The end of great political slogans

THE Lib-Dems have unveiled plans to allow people who are already drawing a private pension to sell their annuities to the highest bidder. So you'll sacrifice your pension but you'll get a great big lump sum. I have a vision of the future. Let's jump into our Bentleys and race down to the food bank.

"CLAUDIUS in a cardie." Derek Jacobi in Last Tango in Halifax, as described by the Sunday Times.

TWO translations were required by the reader who received the New Year text message LMYLR. My Scottish family tell me it stands for "lang may yer lum reek" or as we say south of the border, long may your chimney smoke or, more simply, good health and long life. In fact, if you get an LMYLR from Scotland next year, try responding with GHALL. That'll have them running for their Gaelic dictionaries.

FIFTEEN days have passed since six people were killed by a runaway bin lorry in Glasgow and a veil of secrecy has descended. Bizarrely, the city council declares that it will never identify the driver involved. The inevitable result is feverish speculation that the authorities have something to hide (the day after the tragedy, whistleblowers told the Scottish Mirror that "hastily arranged training sessions" had been provided for non-driving refuse workers). There are even some wild online theories that the incident was an Islamist plot, which hardly seems likely given that, according to early reports, the 57-year-old driver is called Harry. Politicians always tell us they believe in open and transparent government. But only when every other option has been tried.

WHAT happens when two political parties become so close on policies that you can barely see daylight between them? The result is that all the great, snappy political slogans of yore have vanished. Don't expect "Free beer for all the workers" or "Labour isn't working." Instead, brace yourselves for this sort of stuff, a recent dispatch from the front line of the General Election campaign: "Prime Minister David Cameron said Labour would spend an extra £13.5bn on debt interest because of a reluctance to cut spending as quickly as his party would." Another four months of this? Ye gods and little fishes.

NO, no, Pixie. You're doing it all wrong. If Pixie Davies had been paying more attention, she'd know that child actors in Britain are supposed to talk extremely posh, recite their lines as if they are reading them from cue cards and flap their arms about in a most unconvincing manner. In short, Britain has a tradition of producing the world's very worst child actors. But little Pixie who played the narrator's daughter in the enchanting Judi Dench / Dustin Hoffman comedy Esio Trot (BBC1) broke the mould. She was animated, natural and just perfect.

HERE'S a first. My latest BT phone bill, sent to me by BT at a BT email address, was judged so dodgy by the BT system that it was promptly dumped in my spam basket. If BT itself can't sort the wheat from the chaff, what hope for the rest of us?

INDEED, we have become so suspicious of unexpected emails that East Coast rail travellers, invited to apply for refunds after the yuletide chaos, promptly binned them. No, you're not going to catch us with the old send-us-your-details scam. Turns out the invitations were genuine.

A READER sends me a junk-mail envelope in which her town suffers a particularly unkind spelling error. Whitchurch has become, well, you can guess. Does no-one ever read these things?