Amid the global doom and gloom, let’s have some fun.
If the Cop26 climate summit was a film, it would be a Hammer horror.
Smooth Peter Cushing plays double-breasted Prince Charles, and Vincent Price is Boris Johnson, hissing “coal, cars, trees”.
US President Joe Biden is reprised by Henry Fonda, after he stumbles on set while filming On Golden Pond
next door.
Burt Kwouk auditioned for Xi Jinping, but the Chinese leader was written out of the script. And Meryl Streep stars as the Queen, in a cameo appearance on Zoom, pleading with politicians to rise above politics and become statesmen.
There are other comic touches. United Nations staff refer to Alok Sharma, Tory president of the event, as “His Excellency”. Ahahahahaha!
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The movie is shot in a dystopian inner city, where rats as big as hyenas roam the streets, looking for striking dustmen to bite. Twenty-five thousand zombies are herded inside a ring of steel, shouting into their iPhones.
The dialogue is apocalyptic. Johnson warns we’re all doomed if we don’t do as he says. The UN Secretary General says we’re all digging our own graves.
His Excellency Sharma bleats “red lights are flashing”.
TV beams endless coverage, highlighting a $18billion deal to stop deforestation by 2030. Eco-ghostbusters first saw this apparition seven years ago, and denounce it as too little, too late.
All we can do is sit back and try to comprehend the cataclysm that evidently awaits. But the movie makers insist we sit on the edge of our seats, gripped with terror.
Meanwhile, a real, immediate threat to human existence – Covid-19 – stalks the globe. In only 20 months it has afflicted 247,574,342 people and claimed 5,013,591 lives – 141,181 of those are in the UK, and our death toll has risen to 163 every single day.
Yet so-called world leaders refuse to hand over millions of unneeded vax jabs to underdeveloped nations, where they might halt the inexorable march of the disease.
But you don’t hear much about that at Cop26, where pledges are more numerous than a pawn shop. How many will be redeemed?
It's a Tory humiliation
The Tories did a screeching U-turn today over a bid to save one of their own from justice. Like everything they do, it was too little, too late.
Conservative Owen Paterson, guilty of “egregious” (ie shocking) breaches of lobbying rules, resigned as an MP.
The not-very-Honourable Member for North Shropshire knew the game was up. Within days, fellow MPs would suspend him from Parliament, triggering a recall motion and a by-election, when he would be humiliated. So he quit before he was sacked.
But this unedifying chapter of corruption raises one, big, unanswered question: why did Boris Johnson think he could get away with it?
The fish rots from the head.
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Two albino wallabies escaped from their pen in a village near Leeds. Amadeus, a male, and Roxy, a pregnant female, did a runner after winds damaged a fence. One has been recaptured, but as I write the other is still hopping about the countryside. These marsupials lived in the wild on Dunstable Downs after escaping from Whipsnade Zoo in the 1940s. What a pity the runaways can’t stay free.
