Godfather of the Murdoch clan
This website commissioned Richard Lutz to look over his shoulder at 2011. Here is his shortlist of the men who really should be banished from this planet
And so to the heroes of this parting year of 2011- so many outstanding people with deficient DNA and a self inflated sense of importance in this tattered world of ours.
Let’s get started. Are you standing comfortably propped up at the bar with your Iphone, IPad and twitter account? Then, let’s go.
Tony Blair– Well, he is truly gone from these shores and doing unknown things to alleviate pain and suffering in the Middle East (notice how well it is going these days) but this year it emerged that he increased his knowledge of that part of the world 8 years go by traveling to the shores of the River Jordan to celebrate the baptism of Rupert Murdoch’s child.
And become the little girl’s godfather.
Of course, if you can count up to 8, you will realise that Mr Blair was still Prime Minister at the time. So (and this is really creepy) he ensured that the inevitable Hello magazine pictures were snipped to keep him out of the final shot.
Jeremy Clarkson– what with revolutions in the Mid East, Japan trying to wrestle with the results of its tsunamai, people getting gunned down daily on the streets of Syria and the UK economy going down the toilet, it is only right that this deranged guttersnipe should spew out ill-informed vomit from his brain: strikers should be shot; suicidal people who throw themselves in front of trains are an annoyance (he said this as Gary Speed’s grieving family dealt with his death) and the odd comment about lazy Mexicans. He should be made to learn how to read and write and stop dragging his knuckles in the dust.
The Church of England– I know, I know this is not a person but a Thing, an August Entity, a Christian Organisation. But yet a body that holds £9m in News International shares. This means it bouys up Murdoch and his weirdo family and the pond life that work for him. Next time you go to church, ask your friendly guitar strumming vicar if he or she is happy about buying the weekly groceries with the aid of phone hacking, garbage-rummaging journalists and their reptilian paymasters.
And that brings us nicely to the Murdoch family itself- the dad and his son James didn’t know about the phone hacking, never read their emails and couldn’t be bothered to ask where all the secret conversations were sourced from. They just d-i-d n-o-t
k-n-o-w. Got that?
Now onto yet another hero of the year: The Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox. He’s the fast forgotten little pudgy smirking ex minister who thought it really cool to let his unelected best friend Adam Werritty come tootling around the world to sit in on crucial military meetings despite having no MOD clearance.
Werritty sat in on at least 40 round table talks about security, defence, terror (and probably procurement).
Kind of like a long term work experience engagement that would last until Werrity finally stopped riding on the coat tails of his soon to be sacked pal and actually got a job.
And with that, I move to the next Man of 2011. And it has got to be Mr Tubby No-Mates himself: Kim Jung Un, the new head tyrant of North Korea.
Every shot of him is reminiscent of that poor guy in the back of the class who wasn’t any good at sports, games, maths, girls, sarky banter, having friends, having a good haircut or not looking like a sad eyed Panda.
His only pal seems to be the pitiable brainwashed folks of North Korea itself. I look at the pictures of him (NB: there are none of his two older brothers who have already been airbrushed from history) and say: ‘There goes a guy with some Real Issues running around his head. And there goes a head with one of the world’s worst haircuts.’
And finally, the final jerk of the year- Mustafa al-Dabi. Not only do the folks of Syria have a real problem about getting gunned down in their own streets by their madman leader, it now transpires that the boss of the Arab League observer group trundling around this benighted bloodied country is a former despotic hardman of Sudan.
Al-Dabi, according to reports, is an ex-intelligence chief of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, himself wanted by an international court for genocide.in Darfur.
Dabi was in charge when his boss forced 3 million people to run for their lives. The UN claims 300,000 died in this bleak terror exodus.
Amnesty International says giving al-Dabi the leadership of the observer mission in Syria calls into question the credibility of the whole effort.
So, what exactly so far are the Sudanese general’s thoughts on Syria? He finds Syrian towns and cities ‘reassuring’ despite its streets drowning in blood. ‘Some places looked a bit of a mess,’ he is reported as saying, ‘but there was nothing frightening.’ God help Syria.
Roll on 2012