Bloody wimmin.

IT'S that 0.27 per cent of the year when females are recognised as not being too mad, naggy, annoying or hormonal. An International Women's Day, just for little ol' us? Wow. Thanks.

That blessed 24-hour period when it's all right to say 'Huzzah for girls!' and the men in charge of stuff say things like 'Afghanistan, yeah, dreadful isn't it? What shall we do?' before they go back to trading women's rights for a political deal with the Taliban.

Let's get this straight. I am a woman, and I am amazing on more than just the one day a year. I am frequently an idiot as well, but usually not for too long, and in this country people like me form 52 per cent of the population. Elsewhere in the world the figures are different, not least because females are killed, abused, sidelined, abandoned, and generally treated in a rather offhand manner to such a large degree that 100million women who should have been born seem to have disappeared.

Regardless of that, we are not a minority. We are not a pressure group, a campaign, a token or something anyone ought to be having a sit-in for. We are 49.76 per cent of the world's population and if all of us who were born had the same medical treatment and social chances we'd be a superpower. We'd be the gender equivalent of China. You don't like what we do? Well, Fuk Wu.

That's not to say that taking a day every year to point out the iniquities of the world is a bad idea. It's the only way some of those issues are ever going to get in the papers or on the main news bulletins, so it's worth doing even if it is offensively tokenistic to your average European female who can hold a driving licence and own property without anyone's by-your-leave.

But then there's the hypocrites who hand-wring over wimmin's stuff when it's March 8 and go back to screwing them over on March 9. Step forward, Prime Minister Dishface and Mini-Me Clegg.

Today these two middle-aged numpties are going to announce plans for a law against stalking. They're not going to mention the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 which is supposed to do that already, but which is rarely exercised properly by the police or courts and is more often used to stop journalists asking questions of people who'd rather they didn't. And no-one's going to say that your average stalker is too deranged to give a tupenny-ha'penny for what the law says about anything.

The politicians are certainly not going to admit that in recent months support for them among that 52 per cent of the population has dived off a cliff. Whether it's public sector job cuts, benefit reforms, the recession or pension changes, it's women who are losing the most, and the polls are showing that they have rather gone off Dishface and Cleggy as a result.

So what they're also going to do today is announce that Britain is going to sign up to the Council of Europe's Convention on Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. Yay for the girls, yay for the boys who like girls, please vote for us again next time.

This convention is an interesting thing. Firstly it was produced in May last year, so we're a little slow in getting around to it. It's been signed by only eight member states so far which is pretty poor, and Germany says it won't apply to asylum seekers. And I'm not sure that Dishface and Cleggy have read it all the way through.

There's plenty of pledges which are prime examples of hope triumphing over expectation - Article I promises to eliminate all violence against women for example. But it also says that signatories should devote financial resources to combating violence and ensure adequate rape crisis support and refuges for women.

Article 20 says: "Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to ensure that victims have access to services facilitating their recovery from violence... services such as legal and psychological counselling, financial assistance, housing, education, training and assistance in finding employment.... access to health care and social services and that services are adequately resourced and professionals are trained to assist victims."

Except Britain's women's refuges are turning people away and closing beds because of the cutbacks. Housing benefit is being cut, jobs are going part-time, JobCentres and training services are being reduced, and the NHS is being turned inside out. So we're flouting the convention before we've even signed it. Sod the women, let's buy off the bankers.

The convention also promises to provide civil law remedies for women against their abusers. Only, oh yes, massive reforms of the Legal Aid system make that impossible unless you're rich.

And for final proof that 'Calm down, dear' Dishface doesn't give a monkey's cuss what the convention says, we need look no further than Article 40 which says: "...any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment, is subject to criminal or other legal sanction."

Except when you're in the House of Commons, when you can say whatever you like. Whoopsy!

Although it says stuff the world should already be doing the convention really matters in many important ways, and if the men who sign it don't believe in it or act on it then they can still be held to account by it.

So I'd just like to say - sign away, boys. Pat yourselves on the back, and forget about it all tomorrow.

But don't for a moment think that those bloody wimmin have gone away.

Man on left: "We need to do something for women."

Man on right: "We've got pink flowers. What more do they want?"

Can't we deport them?

THERE'S a problem family I know of.

