Snippets and gleanings - you couldn't make it up

Dodgy dossier
A friend recently gave me a copy of The Diary of a Secret Tory MP: Dodgy Dispatches from the Heart of Westminster which has kept me amused. Turns out the author is not a Tory MP after all but an ultra-marathon runner (who knew?) from Wales called Henry Morris. However, recent revelations from within the ranks of the Conservative government rather put Mr Morris' fevered imaginings in the shade. If he'd written about an MP called Willy sharing dick pics, or one calling an aide at 3.30am asking for £5000 to pay off "bad people" who'd locked him in a flat, one might have thought he'd gone too far. But truth really is stranger than fiction. Satire is not so much dead as lying stunned.
 
Uncommon law
On which note, anyone having read A P Herbert's Misleading Cases or, like me, remembering with delight the BBC's wonderful television adaptations of the late-'60s and early-'70s, might have found themselves bemused, as I was, to be sitting through a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice last Thursday. Sadly, this didn't hinge on the acceptability in law of writing a cheque on a cow and wasn't brought by the litigious Mr Albert Haddock to the amusement of the amiable Mr Justice Swallow. No, it was brought by the Solicitor General, the appropriately-named Robert Courts, alleging contempt by Ms Trudi Warner, a sixty-nine year-old woman from Walthamstow in East London, for holding up a placard to jurors quoting case law from 1670 establishing their right to act according to their convictions. The verdict, due tomorrow, could overthrow 350 years of English legal precedent and send an elderly lady to jail. That's no joke.

Hostile environment 
Yesterday saw huge demonstrations in the Canary Islands protesting against overtourism. Predictably, politicians in the islands have dubbed such protests 'tourismophobia', which is rich considering it was a local politician, the Mayor of Lanzarote, Dolores Corujo, who started the controversy by complaining about too many British tourists in her island. In a curious reversal, it's the Brits who suddenly find themselves the butt of xenophobia and they don't like it, or rather the Daily Pail and Daily Depress don't on their behalf. Such allegations are absurd, of course. In reality, it's not about the tourists per se but the tourism model local politicians have foisted on their own people. But, when all else fails (and it has - catastrophically), they blame the victims.

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