Shropshire Star

Mark Andrews: Suella's next move, Charlotte sings for peace, and never mind Robocop, it's the teddy bears that scare me

It's only two months since we were basking in the late summer heatwave, but now the campaign to part us from our money in time for Christmas has well and truly begun.

Published
Picture shows: Charlotte Church TX: BBC One Friday 26th March 9pm

According to toy manufacturer Alecto, this year's big thing will be a device that can be implanted into a stuffed toy,, bringing it to life so it can talk to yoru child, using commands that you send on your mobile phone.

I'm not sure I feel entirely comfortable about that.. The way people are talking about Artificial Intelligence, it can only be a matter of time before we all come under attack from an army of raging, violent teddy bears that make Robocop look like Alan Carr.

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A commentator opined this week that by appointing David Cameron as Foreign Secretary, Rishi Sunak had managed to keep Suella Braverman's resignation off the front pages. That worked well, didn't it?

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Mrs Braverman's angry 'resignation' letter showed all the grace and maturity of a petulant project manager on The Apprentice blaming her team-mates for the failure of a task. She makes some reasonable points, but her short fuse and inability to bite her tongue are not the hallmark of someone temperamentally suited to one of the great offices of state.

So what will she do now? She could follow the lead of her namesake in Dallas, hit the bottle and spend the next 10 years seeking vengeance against the man who wronged her. More likely, she will become a slightly more upmarket version of Katie Hopkins, and spend her days banging out ever-more-deranged conspiracy theories on social media.

Either way, something tells me we are going to be in for an entertaining time ahead...

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Meanwhile Esther McVey is back to bring her unique brand of diplomacy to government as 'minister for common sense'. My first thoughts on hearing that were of Ollie Oliphant, the loquacious northern judge in Rumpole of the Bailey, who kept banging on about 'common sense' in his rambling addresses to juries.

But doesn't a minister for common sense kinda suggest the rest of the cabinet don't have any?

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She's going to have her work cut out with all the mad wokery running rampant at the moment. In Bristol, campaigner Helen Tierney has launched a petition to remove the padlocks from a bridge in the city, saying locks are a symbol of slavery.

Now I don't know anybody who has signed that petition, but I would hazard a guess that at least some of them will be cyclists, that type always are. I wonder how they secure their bikes when they are not riding them.

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Meanwhile, fresh hope for an end to fighting in the Middlle East now that Charlotte Church has stepped into the breach. Now sporting more tattoos than Popeye, Charlotte says she will sing for the liberation of Palestine every Friday and Monday morning. She doesn't say who she will inflict this on, but surely it's against the Geneva convention?