The Sunday Ishmael: 12/04/2026

A couple I know want to move house. They really do want to move house, because they have secured a generous offer on their own house... Every day they drive out to properties, where the home owners, also desperate to move house, have cleaned, polished and vacuumed in readiness for the viewing, roasting coffee beans and displaying fresh flowers. Maybe lighting a scented candle. After each viewing, the couple, we'll call them Mr. and Mrs. Discerning (talk about nominative determinism), compare notes in a slightly defeated, but valiant way. 

The neighbouring gardens looked scruffy - they are probably drug dealers. 

There's social housing on that estate. 

I could hear the TV from next door. 

There's a river in the back garden. 

There's no parking. 

That's a really busy road. 

Worn down by house hunting, but still determined to move house before they actually have to move into Very Sheltered Accommodation for their waiting in Heaven's lobby years, Mr. and Mrs. Discerning decided to buy a new build direct from the builder. They put down a deposit of £2000 to secure it. They chose a kitchen. Then doubts assailed them.

"Oh, mrs ishmael, we were talking to someone in the Co-op who bought a house on that estate and they said there were nothing but problems. Scalding water out of the cold tap. Doors not fitting properly."

"I think the builder has to put all that right - there's a 10 year warranty on new builds."

"Maybe so, but I've heard it isn't that easy to get the snags sorted. And everyone says there's Dust."

"Dust?"

"Yes, Dust. New Builds have Dust and you know our George's asthma. We can't be doing with Dust."

So they've backed out of the contract and lost their deposit and they are back to driving around the county, looking for perfection.

If you let it, Dust can be a bit of a problem. Quentin Crisp, on the other hand, would simply have lit a cigarette, surveyed the  building site with mild disdain, and reminded Mr and Mrs Discernment  that “after the first four years the Dust doesn’t get any worse.”

In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Dust is what authoritarian systems fear most. Dust is the truth — inconvenient, messy, unavoidable, whereas politicians prefer a clean, Dust‑free narrative. But the world is full of Dust, and always has been. The more they try to sweep it away, the more it settles on everything.

 It’s been a week where the world has once again reminded us that satire is redundant. The President of the Unites States posted on Truth Social: 

 ‘Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP.’

‘Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. ‘There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fucking Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP’.

How refreshing. D'you think he's quite all there? Marbles all present and correct? Enough sandwiches for a picnic?

Even more amusing were the commentators, putting on Serious Face, who couldn't bring themselves to report the  words and instead referred to President Trump "dropping the F bomb." As if it was a particularly meaty fart. Statements have been issued with the solemnity of prophecy but the accuracy of gossip. Everybody claimed to have won, except us, of course, paying more for petrol than any other nation on Earth, but that's ok because it will make us buy more electric cars. And, of course, the Dragon Ship which finally made it to the Med, 

 is now tied up, having experienced a "minor technical issue".

The negotiators have all gone home, having utterly failed to make a deal. Only Israel has stuck to its guns (see what I did, there?) and has been bombing the fuck out of Lebanon. 
Have you seen Jonathon Glazer's 2000 film, Sexy Beast? Purporting to be a heist movie, it is allegorical and mythological, using water to signify thresholds between worlds, dressing demons in human skins. Don Logan, magnificently  portrayed by Ben Kingsley, is a violent, shouty, sweary, amoral sociopath. 

Why am I thinking of Don Logan as President Trump declares: ‘I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas. We will also begin destroying the mines that the Iranians laid in the Straits. Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!’

Or possibly Malcolm Tucker?

Time was, musicals used to be jolly and colourful, a populist take on comic opera. Jaunty lyrics. Pretty dresses. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. State Fair. My Fair Lady. Then something terrible happened. They started taking themselves seriously. The rot set in insidiously, with West Side Story, happy little songs about teenagers stabbing each other to death. Then Les Misérables dropped like one of Trump's meaty farts. I read the book several decades ago. God, its awful. Unrelentingly bleak, structurally sprawling,  a world where joy is a brief visitor and suffering is the permanent tenant. Turning that into a musical was like deciding to adapt Crime and Punishment as a tap‑dance Cabaret.

So I thought - if  Boublil and Schönberg could turn misery into sing-along money, then lets have Tehran -The Musical. We'll take the  vast, baggy Middle Eastern conflict and orchestrate it.

Here's the show stopping, full‑blooded, swelling‑strings, fist‑to-the-sky number from Tehran – The Musical.

