“Has President Obama Travelled to Mars?”

Pay no attention to Tony Blair’s interview on Sky News this morning (still the master of the Vacuo-Olympian sound bite: “It’s really important to distinguish between a coalition that is a marriage of conviction and a coalition that is a marriage of convenience”). Do not click on my column for The Independent on Sunday on why The Mirror’s headline, “Call this Justice?” was a QTWTAIY. Avert your eyes from Tom Harris’s brilliant article for Labour List on the ultimate betrayal: trying to persuade former Tory voters to vote Labour.

Instead, read this: “Has President Obama Travelled to Mars?” Number 830 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No, asked by Rob Schwarz at Stranger Dimensions (“Apocalyptic science and the ends of the world collide…”) in January but for some reason overlooked until now.

Top opening paragraph: “At the age of 19, President Barack Obama went by the name of Barry Soetero, and he had been to Mars.”

Thanks to Simone Webb for putting right that omission.

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  “It’s really important to distinguish between a coalition that is a marriage of conviction and a coalition that is a marriage of convenience”

  Uttered, almost certainly without a trace of irony, by one of the protagonists in a coalition of Blairites and Brownites cobbled together over dinner at Granita’s, heralding a period of almost uninterrupted internecine warfare that ended with the triumph of the Brownites in a palace coup in 2007 – a victory that could only be described as pyrrhic.

  If golf is a good walk spoiled, the straight kinda guy’s premiership was a fine opportunity wasted. Along with the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens and 179 British servicemen and women, the vast majority in the bungled aftermath of Mission Accomplished, it need hardly be added.