How to blow £13 million

The Count can think of plenty of ways to blow £13 million. Unfortunately, the Countess can think of even more ways of blowing £13 million and does so at great cost to what remains of the family silver, so carefully looted over the laast few hundred years by the Kostov clan in the name of Mother Russia.

But aristocratic waste is nothing compared to what the government can achieve. To them, blowing £13 million is as inconsequential as blowing their nose. They do not need to blow their noses anyway. They need to clean thier noses to make them less brown. But that misses the point. The point is that it is in the small things that the greatest waste is achieved. Like the time the Count was sent to work in a tax office. Officially, this was work experience. Unofficially it was to get hold of the Kostov tax returns and destroy them. But in this so called work, the young Kostov discovered that he was doing something which was

1. 100% pointless: sending out tax notifications on codings which everyone knew would be changed three weeks later by the spring budget
2. 100% inefficient: it could have been done by computer in a few moments, but had to be done by the young Kostov hand over ten weeks
3. 60% even more inefficient, because even by hand the work could be done in four weeks, not ten weeks: but ten weeks was the alloted time and because the bureaucrats did not want to lost their budget for the following year, the young Kostov was retained for the full ten weeks. This gave him plenty of time to help out with the filing in the office, to locate the Kostov tax returns and secure the Kostov inheritance from the rapacious hands of the taxpayer for another generation.

All this still misses the point. The count has been drinking too much vodka, and it is not even lunchtime yet. Drink is what happens to people when they start thinking about the taxman.

So let's see how the government can blow £13 million without even trying. They set up a programme to recruit teachers. Because they have no imagination, they have no idea how to do it. So they try to bribe graduates into becoming teachers. But because they wet their pants at the thought of the Unions demanding equal treatment for all teachers, they can not even bribe the graduates well: they bung them a laptop computer and digital camera. If even the dullest graduate can not figure out that it is not worth blowing their career for a digital camera, then they should not become a teacher.

That's a triple negative. Award yourself a medal if you could understand it. The Count is in a generous mood today.

Then the dimwits figure that since they have a lousy proposition, the way to make it work is to spend a fortune on advertising it. £13 million later, they had managed to con 140 of the dimmer graduates into joining their scheme. That is about £100,000 per graduate just to recruit them, let alone train them or pay them. For £100,000 they could have put together a real bribe. Even the Count would consider stepping into a school for a day or two for a cool £100,000.

We will now see how the government's scheme was wasting 99% of its budget by comparing it with a private charitable scheme, called Teach First. Teach First could not offer any bribes at all. And to make matters more interesting, it was putting teachers into challenging schools, which have traditionally served as feeders to Her Majesty's Prisons in much the same way as Eton is a feeder school for Oxford, Cambridge and Parliament. It would be better if Eton fed the prisons and the challenging schools fed Parlaiment, but that is another matter.

Teach First had no money but plenty of imagination. Within three years it had recruited over 500 top teachers and had received government support totalling £200,000, or roughly £400 per teacher.

Government recruiting cost per top(ish) teacher: £100,000. Private sector cost per top top teacher: £400. Government waste: 99.6%. People whine about aristocratic waste because it is visible. But the far bigger waste are all the useless bureaucrats who save money on paper clips at the same time as they blow millions and billions on employing themselves to administer utterly useless programmes in the most inefficient way possible.

This is all so depressing, the Count is going to have to open another bottle of Vodka or two.

£5 billion for a photo

It used to cost one rouble and a bottle of vodka for a family snap by the village photographer with his box camera and sodium flare. The vodka cost less than the rouble, but was valued more by the photographer. This helps explain why the Kostovs have no useful photographs from earlier than about 1997.

Compare this aristocratic waste with the parsimony of our "servants of the people" who serve themselves with as much gravy as they can from the trough of public money. For them, a photo oportunity does not cost a rouble. It costs £5 billion.

£5 billion for a photo? We could buy 2.5 billion bottles of vodka, duty free, which would be enough to keep the Kostov photographer happy and enough to make sure none of the Kostovs cared that his photographs looked like a blizzard viewed through a drunk's eyes. Given that most of the time we were drunk and living in a blizzard, this may help explain why his photographs turned out the way they did.

Here's how to spend £5 billion on a photo.

Set up something called the school Academies, which is a Good Thing. It is all about educashon. That means nice stories about edukating kids and lots of pictures of smiling politicians and smiling children in front of brand new skools which have been built at a cost of £25 million each. Then build 200 akademiz.

