Wes Montgomery - Round Midnight

Monty!

David Cameron distances himself from 'maverick' Tory party

Conservative leader David Cameron has moved swiftly to put distance between himself and the Tory party, which he described today as having 'some quite eccentric views.' This week Mr Cameron rebuked MEP Dan Hannan over his criticism of the NHS. Yesterday Mr Cameron moved to squash plans put forward by a Tory council to subsidise the fees of children attending private schools if their parents lose their jobs. Meanwhile former cabinet minister Norman Tebbit has been critical of Mr Cameron for driving away the party’s traditional voters. Mr Cameron has also reprimanded shadow cabinet member Alan Duncan as well as backbenchers Douglas Hogg and Sir Patrick Cormack over MPs' pay. A spokesman confirmed today that Mr Cameron had disowned the Tory party altogether. "These are the views of a maverick party, not of David Cameron," he said.

THAT's why mums go to Iceland

Story.

Music Desk: For Isla

Lord Haw-Haw: new broadcast

More here.

Zombie Ants Desk!: Breaking News

Run! Run for your lives!

Wrestling Midgets Desk: Alan Duncan speaks

“Basically, it's being nationalised, you have to live on rations and are treated like s**t"

George Osborne: 'We are the progressives now'

Er, yeah.

US healthcare debate swallowed by supermassive black hole of stupid

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

Shock photo of Clinton and Kim Jong Il taken seconds before their watery deaths

Topless celebrity - New picture

Heavy breathers this way.

Tamiflu: Security stepped up to protect stocks

More.

Andrew Flintoff celebrates Lord's victory

Hercules Drunk, Being Led Away By a Nymph and a Satyr.

Moon landings hoax: New evidence emerges

As the 40th anniversary approaches, new evidence has emerged that the moon landings were an elaborate hoax. Analysis of the television programme Lunar Jim, which chronicles the moon life of astronaut Jim and his team – Robot Dog Rover, Ripple, Eco, and T.E.D. the Technical Equipment Device - suggests that the images apparently being beamed back to earth are staged, probably in the Nevada desert. Bill Kaysing, for many years a leading hoax theorist, says that Lunar Jim is yet more NASA funded propaganda. "If you look carefully you can see that Jim's flag flutters in a breeze - yet there is no air on the moon at all! Plus you couldn't have that cow and that chicken just walking around on the moon like that." A tight lipped CBeebies spokesman would confirm only that Lunar Jim is intended as "a children's cartoon."

Andrew Strauss denies using time-wasting tactics as England secure draw

Story.

Obama in roving eye furore

Pervert.

Michael Owen arrives at Manchester United for medical

More on the little Welsh Wizard.

Wrestling Midgets Desk: Breaking News

Wrestling midgets, fake hookers, murder. Usual story.

Brown's new government relaunch strategy

Blue Steel!

Obama killed Michael Jackson - True Story

KILLED HIM I say.

Ant Desk: 'And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords'

Full story here.

Rare photo of Russia's most powerful Smurf

Via Sullivan.

Michael Jackson's final "Ow!"

Republicans shocked by faithfulness revelations

At a tearful press conference, Indiana's Republican governor Mitch Daniels admitted that he has not been unfaithful to his wife, potentially scuppering his hopes of a run at the presidency in 2012. With a promising career in tatters, Daniels begged forgiveness of his family and party.

"I take strength from God, my daughters and my loving wife," Daniels said. "And I hope my fellow Republicans can forgive me for this shameful episode of not doing anything to be ashamed of."

The Republican party, long a bastion for white men that privately indulge in extra-marital affairs, prescription drug abuse, racism and approaches to underage boys while preaching strong family values, has been rocked by the revelations of a lack of revelations.

"It's a sad day for the party," Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele says. "You think you can trust a fellow GOP man to go behind the back of everyone close to him and still advocate hypocritically for biblical moral values. But I guess there's always a few non-rotten apples in every barrel."

Fundamentalists Vs Wondermentalists

Khamenei says we are the evil enemy . So we play him the only song we know that references Iran.

Shorter Comrade Milne

Weep for Ahmadinejad, who faces an attempted coup by telegenic ELITISTS, which is all Bush's fault. Or Obama. Whatever. Also, weep for Hezbollah.

Shorter Bea Campbell OBE

I'm rad, I'm sexy, I'm Marxist. So bow down to me, peasants.

Demonstrators tweet, Iran teeters

The Twitter Revolution.

Via Sandmonkey, who has more.

Ahmadinejad says recount is impossible: 'We didn't count them the first time'

More.

Music Desk: Shatner

Because it never gets old.

