Maggie Tate

OUT

Our peg used to be a wine consultant - with qualifications from the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust and everything - and ranks a vintage from whatever year it was of Frog's Leap Zinfandel as the finest wine she has ever tasteed. And she used to get to taste thousand pound bottles quite regularly. And she once supplied the wine to a dinner party at Graham Gooch's house. So there.

All quiet in Kabul.

That Thai bloke in the qualifier was unreal. A blind mon with no onds would've been better. He went for treble 18 at one point and hit fat 13 smack in the middle. He wanted tops and landed above the actual number 20. His second dart was closer, landing in the middle of double 1. Then his attempt at double 19 was just below treble 3. Champagne stuff. Exhibition. As Martin Amis put it in London Fields, 'Darts, darts, darts. Darts. Darts.'

On the agenda in the new year - Chi-Raq Anamolisa starring that lunatic David Thewlis off Naked, which is a fucked up film if ever there was one The Revenant And I've heard there's a new Star Wars out which I'll go and see in Dubai next week

Because the govt bribed the public with about $130bn of benefits as it kicked off elsewhere. Overall Saudis are quite rich. The richest get to go abroad and sup ale, do coke and shag whores. Young men get to join the religious police and harass people. They enjoy that. And believe it or not, the current Saud rulers are the most progressive and modernising in its history.

Well it's a tough one. Iraqis might have embraced democracy after Saddam, but instead they took power tools to each other's kneecaps. Dictatorship is the last thing anyone, anywhere ever needs, but it's hard to use Iraq as supporting evidence, granted. Come to think of it is hard to look at anywhere in the Muslim world and conclude that anyone is much interested in democracy the way we think of it. Wanting an end to autocracy and wanting democracy are not the same thing. In Saudi the public would user their newly-found democratic rights to set the country back about another million years. They are the last people who need liberating from their current arrangements. Everyone within Saudi who wants rid of the current regime wants it to be much worse, thinks it is nowhere near Islamic enough. Liberal Democrats they are not.

Well it's a tough one. Iraqis might have embraced democracy after Saddam, but instead they took power tools to each other's kneecaps. Dictatorship is the last thing anyone, anywhere ever needs, but it's hard to use Iraq as supporting evidence, granted. Come to think of it is hard to look at anywhere in the Muslim world and conclude that anyone is much interested in democracy the way we think of it. Wanting an end to autocracy and wanting democracy are not the same thing. In Saudi the public would user their newly-found democratic rights to set the country back about another million years. They are the last people who need liberating from their current arrangements. Everyone within Saudi who wants rid of the current regime wants it to be much worse, thinks it is nowhere near Islamic enough. Liberal Democrats they are not.

Watch out for it getting about a thousand times more fuckeder if the House of Saud ever falls. I read recently, as an aside, that there is a lawyer in America who is a specialist rape prosecutor and she has an 80% success rate. I don't know the details but she seems to be doing a lot better than the British system.

Sorry but what does this have to do with Saudi Arabia?

How much CO2 did his spacecraft emit, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

Delighted to see that the Paris conference successfully abolished all future bad weather.

It's the left's fault. Whereas Kerry and Obama and more or less every leftist you care to mention refuses to identify where Islamic terrorism comes from, to the point that they insist on calling it Daesh in order to avoid saying the world Islamic. And appointing themselves as Muslim scholars to say terrorism has nothing to do with Islam when the terrorists themselves and their apologists tell us the opposite time and time again. So when someone else points out the obvious is terms understandable to everyone, of course they like it, especially when the competition is such dreck. Straight talking, honest politics. It's what Jeremy Corbyn promised us remember. The public will forgive anything of someone who talks to them straight in a language they understand.

I've remembered another thing from Morocco, which was leaving my hotel in the medina in Tangier at 6am to walk down for the ferry to Spain and finding a superbly crafted human turd of quite large proportion perfectly placed outside the front door - should I have taken this personally? Then I bought a ticket to Tarifa in Spain cos from there I was going to Seville, then accidentally got on one to Marseille. It was only cos they did a final check than they told me mine was the next one along. Yes. Aside from the hassle I think I could forego ale to sit in a café drinking mint tea watching the world go by in Morocco very happily. But the hassle is unbearable. Budapest and Belgrade next month. Shall report.

Well he seems to be arguing for internment, which is interesting. He's a prick. 'Dropping something from a great height can never be precise - this is why Santa still parks up the sleigh.' People think this is serious? Just fuck off you tedious boring fucker. The leftist equivalent of Katie Hopkins. Not a fucking brain cell between them.

Two hours in Zurich, not two days. To save 350 odd sheets it's mad not to. I'm doing Dubai to Hong Kong return in March, 650 direct, 265 with a quick connection in Mumbai each way. That's a win that is. Though obviously 325 direct Heathrow to Johannesburg is not going to be beaten. I got so lost in Fez that I had to pay some street urchin a handful of coins to get me out of the medina. What a madhouse. Then on the train to Tangier the other five passengers in my compartment had a massive argument about some issue of the day that very nearly turned violent. I didn't know where to look. The average tone taken by Moroccans towards each other in everyday discourse is borderline hysterical.

86/3 off 99 overs. I've got it on in the office and can hardly contain myself. Sensational. Geoffrey Boycott will be masturbating himself into a froth. Any batsman who's ever made the excuse of playing his natural game for getting out should be watching and learning. De Villers once got 149 off 40 odd balls, now he's 21 not out off 176.

Skyscanner will show that a quick stop somewhere can save HUNDREDS. London to Johannesburg return direct next month for instance is showing as £971, or £615 with a couple of hours in Zurich either way. Seems a no brainer to me. I found Morocco good but a pain in the arse. Too much fucking hassle. Fez was worse even than Marrakech. Tangier a bit more bearable.

No it was This Week with Andrew Neil. He did not mention oil specifically but he did go over some of the vested interests who desperately need man-made climate change to be true and catastrophic and all that good stuff. And he mentioned how impossible it is to get a warmist to debate a skeptic, as evidenced elsewhere in this ridiculous clip: And also I see that the mad Australian from the Greens is refusing to go on telly to talk about climate unless they withdraw the invite to Nigel Lawson. Pathetic. Portillo agreed with the gist of what Corbyn said and feels as if the measures to protect against it may well be worse than the problem in the first place and has a problem with rich countries telling poor countries that they may not get rich. Alan Johnson said blah blah blah 97%. And Andrew Neil did helpfully point out that Corbyn is at the extreme end of the skeptic side of the debate.

Owd Piers Corbyn was on the telly last night talking about climate change. It's a step in the right direction at least that they let him on.

Then that is utterly, utterly bizarre. And a scandal. But the Welshists think that although the situation you describe exists it is reasonable to have presumed consent. Appalling. Surely if the form says the deceased has consented the NoK have fuck all to do with it??

Point to note regarding oil - one of the reasons the regime collapsed with barely a whimper in Libya was due to our targeting of oil assets. And I was VVITK at that time.

So hypothetical situation which can't be all that hypothetical. Person dies having given consent. NoK is asked out of what, the way kent describes anyway, sounds like a bit of a formality. And they kick up a stink and say they cannot allow it to happen. What then?

Unfortunately I don't think it's me who needs to think it through.

So how does a local group on the ground determine whether it has been hit by a drone or a Tornado? Given that both are well capable of striking without being seen or heard. And what difference would it make to those on the ground what they'd been hit by? The fact remains that there are no allegations of civilian casualties inflicted by British assets, drones or otherwise, in Iraq. And therefore no reason to think that there will be loads in Syria.