Littlejohn isn't even trying

Today's Richard Littlejohn column isn't the slightest bit lazy or unimaginative.

Oh wait, it is.

A few days ago, the Advertising Standards Agency ruled that two Government adverts about climate change were in breach of their Code.

Littlejohn says:

The Government has been ordered to drop two adverts based on nursery rhymes which exaggerated the risks of so-called 'global warming'.

...the Advertising Standards Agency said they amounted to scaremongering and didn't reflect the growing scepticism over claims that the planet is heating up.

Of course, that's only half the story. The ASA investigated five ads and cleared three of them. Generally, it did not find the ads in breach on truthfulness, substantiation or environmental claims. The ASA also ruled the ads did not breach their clauses on 'distress' so they didn't actually say they 'amounted to scaremongering'.

Littlejohn then repeats all his usual points:

Despite the fact that the world has actually got cooler this century, mounting evidence that 'climate change' is a myth, and the revelation that alleged 'experts' in the field have been fiddling the figures to fit their theories, the hysteria goes on.

It's an interesting use of the word 'fact'.

Littlejohn doesn't seem to have read the ASA judgment. Because it says:

The ASA understood that, amongst the majority of scientists who worked in the field of climate research globally, there was a consensus that human activity was contributing to upward temperature trends globally and would continue to do so unless steps were taken by the worlds' governments to reduce GHG emissions, including CO2.

We concluded that, at the time the ads were published, there was not a significant division of informed scientific opinion on the issue amongst the world's climate scientists.

It may just be that Littlejohn is not considered in the 'informed scientific opinion' category.

So, it's not quite as clear cut as Littlejohn tries to imply, if you can imagine such a thing. He doesn't even mention the three adverts that were cleared.

But the adverts updated nursery rhymes to make their point. So Littlejohn says:

It also got me wondering what other nursery rhymes could be updated ...

The Daily Mash wondered the same thing two days ago...

His lack of imagination runs to the rhymes themselves. He criticises the climate change ones for not scanning and not being true.

And guess what? He then writes his own which don't scan and aren't true.

Also they're repetitive, and incredibly unfunny. Almost indescribably awful.

Not unlike that time he went through the TV listings to put Alan Yentob in every programme.

So we get this:

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown.

Trying escape the lynch mob who think he's a paedophile.

When they catch him they'll string him up, the dirty nonce.

And later this:

George Porgie, pudding and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry,

Now he's on the sexual offenders' register.

And on health we get this:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

So they took him to an NHS hospital, where he caught MRSA and died.

And this:

Three blind mice, three blind mice, See how they run, see how they run.

This ward's been crawling with mice since the NHS contracted out the cleaning.

Could that last line sound any more like he just isn't trying at all?

Of course, 'the foreigners' cop it too:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester,

But when he got there

He found they'd already given the job to a foreign GP who can't speak English.

And:

As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives.

He said he'd come from Somalia,

And was now living on benefits in a £2.5 million townhouse in Kensington.

He runs through every one of his usual targets - Muslims, single mums, gay men, CSOs, equality, diversity - and fails to come up with a single new or interesting thing to say about any of them. He even references the foot-and-mouth outbreak which happened either three or nine years ago, depending on how generous you feel.

Oh, and because he says he never makes up health and safety stories, it's worth mentioning this one:

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, To get her poor doggie a bone.

When she got there, it was groaning with oven chips, turkey twizzlers, bumper bags of crisps and lashings of fizzy drinks.

But there weren't any bones because elf 'n' safety had threatened to prosecute the butcher if he didn't stop selling them.

Presumably there is more to his column - these dreadful 'rhymes' are all that's online - but the Mail have spared us. Err, kept it for the people who buy the paper.

[Update: thanks to Uponnothing for the comment below. I apologise. I should know better by now. Apparently, those 'rhymes' are all Littlejohn has come up with today. No wonder he gets paid over £700,000 a year and was recently named the sixth best columnist in Britain...]

(Hat-tip to Red Arrow at Mailwatch Forum)