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The Archbishop of Canterbury on… Yvette Cooper on Palestine Action: 'Trust me, bro'

WAKING up with a hangover that has turned my genitals quite, quite green, I reflect on the week’s unusually warm weather. 

It is my custom at this time of year to host a garden party for foreign ecclesiastical dignitaries. However, I decided that this was quite unfeasible given the heat and so placed a handwritten sign at the gate of the Palace on the morning of the event. 

It read: ‘Owing To The Fucking Hot Weather And To Spare Us All A Right Cunt Of A Day Sweating Cobs, Today’s Garden Party Is Fucking Cancelled.’

The sign had only been up for ten minutes when my private secretary knocked frantically at my chambers. ‘Come!’ I boomed, and in he burst, in a great flap.

‘Y-Your Grace, I’ve just seen the… sign you put up at the gate. You – you can’t cancel the Garden Party! Dignitaries have flown in from all parts of the globe!’

‘Yes I can. It’s too fucking hot.’

‘B-but Your Grace, the forecast is for 25 degrees with a light breeze!’

‘Don’t care. Anything above 23 degrees is too fucking hot as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Your Grace, I urge you -’

‘Look, unless you want me to host the fucker in just a g-string, the answer’s no.’

Upon which he skulked forlornly away. With a wry smile, I take a light breakfast and peruse a periodical. Therein I read that Yvette Cooper has stated that the proscribed group Palestine Action are indeed a terrorist organisation – it is just that people are not aware of the ‘full nature’ of their actions, which she cannot divulge.

Jesus fucking cock on a wankstick, what the fuck are you talking about? What kind of terrorist organisation keeps their fucking terrorist activities a total secret? How fucking terrifying is that? Activities which no one knows anything about? Do you think the fucking IRA would have got where they did if they’d planted bombs but then gone to insane lengths to make sure the media didn’t get wind of what they were up to? What kind of docile monkeys do you fucking take us for? 

Phil Rhys Thomas has written a piece in The Spectator titled ‘Admit It: No One Really Likes Eating Fish’. He goes on to describe eating seafood as an ‘endurance test’.

I know it’s the fucking Spectator and you have to take the most fucking asinine, contrarian stances and tart them up in Oxbridge essay prose but you’ve fucking sailed high over the fucking shark with this one! You might as well write a column titled ‘Men: You Don’t Really Care For Wanking, Do You?’ Do you seriously think you’ve pricked some sort of balloon of delusion that’s lasted since before the birth of Christ? That we’re only eating fish out of some sense of obligation imposed by the liberal elite? Or did you just write this for a fucking bet?

A-level results came out this week, and as is his annual wont, Jeremy Clarkson tweeted: ‘If your A-level results are disappointing, don’t worry. I got a C and two Us and here I am today, installing lights for a helicopter landing pad in my garden.’

You went to fucking public school though, didn’t you, ‘Jezza’? The fees of which are currently over £40,000 a year. One of the most expensive educations money can buy and they still weren’t able to cram any intelligence through those fucking obdurate cloth ears of yours! As evidenced by your articles for the Sun and others: fucking stupid, cowshit opinions plucked out of your arse for the delectation of morons. You went to fucking public school and that’s why you are where you are, nothing to do with merit, just class privilege doing its thing. And if you’re not a fucking idiot, how come you wear fucking ironed jeans?

Finally, it seems that the number of migrant boats coming into the UK in the past year has hit the 50,500 mark, causing fury in the press and prompting the usual tough talking about deportations from Keir Starmer.

You fucking know what? Let’s revise the ‘one in, one out’ system. One dinghy of people fleeing fucking wars and despotic regimes in, one dinghy of Reform-voting, hotel-burning, fascist twats out. And squeeze in a few right-wing journalists. These boats full of brave adventurers might find an uninhabited island where they can deport who they like. Of course, they’d all be white so they might have to focus on crabs and the odd starfish, but it’d be every bit as productive as their fucking yob days out at asylum hostels!

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Cock-shaped pasta in Italy's Blackpool: The gammon food critic's holiday to Sorrento

Restaurant reviews by Justin Tanner, our retired food critic, who’d be watching more of Masterchef if they’d left in the bits where Gregg grabs the contestants’ arses.

I’M off on holiday. It’s been a while and a mate down the pub told me Sorrento is pretty upmarket. As a discerning chap, I wanted my first time in Eyetie Land to be classy.

Only it’s apparent upon arrival that it’s only ‘upmarket’ if your usual holiday abroad begins with a flight to bloody Alicante. A brief amble around the tourist shops is enough to conclude I’m in Italy’s equivalent of Blackpool.

Plastic Virgin Marys seem to be a local obsession. They’re on sale everywhere, though God only knows who’s buying this shit. And ashtrays with paintings of lemons on. They’re obsessed with lemons too. Acting like they invented the bloody things, which is typical of your Italian. Taking the credit for doing nothing, like they did in the war.

But worst of all, endless bags of cock-and-balls-shaped tricolour pasta. Why would I want to eat that? Do I look like a poofter?

But it’s the local food scene I’m really interested in. I’m well-versed in global cuisine so I know that Italians practically live on pizzas and spag bol. Much like myself, so in theory I should be in spaghetti Nirvana.

Sadly breakfast does nothing to reassure me I’m in the foodie heaven I was expecting. The usual, uneducated foreigners’ stab at a full English is predictably inedible. I’m glad I had the foresight to bring a bottle of HP sauce with me, so I surreptitiously smother everything in that for an all-pervading taste of molasses and vinegar. I’m no fool.

There’s flyers in the hotel foyer advertising trips to Pompeii, which I’ll be giving a miss. I don’t need to travel halfway around Europe to view a decimated city steeped in tales of horror. I live in Birmingham.

Lunchtime rolls around, so I opt for a ‘classic’ Italian salad of tomato, mozzarella and basil. Only that’s all there is to it. A sliced tomato, lump of cheese that I now know tastes of nothing unless it’s cooked atop a pizza and some cursory leaves. For nine bloody Euros?

I spend the afternoon supping piss-thin Italian lager by the pool and hoping dinner will be an improvement. I head to a ristorante away from the main square, where you can’t even get a bowl of chips without needing a second mortgage.

When in Rome, as they say, so I ask the waiter for spaghetti bolognese. He rather snootily informs me that’s not a real dish here. So those ready meals in Aldi are holograms, are they? Apparently, locals here call bolognese sauce ‘ragu’ and it’s only eaten with tagliatelle, never spaghetti. Like I can tell the sodding difference.

Pizza it is then and, unsurprisingly, they don’t have pepperoni, tandoori chicken or jalapeno toppings like proper pizzas from Domino’s, so salami it is. It’s passable, but not a patch on the real thing.

As I wend my way back to my hotel, again running the gauntlet of penis pasta, plastic virgins and endless lemon-themed tat, I muse on why anyone would think this moped-fumed, tacky as f**k hellhole that doesn’t even have a beach is the height of sophistication. 

My inevitable conclusion is that my standards in global travel are considerably higher that those of the common herd. Like I didn’t know that already.

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