Think Valjean meets Javert meets a diplomatic summit that’s gone wildly off‑piste.

 “THE DUST WILL SETTLE (BUT NOT TODAY)”

Act I, Finale — sung by Mr and Mrs Discerning, the Envoys, and a lone bureaucrat with a large feather duster.

Mr and Mrs D. (anguished, trembling):

We only wanted somewhere clean,

A place where plasterboard won’t lean,

A house without the builder’s curse,

But every viewing’s getting worse…

They say the dust is in the walls,

It creeps through vents and down the halls,

We tried to run, we tried to pray —

And  the dust still settles…

But not today.

ENVOYS (entering in a swirl of paperwork):

Sanctions rise and sanctions fall,

We sign our names, we stall, we brawl,

We promise peace, we draft, we sway —

And the dust will settle…

But not today.

President DON LOGAN (exploding):

NO! NO! NO!

You think you know?

You’ve never seen a maddened FOE!

You want détente? You want a plan?

I'll Bomb the Fuck out of Tehran!

CHORUS (everyone, including the feather‑duster wielding bureaucrat):

Raise your pens and raise your voice,

History gives us little choice,

We march through chaos come what may —

And the dust will settle…

But not today.

Mr and Mrs D. (soft reprise):

We only wanted somewhere new…

A home to breathe, a brighter view…

But fate has swept our hopes away —

And the dust will settle…

But not today.

FULL COMPANY

Though bombs may fly and nations sway,

Though builders flee and envoys fray,

We’ll stand our ground, we’ll find our way —

And the dust will settle…

BUT NOT TODAY!

If Quentin Crisp were alive today, he’d look at the Middle East, look at the statements of ‘grave concern,’ look at the swirling Dust of rumour and retaliation, and say: ‘Leave it. It won’t get any worse.’ And I hope he’d  be right.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

The Easter Sunday Ishmael: 05/04/2026

 Loneliness 

by John Betjeman 

The last year’s leaves are on the beech:
The twigs are black; the cold is dry;
To deeps beyond the deepest reach
The Easter bells enlarge the sky.
O ordered metal clatter-clang!
Is yours the song the angels sang?
You fill my heart with joy and grief -
Belief! Belief! And unbelief...
And, though you tell me I shall die,
You say not how or when or why.
 
Indifferent the finches sing,
Unheeding roll the lorries past:
What misery will this year bring
Now spring is in the air at last?
For, sure as blackthorn bursts to snow,
Cancer in some of us will grow,
The tasteful crematorium door
Shuts out for some the furnace roar;
But church-bells open on the blast
Our loneliness, so long and vast.

John Betjeman (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society, first president of The Hackney Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.

Statue of Betjeman at St. Pancras Station, where the Eurostar to Paris departs.

Happy Easter, Ishmaelites  everywhere.

The Sunday Ishmael: 29/03/2026

A Tale of Spite, Bureaucracy and the Over-Reach of Power,
or
Doesn't Everyone Hate the Planning Department?

This is the Italian Chapel on the tiny island of Lamb Holm, owned by Tommy Sinclair. The island and the Chapel. Lamb Holm is one of the isles linked by the Churchill Barriers.

You will remember that the Barriers were constructed out of concrete blocks by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War. At the time, one of the  war laws was that you couldn't use prisoners of war on military projects, although Hitler disregarded that convention, in his mysterious Project Riese, between 1943 and 1945. The Project consisted of seven underground structures at Książ Castle and in the Owl Mountains in Lower Silesia, which was then Nazi Germany and is now Poland. Construction work was carried out by forced labourers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp prisoners, many of whom lost their lives in appalling conditions, kept underground in the dark and wet, denied medical help and half-starved.

We weren't like that, of course. Churchill wanted to erect a barrier to prevent German U boats sneaking into Scapa Flow and blowing up our Fleet. The block ships - old rusting hulks towed to the Flow and sunk to impede enemy shipping and submarines from entering - had failed to keep out Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, who,  in 1939, became famous for sinking the British battleship HMS Royal Oak in the heavily defended British Home Fleet main harbour at Scapa Flow on 14 October. Even Winston Churchill described it as "a remarkable feat of professional skill and daring", for which feat he was honoured by the Iron Cross. 835 Naval personnel died in the sinking of the Royal Oak, including 100 boy sailors. Depends on whose side you are on whether you see him as a mass murderer or a war hero.

