was not just a friend of the most malevolent media mogul since Goebells, he was part of the News International family. Though what with authorizing all that renditioning and torture I am amazed Tony found the time to attend Grace Murdoch's christening. The list of the former leader's actionable corruption, deceit and illegality (selling peerages, taking bribes, covering up other's bribes, inventing reasons to go to war, faking an Estuarine accent even less convinicng than Guy Ritchie's, sacrificing kittens to the Pope) is so long that if Ed Miliband doesn't denounce Blair at the upcoming Labour Party Conference, like Kruschev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, or Kym Marsh denounced Myleene Klass in Hear'Say... then we are all doomed.

Not that our neighbours across the channel are better role models when it comes to sloughing off poisonous legacy. Nicolas Sarkozy,(notice the lack of 'h' in his first name just like Nicolas Cage - I hear they were both up for the same part of the maturbating junky cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans but Sarkozy demanded it be filmed in old Orleans instead, sadly without seedy jazz bars though it does have a nice statue of Joan of Arc) who, like Fettes's favourite son, also started a war against an Arab country for the purposes of ego and oil, and so that he would have more in common with fellow French leader Napoleon than just his shoe size (he has feet smaller than Shirley Temple). Sarkozy has not said a word against France's criminal former President Jacques Chirac, who while Mayor of Paris for almost twenty years invented over 2000 bogus jobs and took all the wages to fund his political party. (Chirac's mayoralty also had an annual food expenses bill of 15 million Euros, which is a fuck of a lot of Duck Houses). A trial however has finally arrived. The embezzling Charlemagne however is using the Ernest Saunders / Ronald Reagan defence - he cannot remember anything about the period. This would make Chirac the first modern Mayor of a major city never to have kept any paper documents, computer files or records of any kind whatsoever, everything he had to do in his 18 years running the capital of France he wrote in biro on his hand next to a drawing of Brigitte Bardot's lips which if he moved his finger and thumb in the right manner made it look as if she was (French) kissing.

I was going to comment next on The Guardian's front page shock headline earlier this week: "Homelessness could spread to middle class, Crisis study warns". Yes, no longer will there be some Scouse monkey with a whippet on a string, breath stinking of Belgian lager, arms oustretched begging for cash to buy some skunk staggering the streets of the West End like Romero's Living Dead but a chap named Harry or Josh with a microchipped Parson Russell Terrier, scent of Pinot Noir around his "King of Shaves" moisturized face, politely asking for a short term advance so he can have his Peugeot (in which he now lives) valeted, and "oh and by the way would you like to buy a copy of GQ?"

I was going to... but I have forgotten.

FC Naylor