Mark Andrews on Saturday: It's all going down the pan

THE Army has drawn up a list of ‘red flags’ to spot recruits who may secretly harbour extreme right-wing views.

One is identifying themselves as ‘patriots’.

Let’s get this right. While the Army is actively targeting ‘snowflakes’, ‘me, me, me millennials’ and ‘selfie addicts’ in its latest recruitment drive, it’s not so sure about patriots.

Let’s just hope there’s not a war any time soon.

MEANWHILE, the charity Revolving Doors has stepped up the campaign against short prison sentences, highlighting a criminal who received 198 jail terms of less than six months.

The charity says this is proof short jail sentences don’t work, and it is hard to argue. But did it never occur to any of the magistrates or judges this offender appeared before, that maybe by the 100th crime or so, it might just be time to try a longer sentence? Like forever?

ARE you into your art and looking for somewhere to go? You should probably check out Blenheim Palace which is soon to get a very interesting art, ahem installation.

An 18-carat gold toilet, by Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan, will be up and running by the autumn. The Guggenheim Museum had offered it to Donald Trump, but perhaps he thought it a bit tacky.

Anyway, the Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector describes it as a “sculptural performance of interactive art,” and “like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings.”

Apparently, it is a “cipher for the excesses of affluence” and “the equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labour and value". Don’t we all?

Anyway, Nancy says at its previous home, one of the Guggenheim’s gender-neutral bathrooms, “more than 100,000 people waited patiently for the opportunity to commune with art and nature.”

Or go for a jimmy, as we say in the Black Country.

IT’S good to see our political leaders pulling together in a crisis to put on a show of national unity.

While our governing party, which promised ‘strong and stable’ leadership, has managed to find a whole football team of candidates to be the next PM, the ‘big beasts’ of the opposition have spent the past week telling anyone who will listen they don’t actually vote for the party they represent.

It’s a bit different in North Korea, where communist dictator Kim Jong Un could teach them a thing or two about party discipline. According to reports from South Korea, the little fella has been pretty ruthless in his latest reshuffle.

Kim Hyok Chol, his envoy to the US, was the biggest name to get the bullet ¬¬– literally ¬– for failing to deliver the goods at an ill-fated summit with President Trump. He was shot by firing squad for ‘being won over’ by the Americans.

He took a slightly softer stance with party vice-chairman Kim Jong Chol, who was let off with a stint in a prison camp for a spot of ‘forced labour and ideological education’. Given that all North Korean names sound so similar, you do hope they got the right man. It must be a real downer spending five years breaking rocks because your namesake said the wrong thing.

A similar fate also befell interpreter Kim Song Hye, sentenced to corrective education for failing to effectively communicate the Supreme Leader’s message during his sit-down with The Donald. That’s education today, they don’t teach languages like they used to.

Say what you like about Lil’ Kim, but he runs a tight ship with no cabinet divisions. That’s strong leadership. Probably not stable, but definitely strong.