Anyway, we needed to keep Johnny Foreigner out of the harbour, and it was pretty nifty to join together the string of little islands with concrete barriers, using PoWs. Except that was contrary to war law, so, by the simple expedient of putting a roadway on top of the Barriers, the military project immediately became a civilian project.

More than 1,000 Italian soldiers captured in North Africa were sent to Orkney in February 1942 to build The Churchill Barriers. Around half were transported to Camp 60 in Lamb Holm and a similar number to Camp 34 in Burray. Being good Catholic boys, they needed a chapel. The prisoners were accommodated in Nissan huts. Two huts were made available to be used as a chapel. Dominico Chiocchetti, a talented artist,  was given permission to work full time on the chapel. 

The Madonna and Child painting above the altar was based on an image on a prayer card his mother gave him before he left home for war. 

When Italy surrendered to allied forces in 1943, the PoWs could not go home because of - well, reasons, so the prisoners had to stay in the camps until the end of the war, working away. The Churchill Causeway was officially opened on the 12th May 1945, 4 days after the end of War in Europe.  Mr Chiocchetti returned to the chapel several times after the war to restore parts of his work, before he died in 1999 aged 89.

The uninhabited island, Lamb Holm, was bought by Tommy Sinclair, who set up Lamb Holm Enterprises on the 25th September 2015. He will be 79 in May. Companies House tells us that he has previously held Directorships in various fishing enterprises. Under his Directorship, there have been improvements at the Chapel. Over 100,000 visitors a year visit the site - tourists under their own steam, or, increasingly, visitors from the cruise liners in sodding great coaches, which had difficulty in manoeuvring around the little carpark.

So, in March 2024, Tommy applied for planning permission to build a new car park area for coaches and went ahead with the construction later that year. Planning applications proceed in geological time, so it is only now that the application has reached and been turned down by Orkney's planning committee.

They don't like it, see, people going ahead without their permission and constructing a car park on their own land using their own money. Why, if everyone did that, what would happen to all the important planning jobs?  

The Planning Manager, Jamie Macvie, locally known as Jamie MacTree due to his habit of refusing any application that would involve removing a tree,  advised Council to refuse the application because it would spoil the view of the Chapel from the road, saying the view is: “key to the experience of visiting” the site. Historic Environment Scotland and the Islands Archaeologist both objected, saying there is an adverse impact on the chapel’s setting.

It is a carpark, for pity's sake. Most of the time it will be empty. All winter, which, in Orkney, lasts from October to April. Even when the cruise ships visit, all the passengers are tucked up back on their liners in time for tea.

Mr Sinclair said he had become concerned about the safety of pedestrians at the site from reversing vehicles and was “disgusted” by the decision. He says he is now considering closing the chapel. That'll learn them. Go, Tommy, Go!

Councillor Duncan Tullock said it “should be a salutary lesson to applicants to consult with the planning authority before taking action”. He added: “I sympathise with the fact that the bus parking is required. But there are stages you have to go through, and not take the law into your own hands.” 

Fuck's sake. A world-renowned historic site. 100,000 visitors a year. Doesn't cost the Council anything to run it or to provide carparking. Council knows that parking is needed. Bloke had a carpark built at his own expense. Planning and Council are miffed that the bloke took the law into his own hands. So they spite him by refusing permission. I hope he spites them back by closing the Chapel. Puts up a big chain-link fence and holds midnight Satanic orgies, with liberal libations of a good Italian red. 

Wait- wasn't Angela Raynor going to do something about the insolence of office and the law's delay?

Anyroadup, it seems that the current War still isn't being taken seriously. I suppose it will take a ballistic missile landing on London to make a convincing argument. Interesting fact emerged on the Politics programmes this morning: in 2024/25 the United Kingdom spent an estimated 313 billion  pounds on welfare. In that same year, we spent 60.2 billion on defence. 

Did you hear Pope Leo, poncing about Vatican Square in his hat and best dress, pontificating (see what I did there?)

that God just won't listen to the prayers of leaders who start wars  and have hands filled with blood? Good-oh, thought I, there's Papa firing a round of fucks into Iran and its poxy proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. But, no, turns out he was admonishing President Trump.

Talking of hats and best dresses, did you catch the investiture of Archbishop Sarah?

Well, what can you say? 

Good Evening, Huw Welshman Yere.

