New Year irritations

This lot must be high up on the list, I feel sure... as if, as mentioned earlier, Brown wasn't an impeccably neoliberal Chancellor, ultra-Blairite plotters gather in darkened NW1 rooms to find a more suitable candidate for PM. (Incidentally, never mind Brown's neoliberal, free-market credentials: what's with his neocon flirtations? Glowing blurb praise for long-standing confidant Irwin Stelzer's anthology Neoconservatism, hints about being "proud" of Britain's imperial past, and now recommending Gertrude Himmelfarb's implausibly Francophobe history of the Enlightenment. All very strange for a, ha ha, closet socialist, mmm? Strikes me that he's-a-secret-lefty isn't going to work... shades of the demon eyes, in fact.)

(Also irksome, with apologies: recent comments box issues due to an overly-ambitious attempt on my part to swap comments provider; the net result of which is that previous comments on posts have, erm, disappeared - annoying, but since Haloscan deletes everthing after two months or so, anyway, probably not that annoying.)