There is a problem with building new skools and hoping it will improve iddugation. Last time I checked, chrome and glass, however new and shiny, does not edugate. If I remember rightly, nanny and then the governess eddugated. They did not cost £25 billion. And there was no chance of vandalising the governess, unlike the chrome and glass which will all be falling down in 25 years because the kids have decided to practice some conceptual, socially inclusive art on the fabric of the scool, and the politicians can not be arsed to pay for any maintenance: once they have got their photo unveiling the plaque to the brand new skule they don't want anything more to do with it. Graffiti covered, vandalised, rotting skools are not such good photo opportunities.

Of the £25 million per school, how much goes to hiring good staff?

Zero. Nada. Nothing. Zip.

So now we know how the government will raise edugashion standards: new buildings, same old failed teachers and the same old failed methods.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the politicians huffing and puffing in the background that the Accadimmies are all about giving freedom to the scule to experiment. You can give them freedom without blowing £25 million on buildings. And freedom without the cash to hire a good few governesses, nannies or even teachers is pretty pointless. It is called giving people the freedom to fail.

Once they have failed, the true cost of the akedimies will become clear as the pupils graduate from skool to crime and to prison. The cost of keeping a failed student in prison is over £30,000 a year, which is more than the £23,000 a year Eton charges. Even allowing for spending on tail coats, skiing trips and the obligatory heroin addiction, Eton works out much cheaper than prison. And Eton is able to get away with using 500 year old buildings, which doubtless the government would want to improve with a shiny new steel and glass set of buildings which will collapse in 25 years' time.

So if you want a proper education and reduced costs, look to the aristocracy. They are far less wasteful than the spendthrifts who are addicted to spending taxpayer's money. Minister Kostov is pleased to be of service.......

solid stirling shite

So congratulations to the Scottish Parliament on winning the Stirling Prize for architecture, value £20,000. If they can win another 21,750 prizes of the same value, they might just about pay for the white elephant.

If the Count blows a modest £15 million on country estate, all the low life will be up in arms about the extravagent waste of the idle rich. Blow 30 times that amount and the low life get a prize for it. If you want real waste and extravagence, do not look to the idle aristocracy. Look to the idle layabouts that fashion themselves as the servants of the people.

In taking on the Scots, those with thick heads and thin skins, the Count has gone in search of an ally. Step forward red Ken Livingstone, mayor of London and nutty as a fruitcake. Why on earth should a Count be allying with red Ken? Like the Count, red Ken can call things as they are. So he has made the one astute observation of the London Assembly, which he runs: fire the 25 politician assembly members because they are idlers who do no work.

Hold on to your travel ticket: we will return to Scotland via the London Assembly in due course.

Let's look at this for a moment. London has a human population of 7 million (plus politicians) for which we have 25 useless Assembly members. Scotland (human population heading south of 5 million as Scots all sign up to Johnson's declaration that "the finest sight in Scotland is the high road to England" where they can all say how wonderful Scotland is, without the inconvenience of living there). So how many politicians does Scotland need? 129. Five times as many politicians doing five times the damage for a smaller population than London.

Next stop on the Count's tour: the cost of the politician's buildings.

The London Assembly cost an outrageous £43 million. This is justified by the smellies because it is an iconic building (blah blah blah) on a a top site in the centre of London where the cost of breathing, let alone living, is measured in billions of pounds per second. Well, GDP per head in inner London is three times that of Scotland. So how much did the wonderful Scottish parliament cost for an equally iconic (blah blah blah) building in a top site for a smaller population with one third the living costs of London? Perhaps an extravagent £20 million will do nicely?

£20 million for the "servants of the people"? You must be kidding. These servants have ideas above their station: they blew £431 million (at least) on finding somewhere to put the photocopier. Haven't they heard of Prontaprint? Predictably, it took twice as long and cost four times as much as originally estimated and no politician was in any way to blame for the fiasco they so totally mismanaged: time to give themselves a few prizes for blowing their master's money. If we are their masters, we should horse whip them immediately and have them thrown in debtors' prison where they can beg for alms from vistors who can see the consequences of profligacy with the public purse. Instead, each of the 129 members has £3.5 million of office building.

The Count could buy a Scottish castle or two for £3.5 million and have cash left over to buy the fishing rights on the local river. The reason Scottish castles are so cheap is that no sane person would want to live in one, unless it could be put somewhere interesting, like Italy. But then it would not be a Scottish castle. And the Count does not even want the fishing rights to some washed up river which used to have salmon. He wants the shooting rights to the Scottish Parliament so that he can cull the useless politicians. They may have banned hunting with dogs: they have not banned hunting of dogs. That means all the politicians can be culled with immunity. Forget the Purdeys, I think this is one for my Uzi....

