100% vaccinated cancelled Christmas
Happy Hell signs off for 2021 - she’ll see you if she makes it to 2022
Since Hell last wrote, she has been trying to think of something intelligent to say but “the science” which she has been following so ardently has now defeated her. The island of Gibraltar is 100% vaccinated and the government has cancelled Christmas.
In Britain, we couldn’t give a damn what Austria or Australia do to their “anti-vaxxers”. They are - we are told - “of the far right” and not (as Hell had assumed) ordinary human beings worried about taking a vaccine for which there is no long-term safety data after being told - day in and day out for 18 months - that their “safety” is all anyone cares about. No, the only thing we are interested in, politically, is the case of a 13 week old infant being thrown out of the House of Commons.
As a woman, Hell sympathises with Stella Creasy, MP - who brought the offending item in with her. All mothers like to force others to fake interest in things they have given birth to and we should count ourselves lucky it’s not sicked up on our best jumper.
As a feminist, however, Hell clenches her fists in fury. In America, maternity entitlements are so dire women have to go back to work with babies that young. When a Lyft driver, who went into labour on the job, stopped to picked up a fare en route to the hospital, the company found her example so edifying it alerted the media. In Britain, no one with any compassion (Hell hopes) would want any woman to feel she had to go back to work for six months (at least). Creasy must be making some sort of point but unless she wants Amazon workers breastfeeding on the job Hell does wish she’d give it a rest.
(What does she want for us? Equality with the men who have to pee in bottles?)
Hell has also been very busy sending Love In Late Capitalism off to the printers and sending out proof copies to her favourite lady journalists. This is the cover we’ve decided on, so you have to love it even if you don’t (just imagine it is Stella Creasy’s baby.)
This week, Boris Johnson landed himself in a vat of scrutiny which must have surprised him since no one has plumbed the depths of a word he’s said in a year and a half. Is it a coincidence that as of Monday Paul Dacre returned to the Daily Mail and terror struck hacks knew they'd face a force more to be feared than IPSO?
Luckily, she has no idea.
The elements of the PM’s speech picked apart in exquisite detail were:
‘EVs may not burble like sucking doves and they may not have that arum arum araaaaaagh that you love. But they have so much torque that they move off the lights faster than a Ferrari.’
And:
‘I went as we all must to Peppa Pig World. Who’s been to … hands up anybody who’s been to Peppa Pig World? Not enough. I was a bit hazy about what I would find at Peppa Pig World but I loved it.’
This is all perfectly comprehensible compared to what he has said on pangolins, zoonotic plagues and the Iliad (see Hells passim).
Personally, Hell has never liked Boris more. She has this shivering notion that if anyone else were in charge we’d be in as poor a state as the rest of Europe - if not worse - and she would, once again, be advertising herself as a mail order bride to crocodile farmers in free Florida.
Speaking of what one can and can’t read in newspapers, the New European was compelling for the following report:
‘Prime Minister Boris Johnson is was to sue The New European over our exclusive story that he told a room full of Telegraph journalists he was experiencing “buyer’s remorse” over married life with Carrie Symonds.’
In a post-Covid world, Hell does not wait for a claim to be officially denied before believing it (she infers almost all her information from what is not in the headlines…) Still, no Prime Minister (however unhinged) wanders into a party full of journalists to confess he wishes he could return his wife to wherever it was he got her, so anyone with faculties could see this for a ‘joke’. What’s funny is Matt Kelly’s report of what happened next:
“I was called last night (Thursday) at 10.30pm by a man who identified himself as being from Downing Street Communications office, but whose name I didn’t catch. His opening gambit was: Boris Johnson is going to sue The New European for defamation.
“I won’t go into the rest of the conversation in detail, but suffice to say I made it clear to him that this was not a threat that troubled me greatly and we stood by our story.
“After a few minutes, the caller eventually told me: ‘You just crack on then mate’ and put the phone down.
“I texted him, asking him to repeat his threat of legal action and to send across the Downing Street denial. I also asked him – twice – to identify himself, which he refused to do.
“For a public official to cold-call a newspaper and threaten them with a law suit from a sitting PM, and not to even identify himself, was, I thought, odd. I tried the Downing Street press office to verify the caller’s identity, but they didn’t come back to me. I went to bed.
“The next morning, I established that the phone number of the caller belonged to Jack Doyle, the Downing Street Director of Communications.
“I now understand Downing Street denies they threatened legal action, to which all I can say is I stand by our story, and our story about the story. If Boris Johnson changes his mind again and decides to sue, we’ll see him in court.
“Should the veracity of this account be challenged, I do, of course, have the texts.”
Watergate ain’t in it.
Hell would now like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year while stating for the record that she stands by her story about the New European’s story and their story about their own story and the Prime Minister’s story about his story and if anyone wants to sue she could do with all the publicity she can get.
See you on Valentine’s Day.
Xoxo