Smellyface, Smel-lyface, what are they feeding you?

Smellyface, Smel-lyface, it's not your fau-ho-haullllt!

Ah, Smellyface. It is your fault, all the old cobblers that turns up in your column. You put it there. You've even admitted it a couple of times recently, saying somthing like, 'sometimes, even I can't make it up,' as if we won't notice that means most of the time you can, you tricky trickster.



Sorry, people. Richard Littlejohn is in one of those lucrative phases of his career where some of the ropey old toss he's banged out in a hurry before rushing out in his flip-flops for pancakes gets republished in a book and then republished again as 'excerpts' in the paper he originally wrote it for. Coodernmaykiddapp!

Today's is 'Don't say I didn't warn you: The Labour Party promised us New Jerusalem... but they gave us Little Britain!' Hur hur! Labour gave us a posh school called Kelsey Grammar with a pupil named Honkytonk!

That's not what he meant, obviously. Duh. He meant the grotesque teenage mother he goes on to talk about. Look at the picture - two of her kids are brown. That makes it worse. (Those kids aren't in the article by the way. Gary has helpfully added them in and removed the father for some reason. Wonder what it was).

Surprisingly, the column's not just copied and pasted from an earlier column. It's much harder work than that!

Mainly, he's taken an earlier column - 'Welcome to Britain, land of the rising scum.... We've cornered the market on welfare layabouts, drug addicts and feral gangs' and removed some of the bits that reveal his argument for the obvious bit of old rubbish it is.

In the old version, he includes a story about how he allegedly saw a caricatured family, which opens:

The first time it properly dawned on me that the game was indeed up was about 20 years ago in Blackpool, where I was covering the Labour Party conference.

In the new version, which is from a book about how bad life has been under Labour in the last 13 years and how it's turned us into a nation of shit people, he neglects to mention that he allegedly saw this when a Labour government was still two elections away. He still includes the anecdote as evidence of the shitness of the people under a Labour government. Class! Get yourself some extra maple syrup.

To add to that, like Alastair Campbell, he's removed uncertainty from source material to make things seem more definite. In the original, he says this terrible family ate fish and chips at 9.30 in the morning:

washed down with what I seem to remember was Irn-Bru, in the case of the children, and Special Brew, for the parents' [emphasis mine]

The 'seem to remember' has gone, replaced with a definite. The vignette is closed with:

Then again, they could just have been scum. It was then that it dawned on me that the game was up for Labour. We've always had what sociologists prefer to call an underclass. But not on this scale and never so visible.

See what he did there? He pretended he realised the game was up for Labour nine years before they could have had anything to do with the visibility of the people he saw without telling you how long ago he saw them. You could, er, make it up.

The rest is based on a parody of a sitcom that aired 33 years ago and a crap extended gag involving a criminal that was imprisoned 42 years ago. Great. If he can't be arsed with new stuff, I can't be arsed going through it properly.

Most of it is lifted from 2007's 'Minnie Ha-Ha's having a laugh in Cell Block H', with a headline based on a soap that stopped being made 21 years before the article was written, and a film star who hadn't made a film in 84 years and had been dead for 23 years. All you need to know is:

• Richard Littlejohn is a massive bell-end.

One gem, secreted away in the middle of the article, is this:

I didn't have to make it up. Most of this lunacy was based on actual cases and I thought I'd pretty much covered the waterfront.

Didn't have to make it up. Most of it was based on actual cases. Yet another oblique admission that he sometimes does make it up and exaggerate.  As if we didn't know.

Richard, are these recent admisssions that you make it up cries for help? Are you wrestling with the idea of a big reveal where we have an article admitting you've been playing a character?

I'm hoping it's not deliberate, and we can look forward to a Noel Edmonds style breakdown where you sob, "I can't keep it up any more," on the floor of the Question Time studio.

Either way, you need to look at this post - 'Are we the baddies?'