Plumbing the depths

The Count prefers the High Life. It is certainly cheaper than the low life. The lowest forms of life always seem to turn out to be the most expensive: think of Tony Blair and his addiction to spending all the Count's ill-gotten gains.

So the Count has decided to go on a fearless journey of discovery in search of the lowest form of life on the planet. It turned out that the Count did not have to look far: the low life crawled in through the front door. The slime ball claimed to be a plumber and then charged the Count £120 for changing a flange. Apparently flanges are little bits of rubber which stop things leaking, like condoms but less useful.

The plumber joins the ranks of other low life, like "sand and cement Jim" who never saw a building problem which he could not tosh up with a little sand and cement, plus £300 for his efforts. Leaking drains? Sand, cement and £300 will tosh it up mate. Dodgy window? Sand, cement and £300 will sort it out. Cash will do nicely, but a good horse whipping would do even better.

But plumbers, builders and decorators are amateurs compared to the real low life. Consultants and lawyers are just the same as plumbers: fat, self-serving, greedy, you can never find a good one when you need one, the job is always trickier than you first thought (because you hired the wrong person last time) and so it will take twice as long and cost four times as much as you first thought. But this is your lucky day: they have just the person to sort it out for you. The only difference is that the so-called professionals wear fancy shirts which justify even fancier bills than the plumbers.

This is what happens when you let the servants get ideas above their station.

But the real low life are the shit bags who con their way into major construction projects which you know will escalate in cost out of control. Let's start with an easy one: the upgrade of the West Coast train line. This was a simple project which should have cost an outrageous £2 billion to upgrade 400 miles of track to take train speeds up from 110 mph to 140 mph. It should have been ready this year. Now it looks like the cost is going past £10 billion; the trains will not be able to run faster than 125 mph if they ever get round to completing the project. Overall train times will decline because operators are fined for being late, so their logical solution is to pad the timetable so much that even if they are delayed, they still will not be late: so they build delay into their timetables. £10 billion and the Count is still counting for absolutely zero improvement.

And we have not even got round to the Scottish Parliament (politicians controlling costs - this is a positively dangerous idea as it will make any sane person either die laughing, go mad or become a homicidal maniac: in the Count's case he may achieve all three outcomes). Then there is the Dome: more politicians controlling costs. Ha. Let's talk about nuclear power stations, the Jubilee Line extension or any other major project in the last 25 years. Or rather, let's not talk about it, because it is too depressing.

The low life complain about the extravagence of the aristocracy. Extravagent, us? We are into recylcing our house decorations and china: that is what we use Sotheby's for. Sell a Rembrandt and buy a Monet. Or, more likely, sell a Monet to pay for more mindless extravagence of a government that is addicted to spending. The Commons costs five times as much to run as the Lords and do five times as much damage.

So if you want to stop extravagence and waste then get rid of the low life, the Count will humbly take over from Tony's cronies. A few million a year for the Count as Prime Minister is far better value than the thousands of overpaid cronies and low life that live in and on governmetn wasting billions on projects that deliver zero value.

What about the cost of living?

The health nazis are on the march again.

The cost of not eating our greens is estimated at $1,100 billion. Look: $1 billion here or there is clearly a rounding error in their calculation: give it to the count. I could give away $100 million and still have $900 million to buy back my Russian estates and the life style to which I am sure I could become accustomed. $1,100 billion????? That could be serious money.

$1,100 billion is what WHO reckon is the cost of avoidable chronic diseases. The avoidable chronic disease that the Count has spotted is death from the overwhelming odure of bureaucratic, self-serving bullshit running out of the WHO headquarters.


The worst fascists are the right on ones who pretend to want to help us, mainly by banning us from doing anything we might enjoy like drinking vodka, eating raw meat (and even chips) while out misbehaving with members of the opposite sex and the more alluring beasts of the forest. Nanny was bad enough, until I was old enough to know how good her badness could be. But Nanny WHO have the full UN mindset of wanting to run the world without the inconvenience of any elections. Only aristocrats are allowed to do that, and at least we do not ban everything once we are in power.

So today the World Health Organisation tells us that lots of people will die from chronic diseases which could be avoided if we all ate our peas, jogged, had cold showers in the morning and generally tried to be as miserable as the faceless bureaucrats who chew their celery sticks in the WHO. Time to look for the meadow mayonnaise: this is not a difficult exercise.

