Nerve agent? 007 would sort spy with karate chop
After a defected Russian spy was attacked in Britain, Jeremy Clarkson asks why his assailants chose to use poison
SPY chiefs are forever telling us that espionage work mostly involves sitting at a computer screen tracking the social media habits of various radicalised halfwits in Oldham.
But we’ve always suspected they were talking nonsense because we’ve seen what 007 gets up to. And he doesn’t know where Oldham is.
He’s too busy in the South of France, sleeping with a girl, who’s actually said “no”, and then eating a cheeky grape before punching a man in the fez.
And it’s not just James Bond. We’ve also seen Jason Bourne doing his speeded-up fighting and killing people with rolled-up newspapers.
And then there’s Jack Bauer — why do all spies have the initials JB? — who asks a question and then shoots you in the knee if you don’t know the answer.
He’d be a rubbish host on Mastermind.
But whatever. This is spying.
Slightly questionable sex, fighting, car chases and blowing up oil rigs that are actually satellite-tracking stations.
In real life, though, it turns out that spying means poisoning a fat man and his daughter in Salisbury. And then going home for some turnip soup.
I don’t get this. I mean, why poison?
If I were told by my superiors to waste a double agent who’s holed up in Wiltshire, I would shoot him in the head.
Or take a leaf out of Roger Moore’s book and karate chop him lightly in the chest. Then sleep with his daughter.
The last spy to be poisoned in Britain — Alexander Litvinenko — took weeks to die.
And I feel sure that as he lay in his hospital bed surrounded by tufts of his own hair, knowing there was not a damn thing the doctors could do, it was all very upsetting.
But espionage is supposed to be a dispassionate business.
Assassins are meant to be professionals.
And poison just seems to be so very haphazard and cruel.
The town has to be sealed off. Everyone who thinks they’ve been to Wiltshire has to be tested to see if they are contaminated.
The local police force is paralysed. The ambulance service is knocked for six.
Politicians have to break away from Brexit talks to attend Cobra security meetings.
And none of this would have been necessary if the fat man had simply been taken into a wood and shot.
I think, because a nerve agent was used, that there were two messages sent out.
One telling spies that they are not safe in Britain.
And one telling Britain not to harbour spies.
Luckily, though, our foreign secretary is Boris Johnson and he is the only man in the world to strike fear into the heart of Vladimir Putin.
Said no one ever.
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Theresa teaser
THIS week, Theresa May was asked what she does to let her hair down.
She thinks a walking holiday is exciting.
And, in all probability, has never had a Slow Comfortable Screw Up Against The Wall.
Asking her what she does to let her hair down is as pointless as asking Jeremy Corbyn how he copes when he’s menstruating.
A load of hot air
RESEARCHERS announced this week that when a lake in Africa shrinks, local women have to walk further to get water for their family.
Naturally, BBC news chiefs ran the story claiming that climate change is sexist.
It’s funny, but I was thinking the exact same thing this morning.
I’m currently on holiday in the tropics.
It’s been very hot all week and my girlfriend has gone nut brown.
Whereas I am the colour of a boiled lobster and am covered in a hideous heat rash.
This lass cruzade's confusing
IF you’ve been trapped in a remote cave all week, you may not have noticed that Thursday was International Women’s Day.
Because it was designed by the United Nations to be a day when the world would pause to reflect on the courage of ordinary women who played an extraordinary role in their communities, I decided to light a candle to the legacy of Mrs Thatcher.
But I may have missed the point.
It would be a day when women all over the world would put pictures of themselves on Instagram along with motivational captions about how they were proud to have ovaries.
Meanwhile, Penelope Cruz, said that to show solidarity with the cause, she would be doing no domestic chores at all that day.
I bet her housekeeping staff were nonplussed about that.
Meanwhile, Theresa May was out and about, campaigning hard for women to be allowed to do the jobs men do – such as being a Prime Minister.
The upshot was that as we moved into Friday, I wasn’t really sure what lessons were supposed to have been learned.
Let’s hope that in future, the United Nations makes its objectives more clear, because later this month we have the International Day of Happiness and World Poetry Day, and next month – the one I’m looking forward to – the International Day of Human Space Flight, when we all get to be astronauts.
Or have I got that wrong as well?
Good G-reef, Auntie
IMPORTANT news from under the sea.
We have been told for years that the world’s coral reefs are all dying and that we must immediately throw away all our soap and our cars and live like wild animals in the woods.
Well, I went snorkelling with a guide in the Indian Ocean this week and asked how badly the local reefs have been affected by climate change.
“Oh,” he said. “Things were pretty bad ten or 15 years ago but these things are cyclical. They’re pretty much back to normal now.”
Weird how you never hear this sort of thing on the BBC.
Calm it on the car men
A LADY racing driver called Carmen Jorda said this week that women would struggle in Formula One because of the physical strength needed to control the cars.
Immediately, Jenson Button leapt off the bicycle on which he seems to live these days and said Carmen, was talking nonsense.
I don’t know who’s right because, being a man who likes a wine or two, I’m too big to fit in an F1 car but I think they both have a point.
It’s probably fair to say that a girl could easily race an F1 car.
You have power steering, a paddle-operated gearbox and you just sit there managing the computers as they drive you round the track at the optimum speed.
Anyone could do that, providing their mum and dad were rich enough to buy them a place in the team.
The problem is that to get the super licence needed to race in Formula One, you need to have proved your worth in other Formulas, where strength is an issue. Karting especially.
I do hope, however, that we do get a woman behind the wheel of an F1 car soon, because now there are no grid girls, the only people you’ll find at the circuits when the circus rolls into town are a bunch of men-nerds in branded, short-sleeved shirts.