The Twattering Classes

 Welcome back to another edition of this much-loved column, in which you can revel and delight in the outpourings of those once housed in locked attics by their embarrassed families, but now able to express themselves more fully thanks to the arrival of Twitter. Join me now to watch the prattle of the Twats and the battle of the tweets in the vapids of the rapids on the river Drivel.

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You may have thought over the last few days that hostile environments are only issued by the Home Office, but you would be quite mistaken. The most vitriolic environment in the world is that created when the constipated Left and the smug Right blow off in social media….equalled only by those occasions when the constipated Right and the smug Left sound off in social media.

True to the laws of physics, when two identically charged particles meet, they repel each other. As both these social groups are smug, constipated ideologues, when they clash they are indeed utterly repellent. Thankfully, when not yelling at each other, they are hysterically, unconsciously funny.

Owen Jones is, for example, unique in being infantile and daft without the need of any goading from anyone else. He prefers to fly solo when being an enfant terrible:

This is Owen four days ago being a tad extreme in his analysis of Windrush:

It’s the sort of thing you or I would say after a few decent bottles of strong South African wine in the closing stages of a somewhat divisive supper party in Highgate. Owen manages it by just sitting in front of his tablet. Of all the iniquities the Mayflower crew could choose to fall on their swords about, left to themselves they never would….so in that sense, the only radical gay in the Village is doing some kind of service by saying Rudd and May should resign. (Rudd did so 72 hours later, but Theresa the Bulkhead Barnacle is still firmly attached to the ship)

Where Bowen Peep goes wrong is in his conviction that Windrush deserves inclusion as ‘one of the greatest scandals of our time’. What, like BSE maybe? Cash for Questions? The Black Hole of Calcutta? Thieving 3.5 million pensions off 1950s born women? Blair lying to Parliament over Iraq? The demise of David Kelly?

It’s a little like me seeing Manchester City winning the Premiership as the opener to a vicous guerrilla-based full-on civil war in Manchester. Which is, in case you hadn’t noticed, how Owen views the local elections in London. But let’s leave Jones the Flounce to his, um, whatever it is he does when off camera, and move towards the other end of the unreality spectrum.

Sajid Javid has just been made Home Secretary…and spookily enough, he too is signalling his virtue on the Windrush issue like a demented flags officer on the Titanic. With legs wide apart – and brain in full political vapour mode – these were Sajid’s first three tweets following his annointment as the man with the ointment:

Twitter as you know works on the principle that, when faced with a list, human beings read upwards, so the sequence above starts at the bottom. This particular series starts at the bottom of the barrel, but then somehow gets lower in the manner of a China syndrome.

His goodbye to Amber Rudd – “very sad” – is sort of reverse-Oscars stuff: you know – that bit where the three losing nominees smile fixedly on camera and applaud wildly as Tom Hanks gets up to collect the gong. ‘Huge talent’, ‘helping to strengthen our great nation’….I’m just so fucking sad that all that power is now mine all mine hahahahahahahahaha.

But Sajid is honoured. In fact he is honoured and humbled to be serving this Great Nation of Ours, because his first duty will be protecting the citizens of this Great Pan-Galactic Empire of Ours from the Jihadist nutjobs the previous three governments let in – and then ignored so as not to offend the Saudis.

And to that end, his first priority – his first, second and last priority – will be ‘to put things right for the windrush generation’. Well that…and help the Conservative Party put all this unpleasantness behind them, and hell – if it doesn’t work – well, he could always run for the Leadership.

Somewhere in the middle between these two inhuman clichés is Piers Morgan – ITV “presenter”, Daily Mail gofer and damp squib of mass distraction. Piers himself hasn’t won any kind of gong in a long, long time, and so he uses Twitter now and then to create a vicarious attachment to success. Today he gave us this gem:

He is so very proud to be associated with an organ grinder for the Alt State in this Great Heaven on Earth Nation of ours. Good for Piers. I remember the London Gazette Annual Dinner may years ago in which every single person at every last table thought that hacking celebrity phones was a jolly jape. I recall (although of course, my memory could be a fault here) that the greatest raconteur of personal invasion capers on that august occasion was Piers Morgan. But I am just an humble blogger, and thus deranged.

Finally, this tweet from Rageh Omaar:

No, I’ve no idea who he is either, but his shtick is childhood obesity aka yoof old enough to vote but too young to understand why they are so fucking fat.  He wants us to know that he’s been talking to Hugh Fairly-Longname and Jamie ‘Puckka’ Oliver, and they’re very passionate about this food crisis.

Hugh Frequently-Wimpering’s River Cottage HQ is just down the road from where I used to live in Devon. It isn’t a cottage and there’s no river there, but hey – this is television and nothing is real. Jamie Oliver I like because he is relevantly outspoken about diet, he believes in tough love, and his recipes work.

But ultimately, these are the reasons why children are fat:

• They eat too much
• They have indulgent parents who can’t cook
• The kids are unhappy
• Their schools don’t push physical education enough
• Domestic Science has been vilified by feminists
• Supermarkets make a fortune from convenience foods
• Fast food joints sell high-fat rubbish.

We don’t need testimony to Parliamentary sub-committeed jobsworth enquiries. We need citizen orientated governance that invests in the electorate, and penalises Mammon for exacerbating our health problems.

There is a Black Hole in the State where holistic should be.

Not many people know this, but if you go to the rim of a Black Hole and tell a Ken Dodd joke, it shrivels away.

Sleep well.