Notre Dame Saint-Germain shirt in aid of firefighters flogged on ebay by vultures

In the wake of the fire which swept through Notre Dame Cathedral the city’s senior football team, Paris Saint-Germain, PSG, last Sunday marked the event and the bravery of the firefighters with special shirts for their match against Monaco. Instead of the sponsor’s logo on the front there was a large drawing of the cathedral and on the back, replacing each player’s name, was simply the words Notre Dame. Celtic will do something similar for the Scottish Cup Final on May 25, players with a number 5 on their shorts in memory of the legendary captain Billy McNeill.

PSG won the match, French World Cup winner Kylian Mbappe scoring a hat trick, although it is no longer important. The club decided to sell a limited number of special replica shirts, 1000 of them at €100, with the money going to the emergency services. Five hundred were to be sold online, 250 in the club’s megastore and 250 on the Champs-Elysees. Inside half an hour they were sold out.

It didn’t take long for the unscrupulous vultures to try to cash in on eBay. Within hours they were put up on the French site and at the time of writing an XL shirt was on offer for €1,000.

THATCHER AND THE SWEETIES

Enoch Powell didn’t just have no time for immigrants, he didn’t think much of women either. In a BBC profile he described his relations with women as an undergraduate at Cambridge – “They didn’t exist” – and he wondered what they were doing there because “the analytical faculty is underdeveloped in women”.

His wife reported that after a three-week honeymoon she went to meet him in the Central Lobby of the Commons where a number of women had gathered and she watched him “go all the way around wondering which one he had married and been on honeymoon with”.

Conspiracy theorists (more of them later) claim he was actually a paedophile and connected to the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal. Adherents want him, and other now dead Tory MPs, investigated by Professor Alexis Jay’s Independent Statutory Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse.

I don’t know if there is any truth in it. Similarly I don’t know if this one is kosher but I so hope it is. Margaret Thatcher, as we know, was a great admirer of Powell. But, so the allegation goes, she was also worried about his sexual proclivities and whether he, or others, might bring controversy to her Premiership over their dalliances (Cecil Parkinson certainly did). So she set about recruiting comely young male and female Tories (a difficult task you’ll agree) who would act as agents provocateurs – not in underwear, Barbour boots and jackets most like – and they would mingle at hunt balls, conferences, in the Chamber and watering holes where randy Tories would gather, to see if they were propositioned, passing the info back to the PM. The posse was known as the Dolly Mixtures.

GORILLA WARFARE?

Proof that Planet of the Apes really was a documentary. Here, an ape flicks through pictures and videos on his mobile phone before switching to Tinder. https://twitter.com/jiveDurkey/status/1121186334243213314

NAT NAT AND SENTENCE DIRECTIONS

The former SNP MP Natalie McGarry could well face prison after she admitted in court last week (after having sacked at least two lawyers, including Aamer Anwar, as well as her counsel) defrauding more than £25,000 from her party and pro-independence groups. She also admitted failing to pass on charitable donations, one of which was targeted to Positive Prison. But it will be up to the sheriff to decide whether to take the direction later this week.

THE BOY DONE GOOD, CLAIM

No prizes for guessing which football manager this quote refers to: “It was the best sex of my life, and he told me it had been fantastic for him, too….I could not believe what was happening to me. He was a master of the art of love-making.” Dunces corner if you said Eck McLeish or Bertie Vogts, although I’m sure they had their moments, Wee Craigie Broon too, memorably. It is, of course, Sven-Göran Eriksson, who may not be too hot on catenaccio (trans. bolt, which he clearly didn’t, or The Chain, not a reference to group sex I think) but evidently has a mastery of awesome attacking moves.

The kiss ’n’ teller was Faria Alam, then an FA employee when Sven was England manager. She reports that after the transportation to bliss he then got into his blue pyjamas, with his built-up shoes surely left under the bed!

But enough of what Sven’s best at, he’s clearly worst at managing a football team and I’m sure the SFA will shred his application, if any of them knows how to operate the thing, which isn’t at all certain. Apart from his inability to master tactics and motivating a bunch of under-achievers he would have difficulty mastering the local patois. His attempts at it are available on a clip from bookmakers Paddy Power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_x7gzJQcQY

DON’T LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY

Conspiracy theories have been around since even before Elvis ended up in that chip shop Kirsty MacColl sang about. Otherwise apparently sensible people, some of whom I know, believe that the US Government blew up one of the buildings on 9/11, the evidence being that, rather than it toppling down, it came down vertically like a house of cards. Then there’s aliens at Roswell air force base and our own Bonnybridge, which appears to be kind of spaghetti junction for their spacecraft.

There’s the New World Order belief, that a group of international elites controls governments, industry, and media organisations, and have got together with the goal of establishing global hegemony (here I plead guilty). According to the conspiracy they have been responsible for most of the wars, the blights on the economy and much else from their headquarters under Denver Airport. Apparently the giveaways are the inordinate size of the place and the assorted alleged Satanic symbols and Masonic symbols (perhaps you raise a trouser leg rather than giving a password to get in?).

Pizzagate, in 2016, did nothing to dispel conspiracy when truth emerged, indeed it ramped it up. A heavily-armed warehouse worker blasted his way into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington because he believed children were being held in a network of underground tunnels. In fact there was no basement. It didn’t stop there however. When it came out that the attacker had appeared in a low-budget slasher movie it quickly became currency that the pizza house raid had been staged! A couple of months ago the restaurant roared back into the plot when a man was arrested for setting fire to the place.

So far so almost harmless. But then it emerged last week that the rate of measles infection in the UK had almost quadrupled in a year and a Unicef report revealed that more than 500,000 British children in seven years had missed the MMR vaccination. Measles is, of course, a highly-infectious viral illness that can lead to serious infections of the lungs, eyes and brain and in some cases complications can even be fatal.

According to Unicef part of the reason for the drop in vaccinations is scepticism about immunisations. Just how much is down to a discredited and struck off British doctor we don’t know for sure, but it’s a reasonable bet that the trumpeting of Andrew Wakefield’s thesis that the MMR jab could lead to autism – promoted by the Daily Mail and Donald Trump among other conspiracy theorists – still has many adherents. Indeed, Wakefield still holds to it. A public safety campaign promoting the MMR vaccination would be timely.