White, of course. Neither of them gainfully employed doing anything much.

She has a dodgy past with rappers and aristocratic layabouts, while he left school and spent five years running errands for benefit cheats. He had what the neighbours might think of as "a real job" for all of seven years as some kind of Del Boy figure in public relations, swearing black was white and practising his 'not lying' face.

For the past decade he's been living off the taxpayer. Last I heard it was costing us £142,500 a year to maintain his lifestyle, and he also gets two free cars and has four houses. He sub-lets one of them and doesn't even have a mortgage on it.

His wife seems to earn a lot for not doing much two days a week, which seems questionable in itself. Somehow they've just spunked £64,000 on a second kitchen and got us to pay for half of it, even though they already had a kitchen and it was done up only a few years ago.

I've heard their marble dining table cost £6,312 and the chairs for it were £1,524 each - by my reckoning that's twelve and a half grand just to eat your tea. You could buy a house in Burnley for that money.

He comes and goes at all hours and they've got some very dodgy friends knocking on the door late at night. One of them looks like Jeremy Clarkson. Another reckons he's their accountant but looks more like a French aristocrat who's lost his periwig on the way to the guillotine. A few of us are trying to get the council to put an ASBO on his best mate, who looks like him but keeps chucking stones at passing schoolchildren. I think he's a bit simple, myself.

They don't seem to do much for the community. He talks about the Big Society a lot and everyone suffering in the recession, but I've noticed his hands don't get dirty, his heating's on day and night and his arse keeps getting wider. But then if I had a four grand Italian sofa I'd spent a lot of time sitting down as well.

They've got a handful of kids who'll grow up to be much the same as the parents, I expect. I'd say they were all quite dense but they seem to have figured out something I can't, which is how to make a lot out of naff all.

Still, the good news is that walking tumour of a Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has announced a crackdown on problem families who cost society more than they give us, so I'm looking forward to Dishface getting his own troubleshooting 'family worker' who will tell him to do some proper work, or be booted out of his Grade-I listed social housing.

Or we could just start with cutting his benefits, because apparently starvation is the best way to get the old work ethic firing.

David William Donald Cameron... you are an habitual layabout who accepts welfare benefits as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts free houses in the same casual manner...

(with thanks to Paul Whitrow for his Photoshop skills)

Don't panda to it.

TWO giant pandas have arrived at Edinburgh Zoo and from the hullabaloo you'd think they'd got there on roller skates.

The zoo is predicting one million extra visitors a year and its ticket website crashed. The First Minister of Scotland has flown to Beijing in some kind of bizarre exchange trip to praise Sino-Scots business deals (will he be expected to breed while he's there?) and people have been lining the streets in panda hats to welcome the new inmates.

Sunshine and Sweetie, or Yang Guang and TianTian if you prefer, will live in matching £275,000 cages, be fed £70,000 worth of organic bamboo every year flown in from Amsterdam, and have their movements monitored 24/7 by webcams. Seeing as they defecate 40 times a day it's probably something for those (and I could name a few celebrities who'll be logging on) with niche tastes.

To listen to the PR gumpf you might think this was all about saving the panda so it can roam the Chinese countryside once again. In the space of half an hour yesterday the First Minister for Scotland, his deputy, and the UK Secretary of State for Scotland had all issued press releases claiming credit and today Saint Nicholas of Clegg piped up about how "delighted" he is that two creatures will be spending the next ten years locked up there.

I'd be a lot more delighted if all this political effort and diplomacy had been spent on getting Abdelbaset al Megrahi the Lockerbie bomber shipped in myself, but you can't have everything.

What no-one is saying is the unwelcome truth; these animals are money-spinners, and no-one in authority is seriously interested in saving them because if they did that they wouldn't be worth as much.

Zoo tickets are free but already they are flogging panda toys, hats, key rings, a panda iThing dock and a "collapsible eco-bag", whatever that is when it's at home.

If they get around to making a baby - a process made considerably more difficult by the fact pandas aren't bothered about sex and the males are usually under-endowed - the millions the zoo expects to make will go through the roof. I doubt they'll spend the cash on rescuing animals in captivity.

In return the zoo bosses are paying the People's Republic of China £6.4m over 10 years, some of which may go on conservation but probably not all of it, and none of which is going to make a damn bit of difference to the pandas.

