Whose country is it anyway? How the British are giving up – and other thoughts

A lady running a cafe in Stockport has been told by council fuckwits to stop serving bacon because it might cause offence to Muslims next door.


It is “unacceptable on the grounds of residential amenity”. I cannot say that Stockport – a place where my brother used to run a pub – is a hotbed of Christian sentiment. But I am pretty sure it is not situated in the middle of Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, in Tower Hamlets two politicians of Bangladeshi origin are squabbling over which should become council leader. The chief areas of dispute are whether one of them – allied to a religious fanatic – has or has not arranged for some of his cronies to falsely accuse the other of being a rapist.

Neither would stand a chance of winning if the British born population bothered to vote. But the British have given up, being chiefly concerned, as far as I can see, with our one great national success story: getting more obese than the Germans.

Elsewhere I see one of my old clients has died. Bob Guccione was the founder of Penthouse and I wrote the first ever advertisement for his naughty publication back in 1965. Golden days when a few nude pictures could cause questions to be asked in the Houses of Parliament. I described it as “the fastest moving target in publishing”. What a creative little creature I was, to be sure.

But not as creative, it seems, as Tory MP Nadine Dorries. She was up for the usual expenses rip-offs but got away with it. In the course of the investigation she revealed without irony that her blog, which she uses as “a tool to enable my constituents to know me better”, is 70 percent fiction.

How rare and refreshing to have an M.P. who may be a liar like the rest of them but at least confesses it straight out.

My best laugh of the day, though, came from the Nigerian High Commissioner, Dr. Dalhatu Sarki Tafida who has complained that Alan Sugar was defaming his countrymen by suggesting that Nigerians couldn’t be trusted.

I am sure some Nigerians can be trusted, but is there anyone in the world with an email address who has not been approached by Nigerian conmen? And has anyone ever heard of an honest Nigerian politician?

Come to that, I wonder how High Commissioners get their jobs. No doubt in the same way as everyone else over there.



About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

2 Comments

  1. Jer_the_bear

    A large cohort of Politicians … and a whacking great cohort of Bureaucracy … is born without balls. And they don't like yucky things like confrontation and men.

    Reply
  2. Rezbi

    “And has anyone ever heard of an honest Nigerian politician? “

    I've never heard of a 'successful' honest politician anywhere, ever.

    Reply

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