Do watch Power, the Downfall of Huw Edwards, the Channel 5 Drama Documentary starring Martin Clunes very successfully impersonating the nonce Edwards.

One of the best lines was given to the father of the boy Edwards paid to provide him with sexual favours. When the dad went to the BBC to complain about the money Edwards was giving his son, who spent it on funding his drug habit, he was refused admission, whereupon the exasperated father shouted: "Can't the BBC keep its nonces under control?"
......................................................

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Kirkwall, Orkney

British Summer Time starts.

It's a Bit of a Puzzle

  It is still very windy here in Orkney. I've gathered up a dozen snapped-off daffodils this morning. The lid of the compost bin has broken in bits. I've gathered up some, but the rest are probably flying out to sea. With the neighbour's chickens.

Who do you suppose has Trump been having peace talks with? Iran denies it. Apparently it was with the Speaker. Is that Mr. Northern Speaker in the House of Commons?

That might account for why Tehran is so puzzled by Trump's assertion that he's had "very good talks" with someone. Got the wrong Speaker on his speed dial.

Or, wait, was it the Metatron? 

If so, it wouldn't surprise me that Trump can phone a celestial heavyweight. That would explain a lot. No doubt the Metatron would get straight on it, and issue a few instructions to Archbishop Sarah, Pope Leo, the Grand Pooh-Bah Mufti and the Chief Rabbinate to put the word out and get Hormuz open again.

This business in a residential area of Golders Green is a bad one, and no mistake.  Harakat Ashab al‑Yamin al‑Islamia (“Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right”) have claimed the honour of burning the ambulances. Brave balaclava'd boys. 

Time for a surgical extraction of your thumb from your bum, Prime Minister. British citizens being targeted for intimidatory tactics in London. Maybe this isn't the time to be introducing anti-Islamophobia measures. Read the room, sweetheart. Count the burning ambulances.

The Sunday Ishmael: 22/03/2026

 Foreign and Domestic News: 

Mecca, Saudi Arabia: Worshippers gather around the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest shrine, to mark the end of Ramadan.

Roads around Small Heath Park, Birmingham, were packed as thousands of Muslims came from all over the Midlands to pray together, celebrating the end of fasting for Ramadan and eating a lot. This party was organised by the Green Lane Mosque.

As I said in January, following the  revelation that West Midlands Police had taken advice from Green Lane Mosque to form their shocking and racist decision to refuse Israeli fans permission to attend a football game in Birmingham, Green Lane Mosque is a controversial establishment - in 2023 an investigation by the Mail on Sunday found that the Green Lane Mosque gave a platform to imams giving sermons on how to stone a woman 'correctly' for adultery and delivering speeches that appeared to incite murder of members of the LGBT+ community.

During a sermon at Green Lane mosque in December, preacher Aqeel Mahmood made misogynistic comments and said men can physically punish their wives as a 'last resort' if they disobey - he advised men to physically discipline their wives as a 'last resort' if they were rebellious, saying that men have 'a level of authority over the woman'. The punishment should not result in pain, injury or fear, (how do you do that? "Here, dear, don't be frightened, thank me for hitting you, and look what you made me do. Again.") Mahmood then said that it is 'common sense' that wives should not leave their children in the care of others to carry out errands such as shopping and that women should never leave the house without the permission of their husbands unless it is a life and death situation.

In addition to inciting men to commit Actual Bodily Harm on their wives, in early 2025, Green Lane Mosque published videos on its YouTube site of sermons given by Mahamed Abdur Razaq - a preacher who, in 2024 said men are 'allowed to hit' their wives if they refuse sex. Basically, an incitement to rape.

There really is something seriously wrong with these blokes, and why West Midlands Police are pandering to them is a mystery. As is why they are not prosecuted for incitement to assault and rape. Then marched vigorously down the cells as a way of letting them know, without inflicting pain, injury or fear, that we don't do that sort of thing in this country. Clearly, the fuss about the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs has just sailed way over their pointy little heads.

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: 'The fact that West Midlands Police thought this was a reputable organisation to get an informed opinion from is just embarrassing. With these allegations of abhorrent comments made by its guest speakers, this mosque's track record should have had alarm bells ringing. West Midlands Police should have followed the intelligence without fear or favour. It clearly told them that the threat came not from Israeli or Jewish fans, but from thugs and Islamists in their local community who planned to attack them." 

..................................................................................