They are dying for two simple reasons: firstly, human beings are ruining their habitats, cutting down trees and the many types of bamboo they need to eat, and forcing them from the lowlands into mountains where there's even less food. And secondly because pandas are a bit rubbish. They're rubbish at sex, they're rubbish at evolving, they're rubbish at everything except sitting and shitting.

What they're good at is making money. There are twice as many pandas in the wild than we had thought - about 3,000 - but we're not being told about that because it doesn't make us rush to Edinburgh Zoo and buy panda mittens. And breeding in captivity to release into the wild is all well and good, but their habitat is still disappearing and unless that is reversed you are merely consigning those offspring to lingering starvation.

Any baby born to Sunshine and Sweetie is more than likely to return to the panda factory in China to enter the breeding programme. It will spend its life in a cage, encouraging us to buy black-and-white toys we don't need while being pampered beyond all recognition with a veterinary regime which costs five times more than it does to look after an elephant, and we will continue to destroy its habitat with our demand for Chinese-made panda hats while other species that we could help don't get the same money spent on them.

Would you do the same to a dodo? Run a conservation programme costing millions to keep a breeding population alive so people could come and gawp at them, rather than learn that perhaps it might be better to have not done the things which killed them in the first place? Or a Tyrannosaurus - a creature which was highly evolved but just came to the end of its run? The same thing will happen to humans one day. Would you want to be locked in a glass house so sentient giant cockroaches could ooh and aah every time you went to the toilet, and hoped you took a fancy to the other genetic tail-end-Charlie they'd moved in next door?

Pandas have a strong tug on the collective conscience - they are symbols of those species under threat from the influence of man, they are cute, and so rare it's lovely for most of us to have the chance to see them

But people who buy those panda hats and go gooey-eyed over their annual ham-fisted efforts at reproduction are not saving the pandas. They are keeping them locked up, keeping them threatened, and drawing out their inevitable demise in a way which does not dignify them or us.

Saving them properly is simply not going to happen until someone finds a way to make as many millions from pandas in a tree as they do from pandas in a zoo.

Foxes have more of a work ethic.

Let's go to hell in a spaceship.

MONDAYS are depressing for most of us, today as much as any other.

Not least because on Mondays you feel like nothing changes. It's the same as every other Monday there has ever been or ever will be. If there is a hell, and if Time exists there, you can guarantee it will be 3pm on a Monday for eternity.

Today I can report some people who didn't want to live in a permanent home in any one place are, ironically, using bricks and mortar to build blockades to stop bailiffs who want to move them on from a place they've lived in for years. The people who are evicting them are doing it even though some (not all) of the evictees have nowhere else to go. Neither side has really been following the planning rules, and each claim they're in the right.

At the Lib Dem conference the nation's third political party is committing electoral suicide in the same way it has on an annual basis ever since it was founded in 1988. Pretty much everything every party worker has said so far is a guaranteed vote-loser, which I suppose makes a change from their MPs losing them votes by speeding, cheating, fiddling and turning their backs on everything they said before the election. Dishface is probably rubbing his hands with glee.

Meanwhile 13.5million people in this country are rubbing their hands just to keep warm. That is the number of people in Britain who are officially 'poor', because the cost of the basic standard of living has jumped 20 per cent in the past year. And what's Dishface doing about it? Why, he's going to New York to launch a business and tourism and campaign which will say Britain is GREAT, in big capital letters.

In other news, a rugby player has been an idiot, a Royal marriage has hit its first skid, and people are complaining that four miners killed in a pit accident in Wales didn't get the same coverage. Had those miners been alive they would have done - but human beings don't buy newspapers with dead people on the front. If newspapers don't sell, they close. If you don't like the way that equation works you will need to rewrite human DNA, and I wish you the best of luck with it.

On days like this it seems like humanity never changes, except for the worst.

But in fact the most remarkable thing humans have ever achieved goes whizzing right over your head. 

The International Space Station was launched eleven years ago and despite involving people who are enemies on Earth has not yet (we are led to believe) seen a single fight. No-one who's on it gives a damn about Spooks or Downton Abbey or gives much of a toss about the Lib Dems.

