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Neil Chandler's Blog

Tories, your gays and hot Italian babes

  Comments (0) Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009 Email To A Friend

 

So, new Tory policies unveiled this week: Kirsty Thingummy
off Location, Location, Location to get into the House of Lords, and TV standby
buttons to be banned.

Taken together, these must be their most detailed policy
roll-out since David Cameron said he’d ban cut-price chocolate by the till in
John Menzies.

And Kirsty Thingummy has all the qualifications needed for a
government headed by Britain’s
first-ever PR PM.

She’s been on telly a hell of a lot.

 

The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir caused a hell of a storm last week
writing about the death of Stephen Gateley.

Only days before, in the office we’d been predicting the
Mail would combine the Boyzone star’s untimely end with the suicide of Matt
Lucas’s ex and come up with a long think piece about the evils of gay civil
partnerships.

Moir’s piece wasn’t quite that bad but it did upset a lot of
gay folk, including a few of my acquaintance (See?  I can’t be homophobic – some of my best
friends etc etc).

But the new phenomenon of a bandwagon launched on the
Internet and sped up by Twitter isn’t the best thing either.

Yes, it was a force for good in the Trafigura case.

But when the Twitterers – including many who admitted they
hadn’t read Moir’s piece, or claimed she’d written things she hadn’t – all
stormed off in one direction, it’s time to be careful.

The late stand-up comic Bill Hicks (By which I mean he’s
dead, not that he had trouble with his timekeeping) used to say that when
everyone agreed on something, it was his job to say “Hang on a minute”.

That’s how I felt last week reading the Internet.

 

Another thing about gay coverage in the papers.

In the 15 years I’ve been a reporter – and Christ that makes
me feel old – there's been a sea-change in how gay issues are covered.

Here at the Daily Star Sunday we’ve often said we’d never
out a homosexual celebrity these days.

And we wouldn’t threaten to out someone to get them to do it
themselves either, as happened to Gateley.

If you look back at some of the tabloid coverage of gays in
the 1980s, it looks like a different world.

Peter Tatchell was a hate figure then.  But these days, without changing his opinions
a jot, he’s an eccentric figure but one whose views are pretty largely
mainstream.

You also see many more black and brown faces in papers these
days – and not just in the sport or showbiz sections.

Maybe not quite so many in the newsrooms, but that’s a topic
for a whole different day.

 

Italian soldiers are in trouble for bunging the Taliban
money to leave them alone in Afghanistan..

In fact, dishing out the dollars in that part of the world
isn’t the worst idea.

The trouble was that they failed to tell the French force
relieving them about the scheme.

So the French turned up innocent and lightly-armed, the
Taliban were out of dollars and out for revenge, and we ended up with dead
French soldiers.

It may come as a shock to you to realise there are Italians out there at all.

When NATO first arrived there and the rebuilding jobs were
shared out, hilariously Italy
put its hand up to build a corruption-free legal system.

But seeing their forcesnds in Kabul, there is one unique
strength they bring to NATO.

And that’s the ability of their female soldiers to look
unbelievably glamorous in camouflage.

They should stick to that – a skill in which they really are
the best in the world.

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