“In Russia, Putin is ramping up a different but not unrelated war, his war against childlessness. Russian women who do not want to have children will now be referred to the psychologist. The demographic crisis which is impacting countries across the western world is particularly severe in Russia, not least because so many young men are dying in the conflict against Ukraine. Whether or not treating women for mental illness when they do not want to have children is an effective tool for addressing this problem remains to be seen.”

 Well, that’s one way of solving population decline – obviously bribing women to have babies hasn’t worked well enough. Russian women, including students, have been paid £900 to continue their babies to term and raise them, under their Pronatalism policy. The Russian birth-rate sits at 1.41 babies per woman, whereas although Britain's birth-rate is similar, at 1.49, our legislature is adopting an amendment to the Criminal Justice Act to decriminalise women who have abortions up to full term.

..............................................

for better, for worse,

for richer, for poorer,

in sickness and in health,

to love and to cherish,

till death us do part

You see, Keir, it's no good blethering in that clerkly way of yours that Britain will not be drawn into this war with Iran. As far as Tehran is concerned, we're already in it and your sophistry cuts no ice. That is why  RAF Akrotiri was hit by an Iranian drone strike on the 1st March. RAF Akrotiri is a British military base, not part of the Republic of Cyprus. 

That is why Iran launched two intermediate‑range ballistic missiles toward the joint UK–US base at Diego Garcia on Friday. Both missiles failed to hit the target: one malfunctioned mid‑flight, and the other was intercepted by a US Navy SM-3 interceptor. The missiles were probably Khorramshahr‑4 or a similar long‑range variant, which has an estimated range of 4,000 km+, far beyond Iran’s previously known 2,000 km capability. That range means, according to defence analysts and mapping by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the following areas fall inside the theoretical strike zone: London, England (entirely), Wales (entirely), most of Scotland, but not the upper reaches of north-west Scotland, including Orkney, you will be relieved to hear, and Northern Ireland. UK ministers stress that our country has defensive systems and that there is no evidence Iran is targeting the UK. Really? Depends what you mean by targeting the UK - there was the little matter of two Iranians arrested after allegedly trying to enter a nuclear naval base, HM Naval Base Clyde, known as Faslane, on Thursday. And these defensive systems of ours - we got nothing, nothing, that can take down Iranian ballistic missiles. We would rely on United States SM‑3 interceptors. We've got nothing, nothing, to take down hypersonic glide vehicles. Even NATO considers this a major capability gap. Here we need the Americans again. They've got the systems. We need to ensure that they have the will to use those systems. And Keir has pissed Trump off - with his prissy logic-chopping - no, you can't, oh yes, now you can, now that Iran is not capable of making the lawyerly distinctions that are so evident to you. For better or worse, until death us do part, the UK and the US are in it together - that's the way Tehran sees it. And Keir better start making nice with Trump, instead of fannying about with Zelenskyy and sending him all our weapons.

And that means pissing off the enemy within. The ones with their bottoms in the air in Trafalgar Square. National security is a damn sight more important than securing a second term by placating the Moslem vote.

The boys in happier days.

"Where's the Dragon Ship?" Kuensberg asked Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, sent out this morning, for some unaccountable reason, to answer War and Defence questions on behalf of the Labour Government.

Steve:     "I can't tell you."

Laura:     "Why not? Don't you know?

Steve:     "It's on its way"

Laura:     "Well, how near is it? Why was it so late setting off?"

Steve:     "I can tell you that it wasn't late at all. In fact, all the stops were pulled out. It was in for a 6 week refit and they did the refit in 6 days"

Laura:     " Why didn't they do the refit over Christmas? When we weren't at war? Why wait until it is needed to defend our Armed Forces?"

Steve:     " I can't answer questions of National Security."

Laura:     "Is it nearly there yet?"

Steve:     "Am I going to come on national television and betray our secret plans to Iran?"

Laura:     "Okay. Try this one. How close to Diego Garcia did the ballistic missile get? Was it a near miss?"

Steve:     "Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm not going to tell you."

Laura:     "It's a matter of national interest."

Steve:     "No, it's a matter of national nosiness."

Laura:     "The public want to know if they are going to be blown up in their beds. Like the citizens of Tehran are."

Steve:     "Tough titty. I'm not telling Iran how close they got."

Panel Member: "They already know, you dope. The missile reported back. And they were watching it. They may have a stone-age religion, but their tech is better than our tech. Oops."

