Alexander's blog

Puns may have been the lowest form of humour to Dr Johnson, but in this instance the one on Obama’s name is hard to resist.

Yesterday it was lovely Michelle, rather than her hubby-wubby, who found herself with egg Benedict on her face, thus inspiring puerile jokes.

Or is one allowed to refer to persons of the female persuasion in such a gender-specific way? Being a stickler for political correctness, I must check up on this. Anyway, just to be on the safe side, congratulations to every female-person reader.

On second thoughts, given the general thrust of my prose, perhaps my typical readers wouldn’t mind being called women if that’s what they are (and sometimes even if that’s what they aren’t). Nor are they likely to know what on earth I’m congratulating them on.

These days we’re too hung up on political taxonomy to keep in focus things that really matter.

We imagine that describing someone as ‘rightwing’, ‘leftwing’ or any gradation thereof conveys adequate information. We think that ‘democracy’ is a sufficient condition for a country’s virtue. We accept that ‘neoconservatism’ is a new type of conservatism, though in fact it’s much nearer a new kind of Trotskyism.

Sometimes an outsider can see what an insider can’t, thus enabling the insider to get in touch with his real self.

The Times proves that this is indeed possible by first explaining what conservatism isn’t and then, courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, what is really is. Thanks to this vacuous, lefty, moribund paper, we now stand corrected on whatever misapprehensions we might have had.

Just one world tour, and US Secretary of State John Kerry is already moving up on the list of my favourite politicians.

I commented earlier on his budding tendency to coin portmanteau names by linking two countries together and thus coming up with a third that doesn’t exist. By fusing Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan he came up with Kyrzakhstan, suggesting that from America’s vantage point all those foreign lands are more or less the same. It’s like a seven-foot giant and a four-foot dwarf appearing equally tiny if you look at them from Mars.

My admiration for Dave knows no bounds, certainly no lower ones. As you know, I consider him the greatest British prime minister since Gordon Brown, and I’ll loyally fight his corner against all detractors.

Dave knows this too, which is why he regards me as a friend. He and I often go down the pub together, letting our hair down, our shirts out and our children get lost. At such relaxed moments I sometimes ask Dave to clarify the meaning of his pronouncements whenever I feel they take me out of my, admittedly rather shallow, depth.

My lower-case conservative friends are enthusiastic about UKIP finishing ahead of both Tories and Labour in the Eastleigh by-election. By contrast, I’m upset about UKIP finishing behind the LibDems.

Is Nigel Farage’s pint glass half-full or half-empty? This depends on whether one looks upon it from an aesthetic or pragmatic vantage point.

The EU has finally figured out a way to solve all its problems in one fell swoop. Unrest throughout Europe? Finished. Euro crisis? Over. Recession? No longer.

All these problems are behind us, with a bright future beckoning but a few steps up the road. For the EU is about to pass a law capping bankers’ bonuses at an amount equal to a year’s salary.

In an attempt to pull the economy out of the doldrums, the Bank of England is planning to cut its base rate to below zero. In parallel, it’ll shift its printing press into a higher gear and add to the £375 billion of worthless currency it has already run off in the last few months.

Certainly not the man responsible for US foreign policy.

Speaking ex cathedra before his first foreign tour, the new Secretary of State John Kerry praised his department for securing democratic institutions in the former Soviet republic of Kyrzakhstan.