Michael Jackson flies to Italy to escape new plastic surgery rumours

More.

'Gördondämmerung' goes on and on

Opera fans are flocking to a rare performance of Richard Wagner's "Gördondämmerung" at the Westminster Opera House of Commons. One of the composer's lesser-known works, the piece is the last in the epic four-opera cycle "Der Ring des Nr. 10 Downing Straße" and recounts the legend of the hero Brownhilde, whose quest for power ends in the fiery drawn-out death of his party's popularity. The current performance, which is proving to be one of the longest in the world of opera, includes the arias "O, diese expensen!", "Keine Rheinmaiden lieben mich", and the show-stopping "Verdammte europäische electionen". The saga is expected to end in Brownhilde's defeat at the apocalyptic battle of Generalelectionarok next year.

Parliamentary Labour Party gives backing to PM

'BRAINS....BRAINS....!'

Cabinet shock as no one resigns for over an hour

There was further confusion in Westminster tonight after no one at all resigned from the cabinet for more than an hour. Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted he would not be forced out of office by the shock development, described by a spokesman as more evidence of a Blairite plot to destabilise the PM's position.

New rumours pile pressure on PM

Downing Street has moved quickly to dismiss rumours that a rumour was about to be circulated relating to something that someone heard about something or other. "The suggestion that somebody said something about something that someone said but later denied is completely untrue as far as we know," said a spokesman. Cabinet ministers are said to be furious about an off the record briefing about who was briefing journalists about a previous briefing which turned out to be either true or false, doesn't matter. Meanwhile the BBC has confirmed as true rumours that recent events at Westminster have given Nick Robinson a chronic and painful erection.

Horror in Browntown

Reports are filtering out from Browntown of a horrifying mass-suicide. Browntown, the informal name for the Government of the United Kingdom, is named after the co-founder of the New Labour cult, Gordon Brown. Followers of Brown, known as Ministers, are reportedly committing suicide as part of a bizarre ritual known as "reshuffling". Details of the ritual are sketchy, but it is believed that Brown intends to cast some of his followers out of the cult, and to elevate preferred acolytes, in an attempt to propitiate their god, Gallup-Mori. Some Ministers who are to be cast out into the wilderness (the "back of the benches", in cult lore) have chosen self-immolation instead, with one case reported of seppuku, or disemboweling oneself on one's own second home.

Browntown began as a benign experiment in social democracy but conditions have recently deteriorated. Ministers have complained of intrusive media attention, an atmosphere of paranoia, and an unusual number of accountancy errors. Brown's behaviour has become increasingly erratic, and some cult supporters are praying for delivery by a mythical "postman".

Blair Babes turn on Brown

More.

Hundreds of Britons on waiting list for Swiss suicide clinic

More.

No-good punk falls for Puerto Rican lady

Republican representative and leading member of teenage gang 'the Jets' Tom Tancredo has unexpectedly fallen in love with President Obama's nominee for the US supreme court, Puerto Rican-American judge Sonia Sotomayor. Tancredo, until now a strident critic of illegal immigration and who once compared Miami with the third world, risks alienating other members of his gang, who have been reluctantly ceding control of the west side of Congress to the rival Democratic 'Sharks' gang since 2006. "Sonia. I just met a girl called Sonia," he says. "And suddenly that name will never be the same to me."

Tancredo's Republican Senate colleague Mick Huckabee, who plans to challenge Democrats to a rumble at the congressional dance later tonight, is gonna bust his head when he hears about Tancredo's fixation on Sotomayor, who he mistakenly called Maria. "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way," says Huckabee. "From your first cigarette to your last dying day."

Republican Representatives are joining in the debate by approaching Democratic counterparts while crouching and snapping their fingers.

Boo-fucking-hoo Desk

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, pictured, says the Daily Telegraph's investigation into MPs' expenses amounts to a form of torture.

Dead Ducks must face re-selection

More.

'Anti-Sleaze' party to contest next election

A party led by Neil and Christine Hamilton is to field candidates at the next general election on an anti-sleaze platform in protest at the scandal over MPs' expenses. Neil Hamilton, flanked by David Mellor and Jonathan Aitken as he launched the campaign, spoke to reporters today. "We need to clean up Parliament and return it to the good old days of cash bribes in brown paper bags," he said. "That Esther Rantzen is a bloody crook too," he added.

Netanyahu triumphs in international baritone contest

More.

MPs: More second home 'flipping' expected

"Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal, who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences: you will go to prison for five years."

Awkward Family Photo Desk

Much more here. Via.

