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RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Now every day is April Fools' Day

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For the best part of 25 years, You Couldn’t Make It Up has been one of the mainstays of this column. All manner of absurd stories have come my way, most of which would be impossible to parody.

Every year newspapers go to elaborate lengths to spoof their readers on April Fools’ Day. Frankly, I don’t know why they still bother.

Real life is far more ridiculous. Looking at the papers, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy.

It is nearly impossible to tell what is real and what is an April Fools now-a-days; real life is far more ridiculous

Take the story I wrote about yesterday, the WPC suing a petrol station owner for damages after tripping on a step during a routine burglary investigation.

That had April Fool written all over it. Except that it was true.

There was also a report of a man in the West Midlands being wrestled to the ground by two police officers on their way to a fancy dress party.

Solihull Police tweeted: ‘Off-duty officers dressed in Zebra & Monkey onesies arrest a violent man in the street. @Solihull police keeping you safe whatever it takes.’

No April Fools: The WPC is suing a petrol station owner for damages after tripping on a step (circled) during a routine burglary investigation

Is this true? I have absolutely no idea. Where do you lay your hands on a Zebra onesie?

Another story claimed that big game hunters were trying to poach rhinos from safari parks in the Home Counties. A wind-up? Your guess is as good as mine.

One of the Sunday papers reported that speed restrictions were being imposed on jockeys at Aintree racecourse. Really? Who knows?

I have visions of Gatso cameras and traffic humps on the approach to Becher’s Brook, and policemen with radar guns lurking behind the fences, probably disguised as zebras and monkeys.

April Fools? A van carrying a prisoner was turned back across the Severn Bridge because it couldn't pay the toll

Nothing much surprises me about the teaching unions, especially when they gather for their Easter conferences. But does the NUT really believe there’s no need for children to be taught facts any more because everything is out there on Google?

And are universities offering degrees in Harry Potter studies? Probably. But even I doubt that Mumsnet is setting up a vajazzling academy, although you never know.

Was a security van taking a prisoner from Gloucester jail to court in Wales turned back at the Severn Bridge because the driver couldn’t rustle up the £12.40 needed to pay the toll? Sounds about right.

So does the story that the Government is recruiting a number of ‘light tsars’ to go round switching off lamps to save electricity. Only that isn’t true, even though in some parts of Britain, councils are switching off street lights to cut energy costs.

      More from Richard Littlejohn...   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: When they said fight them on the beaches, Dave... 27/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Toytown jihadists and a lack of political willpower 23/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The paying public are sick and tired of being ignored and patronised. So who are the real swivel-eyed loons? 20/05/13   The truth at last! Peter Mandelson admits Labour 'sent out search parties' to bring migrants here after losing the votes of the working class, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN 17/05/13   So that's why they called it an oil rig! 16/05/13   When did an 8-month jail sentence become eight weeks? 13/05/13   We're riding along the crest of a rave: How far is Julie Bentley prepared to go in order to make the Guides more 'relevant' to 21st-century Britain? 09/05/13   Arrest first - ask questions later: How dawn raids and ransacking houses became standard operating procedure 06/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Proof no good deed ever goes unpunished 02/05/13   VIEW FULL ARCHIVE

Then again, as the nation shivers during the coldest start to April on record the Government is jacking up ‘green taxes’ on gas and electricity bills to combat ‘global warming’. Not so long ago, that would have been a sick April Fool joke.

There was also a report that the Met Office had admitted getting some of its forecasts wrong. That must be a spoof.

Are families cancelling holidays in the countryside because parents are worried about their children stumbling across the badger cull this summer? Goodness knows. But that allegedly is what the Somerset Tourist Board claims on Facebook. I wonder if it is in any way related to the story about immigrants in Bournemouth using crossbows to shoot swans for food. That one is true.

Did Lady Di dress up as a man so she could visit a gay bar with Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett? Probably not, but then again it does have the ring of truth about it.

Who would have thought, for instance, we’d ever live to see a so-called Conservative Prime Minister splitting his party over gay marriage and passing a law which will wipe out three centuries of Press freedom?

Or that the Old Bill, when they’re not fitting up Cabinet Ministers or arresting each other for talking to reporters, would be smashing down the front doors of ageing television personalities at 6am over allegations of sexual impropriety 40 years ago?

Turn the pages of most papers, most days and at least half of the stories could be spoofs. The frightening thing is that they’re not.In 21st-century Britain, every day is April Fools’ Day. And the joke is usually on us.

Last week I said David Miliband’s towering legacy would be fortnightly rubbish collections and slop buckets. A number of readers have emailed to remind me that, as Foreign Secretary, Miliband also signed the anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty, which was imposed on the British people without a referendum and locks us into a federal Europe.