The space programme is insanely expensive, which in these straitened times means the shuttle has been grounded and a trip to the moon cancelled. NASA is hoping to get a manned mission to Mars within 30 years, but presumably they're going to have to find an even better iPhone buried there to convince anyone the trip's worthwhile.

Yet since space exploration began these things have changed as a direct result: liquid-cooled spacesuits have been adapted to help patients with burning limb syndrome, multiple sclerosis, spinal injuries and sports injuries; most homes have a smoke detector, first designed for Skylab in the 1970s; hundreds of firefighters' lives have been saved by new breathing apparatus; the design of NASA’s space shuttle main engine fuel pumps was used to create an artificial ventricle for heart patients; methods of enhancing computer images of the moon in the 1960s were used to create CAT scans and MRI imagery to diagnose disease and injury; every SatNav device uses GPS tracking from satellites; and a NASA fluid physicist hit on a way to diagnose cataracts early.

Techniques developed to protect metal from atomic oxygen in space have been used to save artworks which no known restoration method could have helped, and imaging developed to study the surface of Mars was used on documents from the ruins of Pompeii which revealed lines that had been unseen for centuries.

Yes, you could argue human beings should have come up with all that stuff anyway. But the space programme provided a catalyst for us to strive for things we didn't understand, and the benefits are amazing. There are a dozen different ways in which space travel made it possible for Rital and Ritag Gaboura, twins born with their skulls fused together, to have successful surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital which they could never have hoped to have at home in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

Things do change, all the time. It's just that for most of us we are not unlucky enough to notice it.

The ISS is next over the UK at about 6.30am on Friday. It's a whizzing light in the sky, moving at 17,500mph. If you get a chance, look up at it and be proud of us.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Letters to Lillys.

OUR week began with a denunciation of Glastonbury for being about as cool as Jesus sandals on your dad.

Dave said: "Agreed, Glastonbury is about as edgy as a tartan rug on the back shelf of a Volvo." Peter added: "Glasto is poseur land. All that self conscious chilling. Caitlin Moran just gets embarrassing when she raves about it. Plus all that coverage in the press. Counter culture was wanky enough before - but now..." And Mark pointed out: "Want to know who goes to Glasto? When Beyoncé headlined last night there were more black people on stage than in the audience."

Then Johann Hari admitted nicking other people's quotes and pretending they were part of his own interviews and the internet convulsed with a cliched loathing of journalists, which provoked this explanation of how, exactly, one would have to go about publishing a lie in a newspaper.

It produced a quite startling number of positive responses, from hacks and civilians alike.

Jon said: "Why journalists don't lie - If only more people understood this process!" Victoria added: "Never a truer word written - and I'm an ex tabloid hack - well done you." While Kat said: "Is a truly brilliant and necessary piece, thank you." And Emma added: "You don't know me but I'm a reporter, and after reading your blog post from yesterday I quite wanted to stand up and cheer."

Carl said:

"Bloody loved it. Thanks for that. You've summed up a lot of my frustrations with the anti-journalist blogging brigade who've used Hari as yet another stick to beat us with. Cheers."

Euan added:

"I really enjoyed reading your blog... it describes my own experiences, and I'm sure many others', perfectly. And crucially it's a really good piece of writing. Thanks for putting a smile on my face."

Gary summed it up by saying:

"Mr Hari would have us believe that what he has undertaken to do, on occasion, is the linguisitic equivalent of airbrushing... in my opinion it's all about integrity. I love the band Pearl Jam. I don't read Rolling Stone interviews to have Eddie Vedder's quoted remarks replaced by cut and paste lyrics from his songs - however accurately or concisely they portray his sentiments at the time."

Not everyone agreed - George got in touch with his own first-hand experiences of a journalist who had reported an opposing view of an event to his own, in too much detail to report here. "It undermined my faith in the newspaper industry," he said.

Then there was Adrian, who said:

"I spent my entire tabloid career makng up stories, and we always contrived the photos to go with them. It was like taking candy from a dead baby. As soon as you twig that the newsdesks are fucking retards you are home and dry."

David added:

"I've watched a well known BBC Radio journalist walk round to other offices/bureaux in a press building and get voxpops from his colleagues who were all happy to pretend to be locals - even faking accents - and giving 'first hand accounts' about an event happening outside the building - journalists don't lie? please..."

