Today's Mail on Sunday has a go at senior Labour people who are too posh for its liking. Inevitably, their houses are valued in each headline.
Lord 'Charlie' Falconer, a cheery cove whom I have met, appears to have a £5 million house, which is bad enough by 'Mail' standards, but the paper caps this by calling him Lard Falconer. He won't like that.
I wonder what Paul Dacre's house is worth? Or his estate in the Scottish Highlands?
Less than David Cameron's father-in law, I suspect.
ReplyDeleteUnless Mr Cameron Snr is accustomed to publicly condemning the wealth of Labour politicians, I rather think you have spectacularly missed the point.
DeleteErm, Paul Dacre's house? What's your point, caller?
ReplyDeleteThe Mail is a newspaper, not a political party that patronisingly claims to represent the working class. That tweet by the (incidentally, quite lardy) Emily Thornberry showed just how Labour view the working class.
Further, your beloved Guardian has quite an impressive tax avoidance scheme going on, as those cheeky chappies at Private Eye like to point out!
...and the Mail on Sunday, as the Eye ceaselessly points out, is not edited by Mr Dacre, who seems at daggers drawn with his counterpart
ReplyDeleteHaving purchased The Times on Sunday I was staggered to see the amount of typos. Literally every article had some mistake or other. Standards are well and truly dropping. I did enjoy the Lard one above though.
ReplyDeleteThe "number" of errors. "Amount" refers to uncountable quantities.
Deletehttp://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/amount-of-number-of-or-quantity-of
Muphry's Law in action!
Matthew: (1)Names in English begin with a capital letter. (2) It's not "uncountable" quantities, it's continuously variable, as opposed to discrete quantities.
DeleteIt's nothing to do with politics. Mail hacks are contractually obliged to mention house prices whatever the relevance.
ReplyDelete"Surrey Police had been searching for builder Viktoras Bruzas, 38, after married couple Patrick, 55, and Gillian Kettyle, 54, were found stabbed to death in a sustained knife attack at their £500,000 home in Fetcham, Surrey, at 12.30am today."
"Mr Goldberg, 46, was single and lived alone in a £360,000 detached house"
"Miss Lanchester, whose parents Hanna and Paul, both 54, live in a £415,000 five-bedroom house in Sutton Coldfield"
On the BBC radio news the police were searching for a Lithuanian builder. So what! Would we have heard they were searching for an English builder if that was his nationality? It's just meaningless waffle to fill an article.
ReplyDeleteHow do they know the house value? I have been in my home for over twenty years. I may have a rough idea and if asked to come in and value it a local estate agent would certainly come up with a price, which would almost equally certainly need to be reduced when it didn't sell for what they suggested it should, but how would a newspaper have any idea what my house is worth? All of the houses in my road are different sizes, shapes and on different sized plots. It wouldn't stop them coming up with a figure though.
Given he was wanted for murder yes I think we'd have heard about it regardless of his nationality. And his nationality is an important descriptive factor when asking for public help in finding someone don't you think?
DeleteQuite so. Our PC Knickem must know whether to exclaim (whilst reaching for his pockie notebook, suspect collared):
Delete"Sveiki? Kas visa tai, tada?"
or to exclaim:
"Hello? What's all this, then?"
(p.s. according to Google translate, anyway)
No I don't. The police describe people as IC1, 2, 3, etc. The BBC can easily read out the classification linked to the IC code. In a line-up of white men I challenge anyone to determine if they are French, German or Swedish if they don't speak. If they do speak can you tell a Lithuanian from a Latvian from a Rumanian?
ReplyDelete