Steve:     "Oh no it isn't."

Laura:     " Where's our aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales?"

Nope, wrong Prince - ed.

Steve:     "Nice and safe, tied up in Portsmouth, having a little rest after  that exhausting Operation Firecrest in the High North and North Atlantic with our NATO allies, putting the fear of God up Putin."

Laura:     "Tied up? Is anybody taking this war seriously?"

Some of the above dialogue is an accurate transcription of exchanges on the Laura Kuenssberg Show on the P.B.C. this morning. Some isn't.

..........................................................................

"For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of the singing of birds is come, 

and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land." 

Song of Solomon 2:11-12 (KJV): 

It was hailing today. Just saying. You may have an Iranian ballistic missile drop on your heads in London, but at least you don't have snow, hail, wind, rain and unsecured garden furniture flying past your windows.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

The Sunday Ishmael: 15/03/2026

Beware the Ides of March

Or if you go down to the Senate today, You're in for a Big Surprise.

 Or Happy Mother's Day.

Back in 2009 and 2010, mr ishmael  found himself very puzzled by the ease with which ducks slid off The Right Honourable the Lord Mandelson like water off a shit shovel. Had he lived to see Mandy's appointment in 2025 to the post of British Ambassador to the United States by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Leader of the Labour Party, mr ishmael might have concluded that the sickness that beset Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had mysteriously also infected Starmer, whose appointment of Mandy was "weirdly rushed", according to Jonathan Powell, Starmer's national security adviser, as revealed in the  tranche of Mandelson documents, released on the 11th March inst. Is it as simple as Starmer's brains being out to rent? Boyant as Mandelson is, or was,  surely Starmer had some recollection of past unpleasantnesses? Let us remember times past with mr ishmael.

HOW COULD SOMEONE TWICE DISGRACED, 

PLAYTHING OF RUSSIAN GANGSTERS, 

AND DISHONEST AS THE DAY IS LONG 

WALTZ INTO THE POSITION OF DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER

AND  FIRST SECRETARY FOR EVERYTHING? (or, indeed UK Ambassador to the USA, interjects mrs ishmael.)

Ever since we have been blogging, commenting or writing to the newspapers, my young friend, stanislav and I, have chosen to refer to the former Labour Party as the Blair-Brown-Campbell-Mandelstein Project and we have characterised its central, abiding  theme as being the power of potential mutual blackmail among that eponymous Quartet of the Damned. Why doesn't Blair sack Brown, why is Mandelstein unsackable, why does a press secretary call the shots;  is it the case that they hang together or are hung separately, what do they all have on each other?

l to r: Brown, Mandelson, Campbell, Blair

Often we have lamented that the governing of Britain, as well as being largely in the hands and at the whim of shadowy, international gangsters, or financiers as they term themselves, Ambassadors of Greed, was rendered more than  customarily incompetent by the alleged criminality of its central characters. They were hamstrung, suspended in mid-air not only by their amorality, their moral bankruptcy, their dubious, elastic sexuality, their greed and mendacity but  ultimately, in practical terms,  by the unlikelihood that those both driven and constrained by unfulfillable personal vendetta would or could ever make objective, nationally beneficial judgements on domestic or foreign policy or on public administration, that they were, in other words, a bunch of cunts.

 Estranged from Truth and Decency, the longer they were in office the grosser became their manoeuvrings; paradoxically, the more distant they personally became from the rule of Law,  the more furiously they heaped the potential for criminality - a guilty conscience - upon the populace; burning all the money in the Downing Street cellars, forcing rights and liberties and conventions through the shredders, upstairs;  seemed like every time you turned around there was a new law you might be breaking.

Surveillance, molestation by law enforcement, illegal detention, the brutalisation of jurisprudence in HMP Britain and the encouragement of neighbours narking  each upon the other, Stasi-style,  generated in government an opposite polarity, opposite to the restrictive, looking-over-the-shoulder, paranoid  climate inflicted upon the citizen; theirs was an unchallengeable  lawlessness. 

