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What to do when militant leftists infest your south-facing garden

HELLO there, and first an issue many of you are facing this autumn: militant pro-Palestine leftists. They’ve infiltrated the Greens and it could be your garden next. 

You have to watch out for these insidious little devils, because let them run rampant and soon your whole lawn will be a toxic morass of anti-Semitism. One garden I know had to hire a Starmer to clean them out, which is unpleasant and expensive.

To begin with, keep a close eye on your grassroots. It might seem like an area you can leave to fend for itself but they will creep in there, often due to online co-ordination, and before you know it they’re overrun.

Look out for the key signs: not just the flags but an unhealthy focus on UN resolutions and boycotts. Harmless initially but soon you won’t even be able to silently repot in your greenhouse without being accused of complicity in genocide.

Now, they will disguise themselves under names like Youth Liberation and Activists for Peace. Don’t be fooled. Test them out for a monomaniacal focus on one specific issue which entwines around everything else, I can’t tell you how common that is.

You’re sympathetic to their cause? Oh we all are. That’s how they get in. But let that sympathy blossom and soon your herbaceous borders are taking difficult-to-defend positions on NATO expansionism and your parrotia persica’s on Russia Today.

So watch for the signs, root it out and don’t worry about them calling you a tool of the Zionist bloc. Though in your case, Mr Polanski, it’s got right into your public perceptions. You might have to leave it fallow for a season or two.

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Seven rules of the box office Tom Cruise must never break or disaster will follow

EVER-RELIABLE box office draw Tom Cruise has made a frighteningly expensive flop with recent film Digger because he broke his own Tom Cruise rules:

Don’t get clever 

The most complex storytelling we want from a Tom Cruise movie is the bit where he explains how to break into the thing to get the other thing. Digger features genre shifts and a metanarrative. If his audience wanted their brains to hurt, they’d read a book.

Stick to sci-fi, action or sci-fi action

Do we want to see Tom as an amoral hitman? F**king around in a mask at sex parties? No. He should be punching criminals, killing aliens or operating a cool computer with holograms instead of keys. Ignore that if your PC worked like that you’d be knackered after every Facebook post.

Tom must win 

Tom always wins, and in a way that makes the audience happy. Valkyrie wasn’t brilliantly received because those watching it wanted von Stauffenberg to succeed in killing Hitler and win the heart of Eva Braun. They could change the history books if it needs to be a true story,

He should not have a personal life

Tom messed up with his bizarre Oprah couch jump, making it tough not to be distracted in dull moments by stray thoughts like: ‘I wonder what Nicole Kidman really knows about Xenu?’ To prevent further damage to the Tom we know and love he should put in an induced coma between films.

Running must feature

It’s become a joke, but we still want to see Tom running as fast as his little legs will carry him. We don’t pay £10 for the reliable Cruise brand and come away from the cinema feeling disappointed and cheated. We’ve got Ridley Scott movies for that.

He should learn his limits

Tom’s two acting skills are a winning smile and a surprised face with his mouth open, and that’s fine. You don’t need to be Christopher Walken to twat an alien with a pneumatic fist. When he overreaches it turns out badly. It’s impossible to watch Far and Away without coming out hating the Irish for what he did to their accents.

Tom must be the good guy

Tom has played a handful of bad guys, including a vampire, an assassin and a Hollywood producer, and his character in Digger is not a traditional Cruise hero. Audiences hate this. Tom must to stick to playing good guys who are unquestionably on the right side, such as members of the US military.

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