And Vicky chimed in:

"Great article - although I really struggle to believe 'showbiz' journos tell the gods honest truth, a lot of what they write does seem to be utter garbage, with no actual 'evidence' to back up the story. Just a load of 'sources'."

Ed: I was touched at the number of people - too many to quote here - who said not only 'thank you' as journalists but 'I believe you' as non-journos. Part of my aim is to show you the stereotype does not reflect my experience although, as I am sure is the case in any job, there is a handful of twats all doing their worst.

Charlene Wittstock drew attention by reportedly trying to flee Monaco on the eve of her wedding to Prince Humperdinck Albert, only to have her passport confiscated and be "persuaded" to go through with the £50m ceremony.

Bill may have found the reason why - aside from international embarrassment - the playboy prince was so keen to press ahead with the wedding.

He said:

"If he cannot procreate within matrimony the Grimaldi clan will be forced to cede Monaco to France and lose a territory they have held since 1297. That's old skool, by which I mean 'medieval'. He'd better watch out for Sarkozy's DGSE goons, armed with scalpels... It would make a great plot-line for a Carry On movie."

The summer wedding season seems to have hit a peak, what with Monaco's Royal marriage, Kate Moss taking three days to tie the knot and the astonishing email from Carolyn Bourne to prospective stepdaughter-in-law Heidi Withers which made headlines. At the same time yours truly had a dig at Lily Allen for changing her name to Mrs Cooper, which prompted what can only be described as a deluge of responses.

There were far, far too many to mention here but they split fairly evenly into thirds. One third wanted to berate the Fox for being a femiNazi being mean to poor Mrs C, another third vowed they never had nor would change their name on marriage "BECAUSE I AM NO MAN'S PROPERTY", and the remaining third had either happily double-barrelled, or weren't much bothered but still wanted to say so.

Mrs C herself took exception to "I thought you would have had more spine" to respond: "I never liked Allen, and it marks a new chapter of my life. I have spine, thanking you." Ben said: "You can't have a conversation or 'row' with her without tons of people weighing in or attacking you (which sometimes, she provokes)." Sam said: "It was you being a twat. If Lily and thousands more women want to change to their husband's surname then let them do it. Lily has every right to do what she wants. Who the hell are you to dictate?" And Lucy said: "I think Lily's mad - she had all that great assonance in her name."

Ed: I find it amazing the former Miss A stuck with her famous dad's name for so long if she hated it so much... but perhaps my choice of words was unwise. I should have said 'gumption' rather than 'spine'.

Then we had the latest pictures of Nick Clegg, the only high-profile figure in Britain to put on weight and apparently not merit a double-page spread in every national newspaper as a result.

Martin said: "After losing his deposit yesterday, could be facing cuts himself - pork chop cuts that is!" And Dave added: "Nick actually enjoys widespread support (from his belt)." Lewis said: "Not being funny, but is that the best story you have?"

Ed: A story no-one else has got? Yes.

Phew. It's been a long week; now for a short weekend. Have a good one y'all.

Foxy out.

Fat cat? Moi?

NEWSPAPERS are full of stories about how women look, but it's time someone did a tale of the tapes on poor old Nick Clegg.

I don't know if it's the power lunches, the free food at Downing Street or the Lib Dem propensity to elect leaders who like a tipple. But this is him during the pre-election televised debates:

This is him at the Royal Wedding in April:

And this is him at a Buckingham Palace reception yesterday (note the table looks almost empty):

 Dishface: Who ate all the canapés?

Perhaps, like Prescott and his bulimia, he's got things only half right. When fagging for Dave you're supposed to let HIM eat the crumpets!

A Laws unto themselves.

POLITICIANS are a wonderful bunch. For a mere £43million in salaries we are provided with endless scandals, ineptitude, and screw-ups. It's about the same annual cost as the Royal Family, with the added bonus there are 648 members of this dysfunctional bunch of humanity and no reasons to feel sorry for them.

If their £65,738 salaries were the only price of all this entertainment, I'd be happy to pay. But on top of that comes £93million they claim in 'expenses'.

Most goes towards paying staff, who are often relatives. Huge chunks go on constituency offices, generally rented from their party's local branch and so the taxpayer's cash goes into political coffers. Then there's the second homes they all get, allowing these highly-paid windbags to speculate on the property market while we pay for their mortgages, home repairs, furniture, and even food.