Whilst we  at home were harangued,  photographed, scolded, barracked, detained, beaten, ejected, confined, batoned, tasered and  shot dead by a constabulary headed by gobby political apparatchiks;  whilst we at home were more legislated against than ever before, our own Gang of Four was engaged, abroad, in crimes against humanity; international law wilfully misinterpreted,  the casus beli summonsed from thin air, contemptuously cyber-plagiarised,  fabricated - with a dark aptness -  by a drunken, bisexual  pornographer,  the whole rotten episode  made glorious by Colonel Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap and eventually vindicated by mealy-mouthed commissions and enquiries, staffed by hand-picked, lousy, wigged and ermined lickspittles, masters of the full and far-reaching cover-up,  the Wretched of the Oxbridge civil service, pinstripe, weasel popinjays,  whose gilded  careers were  case studies  of Vice made Noble.

All was news-managed from Downing Street, the worthless shit, Brown, bullying and intriguing, Son of the fucking Manse, heedless of warcrime, stewing rancidly in his monstrous  ambition as wog children fried, the horrible fucking bastard; Tony and Imelda, lining-up bribes and freebies, Mandelstein in the background. 

Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson

Tony Blair and Mandelson

An early mentor of NewLabour was, ominously, Mr Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of skymadeupnewsandfilth and a press baron vile beyond caricature, although generous in that he allows many of his employees to moonlight as MPs,  the apologetic, motormouthing Mr Spit-Gove being one of Rupe's boys.  Any government alarmed  by the cheapening  of the national discourse, the sexualisation of infants, the bombardment of readers with lust and greed and stupidity and the wholly unwarranted, cruelly destructive intrusion into the lives of ordinary human beings would tell Rupert and his stable of rancid Nazi hacks, Kelvin McCunt and the rest, to go and fuck themselves, tell Murdoch to  fuck off back to Australia, where crudity such as his is worshipped, where they know no better, where ethnic cleansing is still on the agenda, where Sheilas are treated like shit, where the politicians imbibe stupidity with their mothers' milk. Our politicians being what they are, however, and Murdoch being what he is, there will be another level of blackmail at work, NewsCorp will have unused files bulging with indiscretions and worse, much worse, insurance against anyone attempting to curb the filthy bastard's excess.

Murdoch, anyway,  has  sought to levy a subscription from online readers and in an attempt to glamourise his product, to entice unwary readers into parting with their money in exchange for his  cruel, bigoted drivel,  he has acquired the serialisation rights to Lord Crabs'  bouillabaisse  of gossip, innuendo and lies, entitled: The Third Man.

 Campbell, in Mandy's memoir,  is seen, if at all, only through frosted glass because he is an oik, effective at ramrodding the craven filth in the Lobby but plain vulgar,  whereas Lord Crabs, we should remember, confided to the nation, whilst stuffing the Millennium Dome with rubbish, that he was "born to govern," his grandfather virtually a post-war Labour aristocrat, Campbell's, if he knew him at all, probably worked down the pit. And drank pints.

One would think it a snobbery too far to expunge Mr Campbell from the record as Mandelstein has done but Peter is, by his own account,  the owner, the trademark holder of the QueerProject which begat NewLabour and he should know; his, as Rupert will insist, is the Inside Story of  Ruin and if he says there were but three gay conspirators - two with attendant  lavender spouses - then three it was and all the imagery of Ali and Tony closeted together deciding our fates to the clunking accompaniment of a Prime Minister's Edition Fenders Stratocaster must be errant imaginings, les dossiers sexy et fabrique, we must have dreamed them, Mr Campbell's mateyness with John Shit-Scarlett of MI5, his castration of the BBC and the mysterious matter of the Lonesome Death of David Kelly,  these must be the doings of a lowly penpusher and not a member of the Ruinous Gang of Four, for as Lord Crabs tells us in his penny dreadful it was but a Ruinous Gang of Three. 

The Third Man - Then

And now.

Is the Starmer/Mandelson/Epstein affair enough to bring down the Starmer government?

  

That's the happy sight of pigs flying overhead. Duck, that's the sound of shit falling on our heads from a great height.

Martha's Vineyard, 2012
l.to r. Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson
"A man is known by the company he keeps" - Aesop's fable 

"The Ass and its Purchaser"

'Twas an evening in November,

As I very well remember,

I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,

But my knees were all a'flutter

So I landed in the gutter,

And a pig came up and lay down by my side.

Yes, I lay there in the gutter

Thinking thoughts I could not utter,

When a colleen passing by did softly say,

"Ye can tell a man that boozes 

By the company he chooses" -

At that, the pig got up and walked away.

.................................................................

They'd better get a move on and sort themselves out - there's another war in the Middle East to attend to. Seems to be a Labour Thing.

....................................................................

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.