Total and complete tosser

Simon Heffer is, now that John Prescott has blissfully vanished from the scene, the most effortlessly irritating person in public life. His column today is a classic of the type, containing all the lip-smacking relish at the setbacks endured by the Tories at Ealing.

Frankly, if you can't even come second in by-elections halfway through the third term of another party's time in power, things aren't t just wrong. They are catastrophically wrong.

Which is hyperbolic bullshit. And Heffer even acknowledges why:

Let us start with Thursday's other big losers, the Liberal Democrats. Dear old Ming, shaking his stick from his bathchair yesterday, claimed their second places were a triumph.

Well, admittedly they were better than the official Opposition could do: but for a party that often seems to exist only to win by-elections, they were a disaster. At any other time, either Sedgefield or Ealing would have been the Lib Dems' for the taking, but they were never in with a shout.

So it was a disaster for the Tories because they couldn't outpoll the Liberal Democrats and finish second, and a disaster for the Liberal Democrats because they couldn't finish first. What the hell was Heffer expecting? The reason the Lib Dems were unable to take Ealing was that the Tory vote held up. This has been far from inevitable in the last few years. It wasn't a spectacularly good result by any means, but it wasn't a disaster.

None of this debacle will come as any surprise to any of us, for we have all seen it coming. The whole "heir to Blair" rubbish was proof Dave was fighting the last war. Bless him, he still thinks it is the mid-1990s.

Unlike Heffer, who is thinks it's the mid-1890s.

One remark I found especially nauseating was that of Tony McNulty, one of Ms Smith's underlings, who said that, if one was at university in the late 1970s or early 1980s, it was hard to avoid smoking pot.

Oddly enough, I was at university at exactly that time, and had no difficulty avoiding it. I also know a number of my contemporaries who managed to get through those three arduous years without breaking the law.

I also recall that the people who liked to take drugs tended to be absurd Leftists with infantile opinions who broke off from their devout studies of Marx to light up, or worse. Could it be that the young McNulty was one of these undesirables? And, if so, how did he come to be running the country?

What a tool. Of all the breathtakingly pompous and idiotic things to say this takes the biscuit. There is really very little point in reading anything Heffer writes these days. His parvenu attempts to become a choleric squire have resulted in perpetual repetition of tediously predictable nonsense.