There are times in life when you feel like you missed a meeting. Or were on holiday when a vital email went round. Somehow you got distracted by something and ignored some crucial memo. So I guess I must have been off sick when everyone else got told about the word “Brexit”. And also the word “Grexit”.
I was not in the office when Moses toured the world’s newspapers and media organisations with a new stone tablet, saying: “Thou shalt use the ugly and fantastically annoying word Brexit to mean British exit from the EU, and the even more annoying word Grexit to apply to the Greeks, and thou shalt do this with maximum smugness.”
At first I couldn’t understand why commentators were suddenly talking about some brand of denture adhesive or breakfast cereal in the middle of an article about the EU. But there it is. Brexit. It will not be long before pundits start warning of Portugexit, Spexit and Irelexit. Luxembexit and Cyprexit would be awful. But Frexit and Germexit would be unthinkable. Estonia’s departure would be known by the simple, almost Zen-like term: Exit. Before that, commentators can take to the airwaves, denouncing the Brentry of 1973.
Charlotte taxes the right
Just as rightwingers get mocked for threatening to leave the country if a Labour government gets in, so lefties get it in the neck for claiming they would happily pay more tax to fund the NHS etc. Singer and Leveson witness Charlotte Church said she would happily pay 70% income tax if it protected public services — and the screams of laughter were deafening. Dominic Lawson said: “There is nothing to prevent her from writing a much larger cheque than she currently does to HM Revenue & Customs. The taxman has never been known to reject donations.”
In fact, HMRC tells me they will not accept “donations”, any more than Sainsbury’s will accept overpayment at the till. The point of tax is that it applies to everyone generally at rates set by a democratically elected government. Other commentators, such as the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson, suggest that George Osborne implements “Charlotte Church tax reforms” by changing the law so that voluntary overpayments can be made. But surely the dashing cavaliers of the right don’t want to encumber the exchequer with more big-government bureaucracy, just to harass Charlotte Church?
Snapping Moss not snapped
Kate Moss’s behaviour aboard that fateful easyJet flight continues to divide opinion-formers. Is she a richly life-affirming hedonist to whom only misogynists and bores could possibly take exception? Or is she a massive pain?
But this what really baffles me: where are the videos and photos of this event? Surely everyone on that flight would have had a camera, or camera on their phone? And Moss starting to kick off on your easyJet flight – well that’s social media gold, isn’t it? Apart from everything else, it would give us a chance to listen to her voice, still a rarity on the airwaves, in the way that Princess Diana’s used to be in the early days of her celebrity.
But no. Could it be that everyone got their phones out, and it was this that played a considerable but unreported part in Moss’s temper-loss? Airlines tend to be very grumpy about people videoing “incidents” and can always play the safety card to order people to stop. But perhaps it was something about her laser-eyed disapproval that deterred everyone from trying to get a selfie with her in the background. It would be lese-majesty to take an amateur unflattering shot of this legendary supermodel.