A Viscount Speaks

England is the most successful sporting nation on the face of the earth

What ho, Englishmen!

Lawrence rightly upbraids me for my failure to mention St George's Day.  I have, alas, been rather busy.  But what better way to redress the balance than to point you to this superb article by the Telegraph's Brendan Gallagher.  He writes:

It might not be politically correct in a world in which only Celts seem allowed to beat their patriotic breast and my granny in Donegal will surely excommunicate me if she ever reads this but across the board, and across the decades, there is no sporting nation on this planet to compare to England. 

England is a packed Twickenham and whiskey nips on frosty afternoons and singing Abide with Me at Wembley. It is a Bobby Charlton piledriver, a Wally Hammond cover drive and Lawrence Dallaglio's tears as the national anthem plays.

England is Wimbledon fortnight, Cowes Week and the Cheltenham Festival - all three the envy of the sporting world. It is the Boat Race and Henley, a packed Lord's on the first morning against Australia and a raucous Oval as the sun sets on another Ashes series.

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." Shakespeare probably was not thinking about sport at the time but his words ring ever true.

What magnificent sentiments!  Let us never forget that, in Kipling's words, to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life.  Cry God for Elizabeth, England and St. George!

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Beefcake of the Week

What ho, chums!

Phil "Raging Bull" Vickery is our Beefcake of the Week.  The old warhorse is back from a ghastly neck injury and plays against Bath at Twickers tomorrow.  I know some people think old Vicks has crested the hill but I'm a big fan of the Cornishman.  Phil Keith-Roach, ex-England scrummaging wallah, ranks Vickery as one of the top five tight-heads he's ever seen on a rugger field.  He's also a splendidly emotive sort of chap.  One can quite imagine him taking it to the Froggies at Agincourt.  He also gave the colonial, Latham, a sly beasting at Worcester last week.  All things considered, Vickery might be deficient in Saxon blood but he's by no means deficient in the Saxon spirit.  He's a worthy choice as BOTW.

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

The Highlanders are rising!

What ho, proles!

Good news at last in this interminable election campaign!  My fellow Viscount, Lord Monckton, has thrown his hat into the ring in the Highlands.  He is standing on the UKIP ticket.  The Mad Monk is a formidable character and makes great sport of dishing beardie weirdie greens and tofu munchers.  If he's not beasting George Monbiot in Blighty, he's rallying the American masses on the Glenn Beck show.  What a fellow.  Hear his call:

The old discredited political parties understand little of our hard Highland life, and care less. And the numpties in Edinburgh's Parliament of Eunuchs have destroyed our wee bit hill and glen. Taxes and rates rise, public debt soars, but public services wither. Enough is enough. Is this the Brave New Scotland that Europe's SNP poodles maundered on about? Highlandmen, arise! Vote out the snivelling SNP satraps of the stifling European tyranny! Take back your nationhood and your democracy! Vote UKIP with pride!

That's the spirit, old bean!  Let's hope the Mad Monk raises an army of Highland savages to storm Westminster.  It would be quite something if the descendents of Wallace's men atoned for their forebear's treason by taking back Britain for the silent patriotic majority. 

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Will the last person to leave Britain turn off the light?

What ho, proles!

I had the most awful dream last night.  I dreamed that some pious Tab with nary a quarter of Saxon blood in his veins was on the verge of seizing power in Blighty.  I dreamt that this foreign interloper was intent on ditching Britannia's nukes, on giving all our powers to the EU, and on letting hordes of Mohammedans flood into our leafy shires.  The worst part of the nightmare was that the peasantry, rather than pushing this villainous cur into the Channel with their pitchforks, instead chose to welcome him with open arms and acclaim him for his honesty.

Just how damned stupid are the British people?  It beggars belief that half the proletariat can switch votes merely because some pleasant-looking chap turns up on their plasma television screens and proclaims himself a new sort of politician.  What sort of empty headed fools live in this country of ours?  It makes me damned angry.  So angry, in fact, that I spent yesterday afternoon touring the countryside in my Bentley taking random pot shots at any home displaying the Liberal candidate's posters.

I fear this benighted land of ours is about to be saddled with Lib-Lab coalition for the next hundred years.  This is what happens when you allow degenerates, hoodlums and primitives to vote in mass elections.  I say in all seriousness that if Clegg and Brown take power then I shall personally launch a secessionist movement with the intention of forming some sort of Orania-type community deep in the heart of Sussex. Crouchbackland perhaps?  My yeomanry militia have sworn a blood oath to their liege lord and are chomping at the bit for action.  Voters, you've been warned.

Yours, etc
Viscount Crouchback

Beefcake of the Week

What ho, chums!

One thinks of the French as dandyish moppets, as a sort of Franco version of the effete, limp-wristed chaps that Winchester produces by the bucketload.  (Most of whom end up at the Foreign Office, where they take great delight in selling Britain down the river to devious foreigners).  But there is another type of Frenchman.  Let us call him Jean-Claude Headbanger.  One finds Monsieur Headbanger in the French military or, indeed, in its southern rugger teams.  He is most notable for his unusually advanced state of lunacy.  Jean-Claude rouses himself for battle by popping amphetamines, headbutting concrete walls in the dressing room and then foaming at the nostrils whilst he belts out Le Marseillaise.  He does not have quite the phlegm of John Bull but, by golly, he is a fearsome proposition nonetheless. 

There is no finer example than the Biarritz and France loosehead prop, Fabien Barcella.  This beast of a man rose to prominence last Autumn when he brutalised the Boers in Toulouse.  It was a monstering of quite jaw-dropping proportions, utterly shocking to anyone who has never seen the inside of a gaol.  As you can see below, M Barcella is a hefty fellow.  One rarely sees such magnificent farm-yard thighs.  Let us hope that the accolade of Beefcake of the Week encourages M Barcella onto new heights of beastliness.  It would give me great delight to see Paul O'Connell man-shamed in the European semi-finals as brutally as John Smit was in Toulouse.  

