Fake 'em all!

Eleven year-old Liam Corcoran walked through five security checks unchallenged and ended up on a flight to Rome. The poor, confused lad appears to have mingled  with some other children, then simply followed them to board the Boeing. Naturally it has caused a retrospective hoo-hah, but at the time, officials who were responsible for counting heads, searching bags and checking credentials appear to have accepted his right to be there without question. Who, after all, would suspect a pre-teen to be travelling unchaperoned?

Not all juvenile adventurers manage to pull it off, however. In Newquay an intoxicated under-age drinker tried to blag his way into a pub using a fake ID in the name of Rodney Trotter of Peckham. After his ill-conceived stunt came to nothing he went on his way, minus the card, leaving the management wondering if he'd have had more luck under the pseudonym of Trigger. (Alright Dave?)

And recently, Stuart Elliott from Hull was exposed as the latest in a long line of a modern-day 'Walts' (after Walter Mitty) peddling a fictitious back-story of heroic derring-do, based on a dubious peripheral connection with the boys at the sharp end. (He could tell you what he used to do, but then he'd have to kill you.)

Fortunately none of these people will ever be in charge. But,wait? Is that a youthful Nick Clegg I see, wandering aimlessly onto the political stage by tagging along with another group of boys, not of his own family? And where are George Osborne's credentials to be drunk in charge of the economy? Has nobody checked his papers? And just this morning I hear on the news that Vince Cable believes he'd make a good chancellor. (So which of the proper parties were you planning on defecting to, you daft old sod?)

It seems the political world is awash with fakers, chancers, wannabes and fools. It does seem that they are the only people mad enough to ever crave a job in power. And while the current incumbents are hardly the stuff of legend, the Labour alternative embraces such colossal levels of delusion as to somehow believe, even after their craven attempt to bring the country to its knees, that more of that self-same same medicine is what's needed. In fact, so gullible are they, they swallowed the line that Tony Blair is a socialist!

We have seen the rise and rise of the 'professional' politician; those who play politics for politics itself and appear to have no connection with or understanding of the world at large. At least the USA once had the good sense to accept that in the world of Walter Mitty nothing was real and elected a Hollywood actor to the highest office in the land. He did okay, too.

Come 2015 I'm voting for Brian Blessed!