12:38pm Thursday 26th August 2010
By Julian Cole
HERE, for want of anything more uplifting, are some things that have annoyed me this week. This ragbag litany of unconnected irritants goes something like this... noisy students, Nick Clegg, Sir Philip Green and everyone babbling on about The X Factor.
• To begin at the bleary-eyed beginning, at 5.30am last Sunday a group of young men/bloody nuisances began kicking a football around at the end of our street. They were also cheering each other on, very loudly. Unreasonable behaviour that early on a Sunday.
They kept up this antisocial knockabout until one of our neighbours bellowed at them, at which point they put away the football but maintained the hilarious clamour until about 10am, when they fell silent and presumably into their beds.
Then, just before one the following morning, they or someone else started playing what sounded like a game of street hockey.
Now I don’t like to complain about students because it makes me sound like a middle-aged misery-guts. However, when I have broached this topic before, some readers have ticked me off for being too kind. Well, it must be my boundless good nature.
Anyway, two observations...
One: students in The Groves used to go home in the holidays, now they seem to stay on all summer, giving residents no respite at all.
Two: did anyone ever plan for parts of York to become one big student theme park, or was it just an accidental consequence of Tony Blair going on about education, education and education all those years ago?
• Now Mr Clegg. Is it just me or does the Deputy Prime Minister increasingly resemble a genetically-modified David Cameron? The pair of them seem intent on out-doing each other in being loftily condescending while delivering lectures on how progressive they are.
If anything, Mr Clegg is even more irksome. Recently, he wrote a more than averagely nausea-inducing article in my favoured Sunday newspaper. In this, he brushed off the alarming fall in the popularity of himself and his party by saying that parties in government always lose support.
Hang on a hasty minute there. The Conservatives, much as it pains me to admit it, have kept up in the polls fairly well; it is the Lib Dems who are slipping. Might this not be – and it’s only a theory, of course – because they lost the General Election, only to stitch up a deal with the Tories, after which Mr Clegg grandly rose up from his drubbing at the polls, buddy-ed up with Mr Cameron and started to lord it over the country?
• Sir Philip Green, the billionaire businessman whose empire includes Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins and Burton, has been appointed by the coalition Government as an unpaid troubleshooter with a brief to save money in the public sector.
Funny that, because the famously abrasive Sir Philip – a less cuddly version of Sir Alan Sugar – is known for saving himself a fortune by legally avoiding tax on dividends from his companies after handing ownership to his wife, who lives as a tax exile in Monaco. In 2005, a dividend of £1.2 billion went straight to the missus in Monaco, saving Sir Philip a tidy sum.
So the very wealthy Prime Minister, who pretends to be middle class but is no such comparatively impecunious thing, hires a much richer businessman to put the screws on the public sector. Perhaps he should instead ask him how the country can claw back the billions lost to those who know their way round a tax form.
• And finally, the newspapers are full of it – even sober-suits such as The Guardian. As for the pops, they can’t get enough of it, creating stories where none exist, or dredging up old bits of nothing and dusting them off as news.
Yes, The X Factor is back and I shall be avoiding the television on Saturday nights from now on, however much the teenage daughter mocks me for being a snob.
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