We all know the inglorious facts of the 2009 expenses scandal, in which leaked documents revealed how we paid for Prime Minister Dishface's wisteria to be trimmed, for former minister Elliot Morley's phantom mortgage, for Margaret Moran's £22,000 of repairs to her partner's home 100 miles from her constituency; for moats to be cleaned, tennis courts to be repaired, duckhouses to be installed.

MPs of every party and creed had their snouts in the trough, and when finally exposed mid-grunt by the Press they squealed in outrage at the intrusion while the rest of the nation looked on in disgust.

(Since then the committee of MPs investigating the scandal has decided it would far rather look into phone-hacking by the Press. How odd).

There were 26 resignations or well-timed retirements, and five convictions on fraud charges.

Yesterday one of the resignees, former Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws - who lied to the authorities, claimed more rent than his tenancy agreement was for, claimed rent higher than the market rate, rented from his lover, gave that lover £99,000 to buy the house in the first place, and wrongly claimed for building work, telephone calls and the wrong property, all to the tune of £56,592 - said sorry and as punishment was banned from Parliament for seven days.

They banned him from a subsidised bar, a river terrace, his mates and an historic palace for a week. Aside from putting a dent in his social life, what was the damn point?

Had you or I diddled £56,592 out of the public purse by claiming over the odds for housing benefit and paying it to a lover we'd be up before the beak before you could say "oink". There'd be no "sorry about that", no "shall I pay it back and we'll just forget about it?", and no prospect of a judge saying "tell you what, take a week off work and we'll call it quits".

Mr Laws apologised to Parliament and that was that. He hasn't apologised to us - we are not as important as politicians, after all. He said he'd had a terrible year, his motivation was privacy rather than financial gain because he didn't want to admit his landlord was his boyfriend, and that besides he could have claimed a lot more and didn't, so actually we should be grateful to him.

As a result the ever-entertaining Cleggy moralised: "The expenses scandals in the past were about individuals who were fleecing the system for financial benefit and I don't believe that was ever David's motive."

OK. Tell me, why else would anyone fleece an expenses system?

I don't care if Mr Laws is gay, straight or wobbly. If he felt like staying in the closet that's up to him but the best way of doing that was a) not to live with his boyfriend, b) not commit fraud for the benefit of his boyfriend, and c) not steal from the public purse, the use of which is often inclined to bring public scrutiny.

His homosexuality has been offered up like a speccy kid waving his glasses and saying "don't hit me!", making it appear unreasonable to criticise him. Had he offered such a defence in court a judge would have laughed in his face, and rightly so. Sexuality is not an excuse for criminality.

When there's too much talk about their expenses MPs are inclined to be snide about journalists and our ability to claim for all sorts of things. But we are like every other business in Britain - to make a claim I have to prove I spent the money in the course of my work. I have to produce a computerised receipt and a story from every dinner or drinks. It gets scrutinised by a scary man with a red pen who can demand I explain myself and if I've done anything wrong I can be sacked. The laptop and the phone don't belong to me and I certainly don't get my bloody furniture paid for.

MPs don't have to produce receipts. They don't have to prove they worked hard in return for their expenses. No-one is able to question or sack them except other MPs. And they get to keep the houses.

I'm quite keen on the idea of a dormitory for MPs. It would be a lot cheaper and they're bound to get up to even more shenanigans with which to entertain us.

Anyway in a week's time Mr Laws can skip back into work where his future's looking rosy. Dishface said the fiddling fraudster "is a very talented figure" who "has a lot to offer public life and I hope stays in public life". Vince Cable said: "I'm sure we'll see him back"; Michael Gove hoped "that we will all be able once more to make use of his talents before too long".

They want him back for his creative accountancy skills and because he is "the best brain we have", according to Cleggy; and also because he was replaced by talking squirrel Danny Alexander, a man so dumb yet on-message he gives every impression of being a humanoid Speak-and-Spell.

Yet seeing as Mr Laws was stupid enough to be caught with all ten of his fingers as well as his winky in the till, I quake for the intelligence of the other 647 - all of whom seem to think we're stupid.

This man is not behind bars.