Let them fight for seats

NHS place-names. A friend just back from hospital describes the daily delight of being wheeled between the Catheter Suite and the Discharge Lounge.

IN darker vein, the government's Animal & Plant Agency is advertising a couple of jobs, one for a disease-containment manager, the other for a lab technician. A sharp-eyed reader spotted the adverts in a trade journal under the cheerful heading: "Post Mortem Opportunities - Weybridge."

A READER points out that the phrase I used recently, "You've never had it so good," was attributed to Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957-63. It is a reminder, he says, that Britain had some pretty good moments before we joined the Common Market.

COME to think of it, what do the following have in common: The Festival of Britain, the Swinging Sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the world's first jet airliner, the conquest of Everest, radar, the discovery of DNA, the NHS, television and hip replacements? They all came out of Britain before we joined Europe. Which probably explains why so many over-50s are quietly confident that leaving the EU would be not a disaster but a rebirth.

AT a time when schools are leaking and hospitals crumbling, it is being whispered in the Commons that the cost of refurbishing the ageing Palace of Westminster may be £3,000 million. That's right,a cool £3 billion, paid for by you and me, to provide fat leather seats for the bottoms of 650 MPs and 800 Lords. It is monstrous, and the crumbling state of the old building is the ideal opportunity to knock this over-staffed and vastly overpaid talking shop down to size. Let the new Commons have 100 seats and the Lords just 50 and let the blighters fight it out.

SO did we all have a pang of angst as Mel Brooks began a joke on Today (Radio 4) this week with the line: "You wanna know what killed the Jews?" Brooks, 88, is the brains behind The Producers, the movie and stage show famous for high-kicking chorus lines of dancers dressed as SS soldiers, complete with swastikas. He also directed Blazing Saddles, a spoof Western chiefly remembered for the repeated use of the N-word and the baked-bean flatulence scene. No-one ever accused Mel Brooks of good taste. His radio joke was about elderly Jews on holiday who, having eaten and drunk too much, start singing the Sinatra hit, Dancing in the Dark, in too high a key and die ("bang, stroke, dead!") trying to hit the high notes. Bad taste? The dilemma in our politically-correct times is how do you impose PC on people who delight in being outrageously un-PC about themselves? We may have banned Irish, Pakistani and black jokes but if you ban Jewish jokes you seriously damage Jewish culture.

WHILE every Ukip candidate and councillor has been relentlessly examined for signs of racism, anti-semitism or bigotry, the Green Party's candidates seem to have escaped scrutiny. This is probably because the default media mindset is Ukip=bad, Green=good. But last week's painfully embarrassing "brain fade" interview by Green leader Natalie Bennett surely raises questions. It is fair to assume that the mumbling, stumbling, lost-for-facts Ms Bennett, being leader of the organisation, is one of the best candidates the Green Party can produce. So what are the worst like?

"NOTHING is a bargain if you have no choice but to buy it." David Elstein in the Daily Telegraph, refuting the BBC's oft-repeated boast that it costs viewers only 40p per day.