Prospect
In China, women can only marry at age 20 and men at age 22.
The Times, 28th August 2009
“Definitely” is the most commonly misspelt word in the English language, with Britons regularly writing it as “definately.”
Daily Mail, 15th June 2009
Sales of extra-large condoms in Tesco are higher in Glasgow than anywhere else in Britain.
Daily Express, 2nd September 2009
Britain produced 91,723 scientific papers in 2009—just under 8 per cent of the world’s total, and third only to the US and China.
BBC News website, 2nd October 2009
While a cub reporter in Essex, Ruth Rendell wrote up a tennis club dinner without attending it. As this meant she missed the after-dinner speaker dying mid-speech, she resigned before she could be fired.
The Guardian, 7th September 2009
Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate—each year 100 people per 100,000 take their own lives.
Slate, 9th October 2009
According to in-house estimates at the Times, Jeremy Clarkson is responsible for 25 per cent of timesonline.co.uk traffic.
Vanity Fair, November 2009
The annual retail spend of Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street is £5.5bn—more than Manchester and Birmingham combined.
The Times, 3rd November 2009
22 per cent of men “regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates.”
The Register, 4th November 2009
John Lloyd
September saw the results of the Plain Speaking Personality prize, a public poll carried out by a brandy company. X-Factor judge Simon Cowell came runner-up, and Jeremy Paxman and Sharon Osbourne joint third. The winner was a figure pre-eminent in the public’s consciousness as the Man Who Speaks His Mind, alone in a desert of political correctness and cowardice masked as tolerance: Jeremy Clarkson.
Clarkson’s celebrity is based on journalism; geeky, scruffy, oily car journalism. But he has turned that unlikely beginning into a platform for fame. His hugely popular vehicle Top Gear started its 14th series in mid-November. But zany and dramatic as the programme can be, it was only a launch pad. For Clarkson now represents a larger constituency: the seriously pissed-off-with-Labour part of England which has not spoken yet, but will in the next election. It is a world where the walking-on-eggshells demeanour of many public figures is mocked, and ministers are steamrollered for hypocrisy, weasel words and corruption with a collective retch of theatrical disgust. A friend of Clarkson’s, who spoke anonymously, said that in his right-leaning suburb “everybody loves his fight against the euphemisms, the correct-speak. I went into a pub, and overheard a conversation in which three blokes were saying: we wouldn’t have anyone else for prime minister.” Last year a petition on the Downing Street website to give him the top job attracted around 50,000 signatures, while in a 2009 YouGov poll Londoners demanded Clarkson (or Alan Sugar) as their mayor.
The popularity of Clarkson’s political views stands in marked contrast to his own attitude to politicians. At a press conference in Australia in February, he called Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” Then, after a break of some five months, he followed up by saying “Gordon Brown is a cunt” during a recording of Top Gear. BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow then “had a conversation” with Clarkson, but the official statement—as opaque as any diplomatic communiqué—said only that “she holds both the programme and Jeremy in high regard. After the recording she and Jeremy had a discussion about the programme as controllers and presenters often do.”
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