MP issues statement

I'm absolutely outraged that I used my second home allowance to buy a 40 ft yacht. I was astonished to find myself claiming for ball girls and cocktails which are absolutely necessary to allow me to function as an MP in my far flung constituency in the heart of London and back down in Westminster but which are also symptomatic of a failure of all of us, of Parliament, and a failure of the system. I'm disgusted to find that I claimed £100,000 in mortgage interest payments on the second home of my polo ponies, although to be fair everyone was at it and anyway do you have any idea how much I would be earning in the City, well, would have been earning if I could have got a job which I couldn't and anyway there are none left. It is utterly unacceptable that this rotten SYSTEM allowed me to flip my houses so fast and so profitably that frankly I've been munching on big golden Quarter Pounders for the last few years. We have to change THE SYSTEM root and branch for the sake of the people of Britain, who are hurting, sitting in their one houses, with their no jobs. And to draw attention to my family wealth is neither here nor there, I mean, do you have any idea how much it costs to dredge a moat? It's not good enough and I'm as appalled as you are at my ooh, look, a squirrel!

MPs' expenses: David Cameron 'appalled' at ostentatious display of extravagant living

APPALLED, I say.

David Willetts in light bulb shocker

More on 'Two Claims'.

Music Desk: While My Ukulele Gently Weeps

New housing arrangements for MPs unveiled

MPs will no longer be able to claim any allowances for the homes they live in while attending to Parliamentary duties at Westminster, it was revealed today. Under the new regulations, they will be provided with a big tent on Parliament Square and each of the 646 members will be issued with a sleeping bag and a camp bed. Although space will be tight, it is thought that matters will be eased somewhat by the absence of the Prime Minister who will be busy at Downing Street, unblocking the kitchen sink and putting a load in the washing machine.

Hazel Blears under fire over second home expenses

More pixie news.

Alan Johnson quiff tipped to take over as Labour leader

The quiff of Health Secretary Alan Johnson has been
installed as favourite to become the next leader of the Labour Party. James Purnell's sideburns are third favourite, whilst David Miliband's barely detectable bumfluff has slipped to fourth.

That's absolutely, totally brilliant, Derek

Now fuck off.

Foghorn Leghorn opposes judicial nominee

Cartoon chicken Foghorn Leghorn is leading strong opposition among Republican legislators against President Barack Obama's nomination to replace retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter. Leghorn, a failed nominee for a position as a federal judge, represents Republican senators that are up in arms and flightless wings against whomever Obama appoints to the nation's highest court. Although no one has yet been nominated, Republicans fear it might be a woman or a black or something. "I say, I say, I say, boy!" Leghorn says. "Put that gavel down, now. Y'all are not fit to wear that there gown, y'hear?" The Senate judicial committee's leading Republican, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, was unavailable for comment, as he has been taunting a dog that will run at him until its leash jerks it back, making it yelp.

UK 'least wanted' list published

Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service
Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor
Rt Hon Jack Straw MP
Secretary of State for the Home Department
Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP
Secretary of State for Health
Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP
Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Rt Hon Lord Mandelson
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP
Secretary of State for International Development
Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP
Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal
Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC MP
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP
Secretary of State for Transport
Rt Hon Geoff Hoon MP
Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Rt Hon Ed Balls MP
Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
Rt Hon Edward Miliband MP
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Rt Hon James Purnell MP
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
Rt Hon Shaun Woodward MP
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP
Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP

More

Taj Mahal - Rock & Roll Circus

New Avengers remake gets green light

More.

Tory Spring Conference draws to a close

More on Dave's raves.

50p tax rate could drive top twats abroad

There were today new warnings from the City that many of the UK's highest-paid self-serving ghastly twats would flee the country to avoid the new 50p tax rate announced in last week's budget. The Chancellor Alistair Darling has been urged to re-think the tax hike to avoid the so-called 'bastard-drain' of top talent from the country.

In other news: Many people still using schools and hospitals.

Deadly Swine Flu reaches UK

Bless you.

UN Conference on Racism "a triumph"

The organisers of the 2009 UN Conference to promote antisemitism have declared themselves delighted with the first day of the Geneva conference yesterday. The keynote speaker, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "pushed all the right buttons", said a conference organiser. "To have the world's most famous Holocaust denier speak on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day? A masterstroke!"

The head of the UN Human Rights Council, the body responsible for the conference, also expressed pleasure at the outcome. "Listen, we've got Russia, China, Azerbaijan, you name it on this Council. Saudi Arabia, for Chrissakes. Filthy regimes, the lot of them. And the only country we ever criticise is you-know-who. So we had a lot to live up to."


BONUS UNITED NATIONS FUN:

Libya bitch-slapped.

Nazi bovine overlords set to rule for 1000 years

Or at the very least claim a working majority at the next election.

Full story.