(The fellow gawping open-mouthed in the background is thinking: "Mon Dieu!  Le boeuf!  C'est magnifique!")

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

The election is hotting up

What ho, voters!

I say, chaps, isn't this leaders debate malarkey frightfully exciting?  I anticipate something monstrous happening tonight.  I think old Scotch Gordon is finally going to go berserk and land one on Cameron on national television!  Some sort of Glaswegian kiss right on Cam's big pink moon face!  Golly, I hope so!

It's not all fun and games though.  I've had to lay down strict instructions that none of the below-the-stairs staff at Crouchback Castle be permitted to watch the event.  I had hoped that such a prohibition would not be necessary but regrettably several of the more bolshie servant girls have taken to exclaiming over that "nice Mr Clegg".  I can't sit down for supper without one of them prattling on about "ooh, he is very attractive, Jean, he'd get my vote!  I wouldn't mind being number 31 so I wouldn't!"

Of course, partly this is mere teasing since they know very well that I will be marching every last one of them into the polling station on 6th May and ordering them to mark their X - which doubles as their signature for most of them - next to Conservative.  However, I shall have to be rather more subtle this time since in 2005 I got into the most frightful lather when a local journalist spotted me leading my crocodile of servant girls into the polling station and promptly splashed a most outrageous headline over the front of his newspaper: "LOCAL TOFF ORDERS STAFF TO VOTE TORY: Viscount Crouchback threatens refuseniks with whip".

Absolute rot, of course.  I only whip the lads. The girls I prefer to rodger quietly in the wine cellar.  Nevertheless, I shall have to tread with caution this time. 

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Let's get the slaughter started!

What ho, hunters!

Great controversy in my part of the world, chaps.  Sussex CCC used a marksman to kill a nuisance fox on the cricket square.  Chap walked straight up to the wicket and slotted the bastard!  Bloody good show!  Of course, the usual lunatics are up in arms.  All Brighton's pinkos, homos and bohos have been weeping in the streets.  Sod 'em!  The oiks had better get used to foxes being terminated with extreme prejudice because once the Tories are back in power it will be open season on the horrible little pests!  No more loopholes and chicanery, just an out-and-out blood fest!  I and all the bounders at the CL&C are salivating at the mere thought of it.  Tally ho!

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Has Cameron gone bonkers?

What ho, squires!

Good God, have you fellows seen the new Tory manifesto?  It reads like something dreamed up by the Soviet People's Council circa 1925.  Consider this helpful description over on Conservative Home:

This must be the most un-Tory manifesto ever published by the Party.  It would have astounded that bleak, frowning, gloomy-bearded Victorian statesman. It's altogether lacking in the sense of evolutionary caution, of politics as the art of the possible, of the fragility of public affairs, and of the frailty of human endeavour that, not so long ago, coloured the lifeblood of the Conservative Party.

Consider this: "Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group."  Please note: every adult.  How will voters find the time?  After all, they'll be too busy taking over schools, forming co-operatives to run hospitals, organising their own single budgets if ill long-term, sacking MPs in recall ballots, electing police commissioners, voting in local referendums, undertaking national citizenship service, and monitoring government spending on-line to do very much else at all.

I say, it sounds positively dangerous! I have visions of some horrendous totalitarian state in which workers' soviets run every shire and bumptious busybodies are given free rein to poke their noses into every nook and cranny of rural life.  Does young Cameron seriously propose to give every random oik in the realm a say on complex matters of state?  Does he imagine that Gary from the council estate has anything remotely sensible to put forth at the local governors' meeting?  It is a recipe for absolute chaos. 

I had resigned myself to voting Tory but now I am not so sure.  I grow ever more convinced that a full-scale coup is required if we are ever to be free of these infernal knaves and blackguards. 

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

The constituents of Somerset North East are in safe hands!

What ho, Tories!

I say, chaps, isn't it marvellous to know that fellows like Jacob Rees-Mogg still abound in the English shires?  Jacob is the son of former Times editor, William Rees-"Mystic"-Mogg and is campaigning on the Tory ticket in Somerset.  Camilla Long wrote a rather snide piece about him in yesterday's Sunday Times but even she, I suspect, could not help but feel some admiration for Jacob's splendid refusal to pander to the lumpen proletariat:

He is well known for his unique way of electioneering: in 1997, he waged a memorable campaign in Central Fife, crawling the dank, staunchly Labour streets in a Bentley and distributing leaflets with the help of his nanny, Veronica Crook.

I say, now that is the spirit!  But it gets better:

One of the leading members of the David Cameron generation of new Tories created a storm yesterday by comparing people who were not privately educated and did not go to Oxford or Cambridge universities to "potted plants".

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will be fighting one of the Tories' target seats at the next election, also gave the impression that he thinks that anyone educated in the state sector is incapable of writing an "articulate" letter.

I'm not sure Jacob would appreciate the term "new Tory" - he strikes me as very much an "old" Tory - but one can only admire his sentiments.  It is simply splendid to hear a fellow dishing out a few home truths in this age of oikocracy.  Alas, Jacob has as much chance of a future seat in a Cameron Cabinet as I have of securing the freedom of Limerick.  Still, let us row in behind his valiant effort to represent the people of Somerset North East and hope that this gentleman of the shires makes his presence felt from the backbenches.

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback

Love in the Antipodes

What ho, colonials!

Listen, chaps, I know fillies aren't up to much down there in the colonies but surely this is taking things much too far.  

Yours, etc

Viscount Crouchback