Is Keith Vaz a baldy, a baddy — or a bagel?
The truth is I always have trouble with asterisks, or a********, as they should more properly be known. In those far-off days when Liam Gallagher was the belle of the ball, newspaper interviews with him were so full of asterisks that they looked like the sky at night.
A typical quote would go: ‘Are you ****ing tripping d******d, I’m not a ****ing c***.’
It was almost as though Gallagher’s first language was Asterisk.
Gordon Ramsay is also fluent in Asterisk. Reading any report of a Ramsay TV show generally takes twice as long as it should. To fully understand it, you have to go to the effort of filling in all the blanks.
he once had a TV show called Gordon’s Great British Nightmare. One report of it finds him shouting, ‘ You’re my only **** ing hope right now. Mum’s on the ****ing verge, ****ing Dad’s lost it, and you my sweet, at **** ing 19, have the ****ing world on your shoulders.’
Come again? To decode this number of asterisks, we would really need Alan Turing to pop his head round the door with an enigma machine.
Recent reports on the comings and goings of Keith Vaz, or Keith V**, made particularly puzzling reading. For instance, at one point he asked one of his new young friends to: ‘Treat me like a b****!’
even the most experienced Scrabble player, a dab hand at coming up with five-letter words beginning with B, might be left wondering what on earth Keith was getting at.
WAS he, perhaps, asking to be treated like a baton? This would involve him adopting a rigid, stick- like posture in order to be waved around by his feet in the air while a small orchestra worked its way through a selection of popular classics.
In a small flat, and with limited time at his disposal, this would surely have been a little tricky. But, then again, treating Vaz like a b****, or banjo, might have been just as difficult.
Or might the asterisks have stood for: ‘Treat me like a badge’? even the burliest male escort might have had trouble walking around for very long with Keith Vaz pinned to his lapel.
So let’s examine the other b**** possibilities. A) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BEACH!’ hAD Keith Vaz kept all the necessary seaside paraphernalia in his flat (bucket, spade, sunhat, etc), would anyone really have had the nerve to place a deckchair and a windbreak on his body? Odds: 500-1. B) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BROOM!’ eMpLOYING his outstretched legs as the handle and his head as the brush, Vaz would make an unsatisfactory broom, as he is blessed with so few bristles. The Vaz broom would take at least 15 times longer to sweep the average kitchen floor than the conventional household broom. The same drawback would apply to B for
brush. Odds: 1,200-1. C) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BUSBY!’ eVeN the heftiest member of the Royal horse Artillery might blanch at the prospect of marching up and down with Keith Vaz on his head. And what would her Majesty say? Odds: 2,000-1. D) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BELCH!’ ThIS seems much more likely. In the past, Keith Vaz may have seemed extremely pleased with himself, but psychiatrists tell us that many figures in public life employ swagger and bluster to disguise a lack of self- esteem. Was his secret desire always to be avoided like a belch? If so, his wish has come true. Odds: 12-1 E) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BONUS!’ TOO perverse to be true. Odds: 10,000-1. F) ‘TREAT ME LIKE A BADDY!’ AT LAST, the Great Asterisk Mystery is resolved! Once all the alternatives — treat me like a bagel, a baldy, a basin, a belly, a benny, a Beryl, a Bible, a bimbo, a biped, a bison, a blimp, a blush, a bonus, a bosun, a buggy — have been eliminated, a baddy seems by far the most appropriate.
On a sunnier note, it also suggests a future career path. Let’s hope we can look forward to seeing him this Christmas in peter pan at the De Montfort hall, Leicester, starring as Captain hook, or, rather, Captain h***.