It's tough being a charity. You gotta slug it out with your competitors to gain attention. If one charity parades a victim with a bleeding stump, you need a victim with two bleeding stumps before they find the orphan with two bleeding stumps. You can only trump that with an ethnically challenged, blind orphan with three bleeding stumps. Hell, that should open up the sluice gates of public funding and charidee appeals by C-list celebs desperate to relaunch their careers.

So how are you gonna take on obesity? Answer: show that malnutrition costs at least twice as much as obesity. Eh?? Last time the Count was obliged to walk along Piccadilly before heading to Pall Mall and club land, he was nearly trampled to death by vast herds of marauding elephants who were carefully disguised as Xmas shoppers. It took two stiff ones and a glass of champagne to settle the nerves.

No matter, some outfit called BAPEN has declared that the cost of malnutrition in the UK is £7.3 billion which, they proudly announce, is twice the cost of obesity. So please give us twice as much money to deal with our problem. And a knighthood for being so generous with other people's money, while you are about it.

Where the hell did they get that number from? The Count's very refined nose starts to smell the unmitakable odour of a vast mountain of bovine waste. Sure enough, a little digging by my faithful retainer, Digdog, found a report from MAG (the malnutrition advisory group, which is unlikely to be that neutral): it claimed that the NHS might save £220 million a year by feeding its patients properly, and that 60% went underfed in hospital. Given the crap they serve in hospital, that is not surprising.

MAG also estimated that the total cost of malnutrition could be as high as £2 billion a year.So in three years, the cost of malnutrition has been bloated from £2 billion to £7.3 billion.This has nothing to do with reality. It has everything to do with special interest groups special pleading. Because it is for a "good cause" (as they see it) they seem to think they can dispense with honesty or accuracy. Then they wonder why there is an increasing tide of cynicism, loss of faith in authority and increasing belief in alternatives (holistic medicines, lifestyle gurus and the rest):.

There is only one known antidote to all this crap. Bring back some people who can be trusted to run the country impartially, who can stay above the fray of special interests and who can instill trust and respect once more: it's come back time for the aristocracy.

Champagne poverty

The Count has discovered that he is living in champagne poverty. Fortunately, this is a crisis that our masters in Parliament are now going to resolve. A DTI committee of MPs has been looking urgently into the problem of the Count's champagne poverty. It has some dire warinings for the Count. In a scarcely veiled reference to the Count's champagne habit, the Committee declared that "the largest users may either have to suffer interruptions to their supply or pay very high prices". What with Xmas round the corner, an interruption to the Count's champagne supply is a serious matter. And as for the price of Krug, well they bloody well should do something about that.

The committee reminded the government that it has "a role to play in ensuring the European market is opened up, and that the largest firms co-operate to guard against shortages. " Given that most of the champagne houses are owned by LVMH, this is not good news: they are already carving the market up badly enough.

The casual reader may wonder how the government defines champagne poverty: it defines it as anyone who spends more than 10% of their income on champagne. By the same reckoning, the Countess suffers from severe Harvey Nichols poverty, especially when the January sales come round. The Count has been busy trying to locate and destroy her Harvey Nicks store card, without success.

It was only on re-reading the committee report that the Count discovered that they were referring not to champagne poverty, but to fuel poverty. So if you spend over 10% on something, then you are in poverty for that thing and the whole constitution of do-gooders and committees and commissions will work overtime on how to spend other people's money solving the problem.

The 10% of income rule means that half my acquaintances are in severe fast car and faster women poverty. Most of the population of the UK is in housing poverty. And the Count is most definitely in champagne, and possibly taxi, poverty.

On the other hand, my butler is not in poverty at all. He works for food, shelter and the opportunity to make vast amounts of unearned cash from house guests and the more credulous corporate guests who happily trade their money for the Kostov style once in a while. So once again the aristocrats have found the solution to another pressing problem: stop paying people and thereby remove poverty.

In the meantime, the Count will plunge deeper into champagne poverty for the sake of Xmas...cheers!