P&J Column 12.5.16

David Cameron says some governments are corrupt. Weel, if onyb’dy should ken…

Cosmo Ludovik Fawkes-Hunte, 13th Earl of Kinmuck

I observe that the PM has got himself in a spot of the old hot water again, having been recorded saying that Nigeria and Afghanistan are “fantastically corrupt”.

It is said that this will cause him some embarrassment, given that he is soon to be meeting the heads of those particular states.   On some levels, Cameron has only himself to blame for his discomfiture. The man is freer with his opinions than a loquacious Liverpudlian docker after a dozen Guinness. An element of restraint does a fellow no harm on these occasions. Whenever I am going to say something off-colour I always take appropriate measures to ensure that there are no eavesdroppers. Or no surviving ones, at any rate.

But really, the whole thing is political correctness gone mad. It is a verifiable fact that the countries in question are listed as among the most corrupt places in the world in the Corruption Perception Index 2015. Anyone in doubt of that can go and check the document themselves. I do, regularly, before doing business overseas; hence my recent decision to invest in Somalia.

We Fawkes-Huntes, like everyone else who count themselves among the 1%, have long known that entering into mutually beneficial deals with shady characters is a surer route to serious wealth than playing by the rulebook of conventional wisdom. They understand free enterprise much more clearly than those who would seek to tie us in knots with competition law, money laundering regulations and rules against corporate homicide. The ninth earl greatly enhanced the family fortune by getting into the Nigerian gold-mining industry. I, myself, have invested heavily in horticulture overseas, with great success. The profits from my poppy farm up by the Khyber Pass have surpassed my wildest expectations.

So was David Cameron correct to say that Nigeria and Afghanistan are “fantastically corrupt”? Yes. My family’s experience demonstrates that they are utterly corrupt. And it’s fantastic.

Cava Kenny Cordiner, the football pundit who goes in studs up.

There’s an old saying that says that “football without the fans would not be nothing”. It is true that the beautiful game is all about the supporters, but sometimes that very fans can let the side down. Take Tuesday night, for example. Man United went down to the big smoke to stick West Ham in the last ever game at the Anne Boleyn ground. But when they was driving into the car park, some Hammers fans got a bit lairy and chucked bottles and cans and smashed up the team bus.

Now, as old Kenny always says, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of banter, but I think they took it too far there. Back when I was playing our fans used to pull pranks on the opponents all the time, but it was never malnutritious. Mind you, I remember once when I was at Longside and we was sticking local rivals Mintlaw, the fans chucked eggs and flour at their team bus in the car park. We was all laughing at the time and we thought that no harm was done. But it rained during the match which turned the flour and eggs into a sort of batter on the windscreen, and when their bus left the driver couldn’t see. He scraped down the offside of my Bentley and rear-ended Dunter Duncan’s Vectra. Then, by the time they got back to Mintlaw, the bus was a right-on, on account of the engine compartment being clogged with pancake. After all that wonton destruction, the fans never done it again. Because Mintlaw is walking distance from Longside and they stopped taking the bus after that.

Of course, in my playing days I was on the receiving end of plenty of hostile receptacles myself. When I was playing for Brechin we was sticking neighbours Arbroath in a cup replay. When we come out of the dressing rooms the Arbroath fans treated us to the “Gayfield rumble”, which was when they made a heap of noise and stamped their feet to try and scare us. Of course, they never scared me, when I was a Dandy Don, i had sat on the bench at Parkhead. I’ll tell you what did scare me that day, though. When I went to the lavvies at half time, the away dressing room didn’t have any bog roll, and I’d had a smokie for my breakfast. Criminal.

See the Flying Pigs live next month in ‘Dreich Encounter’ at HMT Aberdeen, Thursday 2nd to Saturday 11th June