Comfort food.....when things are going wrong we all seem to have something in the pantry or the kitchen to which we turn at moments in our lives when all is not plain sailing. Me, I like a really good Shepherd's Pie - lamb, not beef - which seems to do the trick. For others it is chocolate. I once met a nice Spanish girl who announced that 'chocolate was her perdition'.
 

Anyway, some of us are content to chase away the blues with a modest plate of something. But how about this as a means of easing the pains of the day? The Times tells us today that Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow has decided to seek solace from the cares of her job by getting you and me - the Taxpayer - to pay for her to have her own Private Jet.

As The Times points out, Brussels being what it is, if she has one then everyone will want one. Barroso, von Rumpy-Pumpy, The President of the Council, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all will soon be after their very own Learjet. But why not? They are, after all, the essential accoutrement of all aspiring Banana Republic Dictators: why should the Proto-State, The EU, be any different?

Still, Ashton, surely the most considerable non-entity of our age, has plenty to seek solace from as she nestles down in the leather-bound luxury of her very own private jet. She must spend most of her time these days sidling around rooms with her back to the wall lest one of the many knives that are out for her is plunged smarftly between her should blades.

Her UK press of late has been enough to get her choking pretty well daily on her cornflakes. Thus the excellent Bruno Waterfield in The Daily Telegraph tells us on 28th. February 2010:

Brussels is at war with itself and Baroness Ashton of Upholland is losing on every front. It is just three months into her job as the EU's first ever foreign minister and Lady Ashton has "travelled the distance from being the nobody, that everybody loved to mock, to becoming the mediocrity, that everybody loves to hate".

Or, we have this from the same source on 4th. March:

David Miliband forced to prop up Baroness Ashton


David Miliband has been forced to intervene to prop up Baroness Ashton, the beleaguered European Union foreign minister.


Still, I don't suppose that The Daily Telegraph is the daily paper of choice at the Ashton breakfast table: not exactly the in-house journal of The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (of which this ghastly creature was once the enthusiastic Treasurer in the days when CND was merrily doing Moscow's work), is it?


But as she has now risen from the perma-slime of Socialism to become a member of 'The Establishment' perhaps she should turn to its in-house journal, The Times.


So this on 26th. February will have had her spraying the Kellog's to the far corner of the kitchen:


Simmering discontent across the European Union with Baroness Ashton of Upholland’s performance as its first foreign minister turned into outright criticism yesterday as several senior politicians from member states attacked her for missing a key defence meeting.


Oh, dear, not much comfort there.......Life is really a bitch, isn't it?


And so it goes on. But what else is one to expect from Gordon Brown's scraping with a well-chewed finger-nail of the bottom of the Labour barrel? She is only there because our Prime Minister has a mortal terror of bye-elections and she, being in the Lords, was thus available, if entirely unqualified and unsuited, to be first the UK Commissioner on the EU Commission and then the EU's first Foreign Minister, thus avoiding the potential loss of a safe Labour seat in the Commons. Thus are British vital interests ever subordinated to Gordon Brown's electoral needs.


One hundred days and counting into the job, Ashton already has the rank smell of gangrene about her. It will all end badly, I daresay.


Soon enough her new chums in the Euro Gang will tire of her and then Nicolas and Angela, José Manuel and José Luis Rodriguez, Milisquirt and Herman and all the other Comrades will hang her on a gibbet in the Place du Luxembourg, there to swing in the wind on a gibbet, meat and drink for the birds.

John Locke

johnlockesblog@gmail.com