Pensioners? They've never had it so good

CAN we assume from now on that the parents of all Muslim teenagers will keep the kids' passports well hidden?

HAVING difficulty getting your MP's attention? Does he seem too busy to be bothered with your problems about local planning, drainage or tax issues? Take a tip from the latest cash-for-access scandal. Try offering him £6,000 a day.

I AWOKE on Sunday assuming I'd overslept and it was April the First. What else could possibly explain the news on the radio that His Serene Lordship John "Two Jags" Prescott had been appointed Labour's climate-change supremo? Has Miliband the Younger got both feet firmly on terra cotta?

WE are not wimps to shudder and shiver and whinge about the latest cold spell. In his 1917 book Canada in Warpaint, Ralph Bell told how tough young Canadian soldiers, accustomed to polar temperatures and massive snowdrifts in the Yukon, shuddered at the "vile" English winter which "rusts rifles, blues noses, hoarsens the voice, wheezes into the lungs . . . and creeps into the very heart."

EMBARRASSING, isn't it, to see the Wicked Media queuing up to tut-tut at the Daily Telegraph for allegedly kowtowing to HSBC? The tut-tutters included the Mirror which recently owned up to phone-hacking. Then there was the Guardian, which has never fully apologised for its gross error about the deleting of Milly Dowler's voicemails. There was the Beeb, still hiding the report into its own allegedly biased reporting of Middle East affairs, and Channel 4 News, still blushing over Cathy Newman's mosque debacle. It's a mucky old pond and few of the big boys are squeaky-clean.

A READER tells me of a recent "Fossil Fortnight" holiday in Benidorm for a group of pensioners. "It's the cheapest time of the year to go," she explains, "and so becomes overrun with seniors spending their heating allowance." The weather was fine and, on arrival, the old 'uns found they had been upgraded from a three-star hotel to a four-star one – with a free-drinks policy. A jolly time was had by all. It would take a very brave British politician to announce, in Harold Macmillan's famous words, that today's pensioners have never had it so good. But it's true. This must be the first century in which the young have envied the old.

EVERY general election throws up new ways of dodging straight questions. This time the favourite is: "I think there is a serious point here." Used by politicians of all parties, it sounds like a put-down, dismissing the questioner's inquiry as trivial. What it actually means is: "Bloody hell, that's a tricky question, let's change the subject." The truth is that "I think there is a serious point here" is just an updated version of that old Westminster duckers' and divers' favourite: "You know, the question we really ought to be asking is . . ."

HOME Secretary Theresa May says allegations of child abuse at a school in Wolverhampton should be heard at the national investigation to be headed by the New Zealand judge Justice Lowell, rather than set up a separate inquiry. Any alarm bells ringing? If every allegation is to be dumped on Justice Lowell's desk, her inquiry could drag on for years. By the time it is finished, the alleged kiddy fiddlers may all be dead. If you were a cynic, you might think that would be rather convenient. Hark, do you hear the distant rustling of long, long grass?