Now he’s abandoning ship, quitting as a Sunderland AFC director and clearing off to the Land of the Free, leaving the rest of us to live with the prospect of his weirdo Marxoid kid brother becoming Prime Minister.

As they say in Primrose Hill — Howay the lads!

Not The Village people!

A new BBC costume drama, The Village, was filmed at Hayfield,

Derbyshire. Starting in 1914, it charts the life and loves of ordinary folk over the past 100 years.

When the producers were casting around for extras they invited people from the village to audition.

Unfortunately, few of them were suitable on account of their ‘body art’, fake tans, plucked eybrows and piercings.

The Village characters Grace (Maxine Peake), John (John Simm), Young Bert (Bill Jones), and Joe (Nico Mirallegro)

Linda Baines, who runs the post office in Hayfield, said: ‘I would have loved to have seen myself in a primetime drama, as would my husband, but unfortunately we have tattoos and my hair is dyed so we didn’t stand a chance.’

I’ve often speculated on what proud men like my grandfather, who volunteered to fight in World War I, would make of modern Britain.

They’d probably take one look at the average tattooed, bleached, pierced monsters cluttering up the streets and wonder why they bothered.

High-viz cross bearers

We all have our cross to bear . . .

A few years ago, an actor playing Lord Nelson was forced to wear a life jacket over his Admiral’s uniform when filming in a boat on the Thames. I was inspired to imagine the Battle of Trafalgar being fought under modern health and safety rules.

It was the daftest example of elf’n’safety I’d come across. Until now.

Hi-viz is all the rage today. I’ve been bringing you some ridiculous hi-viz jacket sightings and there are plenty more to come.

But for now, allow me to draw your attention to the annual Easter Parade in Uckfield, East Sussex, on Good Friday which recreates Christ’s walk to Calvary. This year, the bloke carrying the cross was wearing a hi-viz vest. So now it’s Hi-Viz Jesus.

Always look on the bright side of life . . .

Bedroom tax? Wasn’t that Labour’s idea?

Simon Pegg lookalike Liam Byrne was touring radio and television studios yesterday banging on about the ‘bedroom tax’.

Byrne, some of you may remember, was the grinning ape who left a note at the Treasury joking that ‘There’s no money left’ after Gordon Brown had driven the public finances into the ground. In common with the rest of his Labour colleagues, he refuses to accept any responsibility for the economic mess they created.

You might have thought the politicians would take a day off on Easter Monday, like most normal folk. But MPs are not normal people. They inhabit their own self-important universe.

Byrne is one of the more absurd specimens, a hypocritical nonentity without a scintilla of shame, a walking insult to our intelligence.

Bankrupt a business and you can end up in court. Bankrupt a country and you will be invited on to the airwaves to spout mendacious drivel. Byrne was everywhere yesterday, peddling the fiction that the Government’s decision to reduce welfare handouts to people living in homes larger than their needs is a ‘bedroom tax’.

As Liam Byrne demonstrated again yesterday, Labour has nothing to offer except lies, cheap jibes and pathetic point-scoring

It is, of course, nothing of the sort. Actually, there were proposals for a genuine bedroom tax. But these were supported by Labour, not the wicked Conservative-led Coalition.

Eighteen months ago, shadow minister Tessa Jowell unveiled a report which called for older people — so-called ‘empty nesters’ — to be taxed out of their homes.

The idea was that this would free up accommodation for young families — precisely the intention of the latest reform.

Ex-ministers who should be too ashamed to show their faces in public wander the land spreading fear and despondency, like the zombie army in Simon Pegg's film Shaun Of The Dead (pictured)

The report, endorsed by Jowell, said: ‘While younger families are increasingly being squeezed into small flats and under-sized houses, older people are often rattling around in big houses with many bedrooms standing empty, often for years.’ Talk about pots and kettles. When Labour wanted to encourage people to downsize it was called ‘fairness’.

When the Coalition does the same, it’s condemned as yet another example of the ‘savage cuts’.

It may well be that this Government’s welfare reforms are flawed. They won’t even save much money, if any.

But something had to be done to clean up the public finances after Labour’s drunken-sailor spending spree beggared the country.

As Byrne demonstrated again yesterday, Labour has nothing to offer except lies, cheap jibes and pathetic point-scoring.

Ex-ministers who should be too ashamed to show their faces in public wander the land spreading fear and despondency, like the zombie army in Simon Pegg’s film Shaun Of The Dead.

Byrne should be locked in his bedroom until he has something sensible to contribute.







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