Party before self? Not a chance

A READER swears she heard a water-company spokesman explaining that: "Rainwater flooding should subside when it stops raining."

TALKING of water, when I were a lad and the world was all in black-and-white and you could still buy eight threepenny buns for a farthing, we kiddies in Kington mixed infants school had two galvanised tin baths in the classroom. One contained Play Water and had an assortment of rubber ducks and plastic boats. The other was altogether more serious. It contained Measuring Water and came with pint, half-pint and gill pots. I must have been six before I realised that Play Water and Measuring Water were the same substance. Today, I am having a similar problem with money. It's the burning issue of Osborne pounds and Corbyn pounds.

IT appears that if the Bank of England prints money to restore confidence in sterling, as authorised by Chancellor George Osborne, everything is fine and inflation is not a problem. But if Jeremy Corbyn runs the country and tells the Bank to print money to re-nationalise the railways and give everyone a pay rise, the Tories assure us that everything will be terrible and inflation will run amok. Osborne pounds, good. Corbyn pounds, bad. A puzzle.

MEANWHILE, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham, currently splitting the centre vote for the Labour leadership, all claim that Labour led by Corbyn would be unelectable. They also claim to love the Labour Party and Britain. If they genuinely put party and nation before naked personal ambition, by now two of them would have stood down to give the third a sporting chance against Corbyn. We're waiting . . .

PHEW, what a relief. The 70th anniversary of VJ-Day and the end of the Second World War passed off without hundreds of veterans and civilians being blown to pieces by Islamist terrorists. As you may recall, before last weekend's events it was widely reported that shadowy home-grown bombers, inspired by Islamic State, were planning to plant a bomb on the route. As one tabloid put it: "Bomb plot:The extremists aim to strike on Saturday by exploding a deadly pressure cooker bomb during events in Central London." Thankfully, this dastardly plot was foiled. Just like the one to blow up a North Sea oil rig, fly a private plane into Canary Wharf, smear deadly ricin poison on cars and massacre shoppers in an English shopping mall. If you believe such reports, usually based on unnamed "intelligence sources," terrorist plots are foiled day after day. Now, it may be that our spooks and anti-terror cops are the finest plot-foilers in the world. But it sometimes strikes me as strange that very few burglaries, usually committed by thick-head, drug-addled teenagers, are ever foiled and they are rarely solved. Yet plots plotted by the biggest and best-funded terrorist organisations in history are foiled time after time. It is, to put it mildly, odd.

LORD Armstrong of Ilminster, former aide to Edward Heath, says the Metropolitan Police investigated allegations of sex abuse against the former Tory prime minister "as it should be done." In other words, they did it discreetly and kept it all private. Good old Met. We can always rely on them to do things right, can't we? No point in rocking the boat. Move along. Nothing to see here, folks.

FROM a report on the tattoo industry in Stafford: "Council bosses hope the new initiative will ensure parlours are up to scratch."