I’VE had some of the greatest days of my life at Glastonbury Festival.
Michael Eavis’s annual music jamboree is like nothing else and has to be experienced to be believed. If you know, you know etc.
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Glastonbury also happens to be the wokest place on Planet Earth.
Pin-balling around the 1,000-acre site, you will never stop bumping into people wearing Free Palestine shirts, so much so you’ll think it was the festival uniform.
You will find dreadlocked, middle-class white men called Ziggy performing “pronoun poetry” or some such twaddle.
You will discover vegan food stalls where non-binary folk in tie-dyed smocks hand out leaflets about Britain’s nasty farming methods as they charge you £23 for a bowl of recycled lentils.
There will be people reading The Guardian. Yep, whatever is right on, is right there. Yet amid all the hippy-dippy, save the world business, what you don’t typically get is calls to murder anyone.
This year, that might change. An excitable Irish band called Kneecap, named after a notorious IRA punishment, have been booked to perform — and they want you to kill your MP.
Well, only if they happen to be a Tory MP, naturally.
These rowdy republican rappers — a cross between Welsh p**s-takers Goldie Lookin Chain and Rage Against The Machine — have been caught telling fans: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”
Oh, and this Brit-hating band, who were happy to take more than £14,000 of government funding, despite Kemi Badenoch’s best efforts to stop them when she was Business Secretary, also like to plug Hamas and Hezbollah.
Never mind that supporting them is a criminal offence in Britain — the Kneecap lads decided to chant, “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!” at a recent gig in London.
Cue the counter terrorism police announcing yesterday that they are now investigating both that and the “kill Tories” incident.
Politicians have hit out. Both Keir Starmer and the now-Conservative leader Badenoch have condemned them. As have the families of MPs murdered for doing their jobs.
Katie Amess, whose dad, Tory MP David Amess, was murdered in 2021, said she was “gobsmacked“ at their “stupidity . . . and dangerous violent rhetoric”.
The Belfast trio spat out their dummies and evoked the standard response offered by those when caught out saying something reprehensible — that their words were “taken out of context”, before offering a mealy-mouthed apology.
“We do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah,” they claimed, adding: “Kneecap’s message has always been — and remains — one of love, inclusion and hope.”
Cool. So that’s all right, then?
Brendan Cox, husband of Jo Cox MP, gunned down in her constituency in 2016, doesn’t think so, branding their apology “not particularly genuine”.
Kneecap, who fancy themselves as latter-day punks, probably didn’t care about any of this when it all started to erupt.
I bet they were dying for a headline along the lines of: Is This The Most Dangerous Band In The UK? (Sorry to disappoint, lads.)
They’ve also been emboldened by their cheerleaders in the music biz, including Eton Rifles’ geezer Paul Weller, who reckon it’s just “political repression of artistic freedom”.
Would they have said the same if Kneecap had been condemned for calling for Labour or Green Party politicians to be murdered?
Of course not. Conservatives are always fair game to the #bekind leftie brigade.
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But now the row is starting to hit Kneecap in the pocket.
A big gig planned for the Eden Project has been kyboshed and two festivals in Germany have dumped them.
The spotlight has turned to Glastonbury. Will this hugely influential festival, with its ethos of “peace, love, music and community”, drop them from the bill?
Dairy farmer Sir Michael Eavis — knighted last year under a Conservative government — is no stranger to the rough and tumble of politics.
The 89 year-old stood as a Labour MP for Wells, Somerset, in 1997 but was beaten by the sitting MP, David Heathcoat-Amory . . . a Tory.
The history books record that Eavis did not call for his constituents to then execute him.
So does he, or indeed his daughter Emily, who now runs the show, condone those who do?
POSH TO GET PUSH
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SO a Spice Girls reunion is back on (again) but missing one key ingredient (again): Posh.
Victoria Beckham is still refusing to perform with her old pals, despite demonstrating that she can bear to be in the same room with them after reuniting for her 50th last year.
Much has been made of the fact that she doesn’t need the cash.
OK. But what about the fans? They know she wasn’t the vocal heart of the group, to put it lightly, but they’d love to see her sashay on to a Wembley stage in one of her trademark LBDs (which, let’s face it, she could definitely still get into).
Instead, they might have to make do with an “avatar experience”, whatever that is. Boo!
Come on, Posh, you didn’t get where you are today without all those millions of loyal fans.
Would it kill you to give them something back?
As one Nineties girl group famously sang: “Who do you think you are?”
HISLOP IN PUB PUZZLE
HAVE I Got News For You posho Ian Hislop has been claiming he’s had a brush with real life and visited a Wetherspoons.
But rather than just enjoy a quiet tipple at Britain’s beloved bargain- booze chain like the rest of us, he apparently found himself in the belly of the beast.
The jowly jester said he witnessed domestic abuse and drug dealing when he turned up, presumably for a pint of Spitfire, at a branch in Wales. Oh really, cried ’Spoons gaffer Tim Martin, who described his claims as “fantasy”.
Martin invited Hislop to tell him which pub this was so he could investigate, having found nothing on CCTV footage from any of his Welsh watering holes.
Cue radio silence from the usually fastidious editor of Private Eye.
So which one was it, Ian?
IT’S weeks like this I feel blessed that, despite fast approaching 50, I still have a full head of hair and don’t have to grapple with some sort of dodgy baldness “cure”.
I refer to news that billiard ball-bonced blokes taking a certain prescription-only hair- loss treatment have seen their libido slump and, horror of horrors, their manhood SHRINK.
That’s one hell of a dilemma for a chap to face. What’s more important, an impressive upstairs or downstairs?
I’m now praying the penis enlargement tablets I’ve ordered won’t make my hair fall out.
Dannii covered herself in glory
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HOW sad to read that Dannii Minogue always felt like a fatso next to Polly Pocket-sized Kylie.
My cold heart breaks. So I would like her to know that there is a small army of us straight blokes out here who have always preferred her to her more famous sis.
My devotion to the one-time Home And Away star has lasted more than 30 years.
When I was a young pillock in the mid- Nineties, I cleaned the industrial kitchens of Edinburgh for the best part of a year so I could jet off to Australia for some fun in the sun. My arrival Down Under coincided with the delectable Dannii gracing the cover of “men’s sophisticate”, Playboy.
I skipped a few shrimps on the barbie to have enough cash to procure a copy of this most special of Special Editions.
Perusing it in my bunk at the backpackers’ hostel, a room mate took one look at it and joshed: “Who’s that mate, your girlfriend?”
Cue a heavy sigh from me and the reply: “I should be so lucky.”
POPE? NOPE
I WAS busy mowing the lawn last Saturday so forgot to tune in to the “funeral of the decade” or whatever the Pope’s final hurrah was billed as.
I know some people were excited, but I haven’t had less interest in a global event since Meghan Markle dropped her last podcast.
My daughter, 11, summed up the occasion, saying: “Daddy, I’d never heard of Pope Francis until he died.”
Which did make me chuckle until I suddenly thought: So what the hell are they teaching you in R.E. these days?
I feel sure I won’t like the answer.
I’VE said it before and I’ll say it again, the whole transgender toilet row could be ended overnight if we just directed trans people to use the disabled loo.
Providing accessible, safe and private loos is a legal requirement, so you will struggle to find any public building or office without one.
“Oh, but what if there’s a disabled person already in there?” I hear some cry.
Look, if you’re a trans woman looking for a genuine female experience, then you’d struggle to find a more authentic one than queuing for the bogs.
