The Regular Missive

Ah, my favourite subject. The Daily Mail.

I read in a headline yesterday:

"£100 000 - that's the taxpayer's cost of Tony Blair taking the Royal Jet on Holiday."

Now, much as I loathee Tony Blair with every inch of my being, I object to this transparent attempt by the Daily Mail to drum up support for a bunch of immature children who couldn't organise a bursting session in a lagoon of balloons.

It's quite frankly bollocks.

No, really. The thing is, it's that apostrophe in the headline. It implies that £100 000 is the cost to each individual taxpayer. Now, I've been doing a little bit of research, so let Professor U-B take you onto a journey into the exciting world of mathematics...

"Hello children,

It's a simple process, this. First, let's look at the numbers of people at taxpaying age in the UK. Now, www.statistics.gov.uk lists the people of taxable age (which I'm taking to be 16 or over) in the United Kingdom as 46 930 337 - that's nearly 47 million people on a couple of Islands! Aren't we lucky?

Next, let's take the cost the Mail gave of hiring this jet - £100 000.

Now, finally, we'll take that £100 000 and divide it fairly across the 46 930 337 people. What does that give us?

0.00213082. So, as we're dealing with money, and to prevent a short fall, let's call that 0.003p.

You see, Maths is fun!"

Thank you Professor.

So. 0.003p.

That's three thousandths of a penny.

Now, I don't know about you, but I really don't begrudge Mr Blair that. Well, that's not true, I begrudge him everything, but it's hardly very much really is it? I mean when you consider that my average tax bill per month is about £150, a thousandth of a penny really doesn't matter to me.

But the Mail is trying to convince me that, no, all my £150 is going to fund Mr Blair's little jolly, and then some. This is total crap. If they want to be accurate, they should write:

"that's the taxpayers' cost"

You see what I did there? The little apostrophe? Implying that, as is the case, the cost is shared? You'd have thought the sub-editors, or indeed the journalist in question, on the Mail would have picked up on this. But then again, I suspect it was a "deliberate" mistake, which is typical of them. I could defecate on a piece of paper, and the words formed at random by my fecal matter would constitute a more reliable and interesting article than anything that appears in the Mail, which is, generally speaking, a load of unmitigated arse.

I mean, let's look at the title of the paper itself: "The Daily Mail".

It implies a regular missive, possibly sent by an acquaintance, updating you on interesting happenings.

Now, I'm not being awful, but if I had a friend who sent me regular lines along the lines of what appears in the Mail, I'd have them sectioned. No, actually, I'd beat them to a bloody and swift death with their collected writings to put them out of the perpetual misery that clearly exists in place of a meaningful existence.

Someone once said they hated the Mail more than any other paper, even The Sun, because whereas other papers make you hate other people, the Mail manages to make you hate yourself too. This is very true. It's a loathsome publication that carries delusions of grandeur and tries to convince people it's something it isn't. And until they change, they can go and choke on my tumescent (and quite frankly magnificent) member.

(PLEASE NOTE: Personal details in this article may have been altered to make them more impressive than they actually are...)