Another year goes by and no bloody official recognition. Slave my guts out every week alerting people to the fact that Bono, Patricia Hewitt, Sting, the Milibands, Ruth Kelly, all doctors and most of the Conservative party are agents of Satan, all for no thanks. Not that one does it in expectation of ennoblement, of course. One does it, without fear or favour, for the good of the country. And for money, obviously.

But then you read the new year’s honours list and discover, halfway down, that George Alagiah and Hanif Kureishi have both been bunged some Establishment bauble, and the rancour begins to build. Kureishi’s got a CBE – for what? I mean, I have nothing against the chap. He’s quite a good writer, in much the same way as Jimmy Carr is quite a good comedian and Bas Savage, of Brighton, is quite a good footballer. In truth, the three of them inhabit that vague, shadowy area where “quite good” merges imperceptibly with “actually, not very good at all”.

Martin Amis, Iain Banks and, strange to say, JG Ballard have never been honoured – some people might argue that they have performed a greater service to literature over the years than Kureishi. Some people might even remember the name of a book one of them has written, which gives them the distinct edge over Hanif.

And then George Alagiah, recipient of an OBE – what’s he done, exactly? Read the bloody news from an Autocue. Again, I have nothing against George, who seems a likeable chap. But his is an occupation that requires nothing in the way of skill, tenacity, intellectual ability or fortitude. All you have to do is sit there, read what’s been written for you by some marginally postpubescent PC BBC monkey and try not to belch or snigger. A pig’s bladder on a stick could read the news. Probably. You begin to wonder what honours are for.

Why, for example, has a person called Jazzie B been handed an OBE? Because he was the driving force of Soul II Soul, a mediocre Brit R&B band a decade or so back? Hell, is that all it takes? I could form a mediocre Brit R&B band tomorrow and so, I suspect, could you. If Jazzie B can get an OBE then surely So Solid Crew deserve knighthoods.

And then there’s Kylie Minogue, who gets an OBE for shoving her arse in our faces whenever the opportunity arises, or for having successfully recovered from cancer, or for having taken part in an episode of The Vicar of Dibley. Gordon Brown recently published a book about what can be achieved by individuals who struggle against overwhelming odds to inspire and transform their communities. It was quite an uplifting book in a way.

It’s just that I never knew it was written with Kylie Minogue in mind, still less Hanif Kureishi. Are those the people he meant?

On Boxing Day news came to me, via an extremely right-wing evangelical Christian friend, that Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, was created from frozen samples of Adolf Hitler’s sperm implanted into Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, with the connivance of the Soviet Union.

I investigated this story very rigorously (by typing “Hitler”, “sperm” and “Merkel” into Google) and have concluded that it is absolutely correct.

Certainly lots of people think it’s true, even if most of them do have strange eyes and tendrils of spittle dangling from their lips.

There is even the suggestion, online, that rather than Gretl Braun, our own Unity Mitford was the host mother. Remarkable.

Over the Christmas period I came into contact with a lot of people who were created from Hitler’s frozen sperm. The fat hag in front of me at the checkout in Waitrose on Christmas Eve, for example; the dictatorial little oaf who made me move three yards at Paddington station so that I was in the “smoking section” – to name but two.

It is odd to think that as the Ruskie shells rained down on Berlin and all was lost, Adolf was otherwise occupied: locked away in the bunker toilets with a small beaker and a copy of Razzle magazine.

I’m bovvered and she ain’t funny

Look – don’t get me wrong. I’m a normal bloke who enjoys a good bit of bigotry and racism just as much as the next fellow, all the more so if the, uh, community being lampooned is preternaturally sensitive and prone to screaming “racist” at the drop of a hat.

But Catherine Tate’s dig at the Irish on her BBC Christmas special, now to be investigated by the thousand upon thousand lucratively paid employees of that relentlessly expanding quango, Ofcom, left me cold. What might an Irish person get for Christmas? Go on, guess! A balaclava! Like IRA terrorists used to wear! Help, someone strap up my ribs. According to the BBC, Tate is a “comedy genius”. The definition of “genius”, then, has slipped a little since the days of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Tate’s show consists of a seemingly endless recitation of numbingly familiar catchphrases that were not very funny in the first place. The same woeful dross repeated week after week: humour for people with the IQ of a whelk. Am I bovvered? You should be, love – you’re about as funny as Pakistan.

Irish people wearing balaclavas and knuckledusters: crass, cowardly and at least 10 years out of date.

High cost of cheap immigrant labour

The mass influx of foreign labour from eastern Europe has meant that 525,000 fewer British-born people are in work today than in 2003, according to figures from the Commons library.

It may be that those Brits no longer working are, according to popular perception, bone idle. Or simply unwilling to scrabble around in the dirt for a pittance and live six to a room like their new competitors.

Whatever the truth, the rest of us will be paying for their benefits. A recent study suggested that for Polish plumbers and Kosovan potato pickers to add to the wealth of this country, they would have to bring with them £144,000 of capital – but this didn’t take account of the cost of unemployment occasioned among indigenous Brits.

The idea that we should open our doors to unlimited cheap immigrant labour was sold to us as being a necessity, with an ageing population. It was a lie and it is to the TUC’s enormous discredit that, for reasons of political correctness, it offered no opposition. The financial – and social – cost is with us now.

Excellent news from the Countryside Alliance: record numbers of toffs, toff wannabes and clapped-out celebs (including Jennifer Saunders) took part in drag hunts on Boxing Day. This immediately refutes all that apocalyptic bilge churned out by the Alliance at the time that the ban on hunting with dogs was introduced: not a single job has been lost as a result of the ban, not a single rural community “decimated”, not a single dog put down. And as a bonus, “hunting” – stripped of its wilful cruelty – has become more popular than ever.

Now all we need is the police to ensure that the law is rigorously upheld: there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that too often they can’t be bothered.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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