1) The venal start. Well of course the WHO is not going to produce a report which says things might be getting better. No WHO report can be produced shroud waving and the prospect of millions of deaths. They are in the business of keeping themselves in business, so the last thing they want to do is to admit that we might be a little better off than in the old days, when my mad Uncle Vanya who had to chew his own arm off without anaesthetic after being attacked by a wolf which took exception to being hunted. A rabid wolf was one thing: a rabid uncle Vanya was altogether more terrifying. And do not even mention tooth ache. The only medicine we had was opium, which was the one thing that was better in those days. WHO have banned even that.

2) The meadow mayonnaise moment. $1,100 billion? Kiss my aristocratic pants. Cut away the bollocks (of the WHO bureaucrats, preferably) and even they have to admit that the sum is only £1.9 billion a year in the UK: that is one thirtieth of the sum they chose for the press release. No matter: stick a large number out there and some journalist will fall for it. Even the £1.9 billion is totally suspect. It totally fails to count the cost of keeping these people alive. On our estates we were never to keen on the peasants living much beyond 50: their productivity went from abysmal to negative. So we encouraged them to have a good time on illicit vodka and as many potatoes as they could manage, in the hope this would help them work hard, enjoy life and die early. This way, everyone was kept happy.

3) The venal conclusion. Inevitably, the conclusion is that all the special interest groups have found another bandwagon and are jumping on board.
The WHO leads the way: "The cost of inaction is clear and unacceptable"
Diabetes UK jumps on board as well: "people must be educated to eat a healthy diet and take up regular physical activity"
The Lancet editor is calling for "concerted and co-ordinated political action" to help him get a knighthood and a job with WHO
The British Heart foundation gleefully warns of "an epidemic of obesity".

Have these people ever heard of liberty, free choice, personal responsibility or having fun? If you want any of these, you need an aristocrat, not a bureaucrat, running planet earth. Emperor Kostov at your service......

What's the cost of a billion deaths?

The great professor Peto has declared that a billion people are going to die from smoking.

At least he knows how to get a headline. But in this case, the wreaths he sees are not the wreaths of a billion smokers who have wheezed their last. He is seeing the wreaths which mark the death of academic respectability at his University: the once great Oxford. Now even their professors have to stoop to sensationalism like some superannuated Russian Count to get noticed. Except that even we would not stoop quite so low, not least of all because those Mongolian horses have left the count unable to stoop at all.

The professor missed one trick: he should have put a monetary value on each life. Say each life was worth $10,000 (too much for your average peasant, but the Count is in a generous mood today). He could have then declared that smoking was going to cost the world $10,000 billion ($10 trillion or gazillion or whatever they have for loads of dosh which someone should be giving to the Count).

The inevitable conclusion is that we should Do Something to stop the world heading to smoking cataclysm. This mainly involves banning people from what they want to do: teh normal busy bodies banning bug. At some stage, it doubtless involves giving more money to the good professor to investigate the problem further.

The bullshit is so deep, Hercules needs to come along and clean it out. Lacking a river to cleanse the professors bollocks, we will take a shovel to his bollocks and see what we can do. I hope it is more painful for him than it will be for the Count.

1) The billion people is over 100 years, so that is ten million a year out of a population of 6,000 million. One in six hundred people will die from smoking every year. Is that a terrible price for smoker's to pay for a life time of pleasure?

2) When will these smokers die? If they all keel over at the age of 28, then that is a problem. If they all die after they have retired, then what precisely is the problem?
- the smokers will have had a good few decades of smoking and contributing lots of fag tax at the same time to lucky non-smokers like the Count who has always liked the notion of peasants supporting his lifestyle
- they will have finished bringing up their offspring. Hopefully the offspring will have been taught to smoke to provide more taxes to defray the Count's tax bill.
- they will no longer be economically active, so the taxpayer will be relieved of a burden.

I think the professor wants us all to live long and miserably, without any pleasures, while we become an increasing burden on our families and the state. When the Count goes, I hope to be shot by an insanely jealous husband as I am caught in bed with his wife and his daughter.

3) Where does his billion come from? Sounds suspiciously round to me. Even he admits that most of them will be in China. He should go there. From Beijing to Hong Kong there is a foul permasmog which cuts visibilty down to a few hundred metres: the Chinese will have choked on their own pollution long before they choke on their foul cigarettes.

He should do another estimate: how many people die from living each year? Roughly 100% of all deaths are a consequence of living. Perhaps we should therefore ban living, which in the professor's case would be a very good idea indeed.