Quote of the day

"Of course, Mr and Mrs Cameron, your son is right. There are parts of society that are not just broken, they are sick. Riddled with disease from top to bottom.

Just let me be clear about this (It’s a good phrase, Mr and Mrs Cameron, and one I looted from every sentence your son utters, just as he looted it from Tony Blair), I am not justifying or minimising in any way what has been done by the looters over the last few nights. What I am doing, however, is expressing shock and dismay that your son and his friends feel themselves in any way to be guardians of morality in this country.

Can they really, as 650 people who have shown themselves to be venal pygmies, moral dwarves at every opportunity over the last 20 years, bleat at others about ‘criminality’? Those who decided that when they broke the rules (the rules they themselves set) they, on the whole, wouldn’t face the consequences of their actions?

Are they really surprised that this country’s culture is swamped in greed, in the acquisition of material things, in a lust for consumer goods of the most base kind? Really?"

Comedy writer Nathaniel Tapley addresses an open letter to David Cameron's parents, which also mentions - as does this Guardian article - the student hi-jinx of Cameron, Boris Johnson and their chums in the Bullingdon Club, hi-jinx which funnily enough also involved destruction and damage to property...

Our esteemed PM might also wince when he hears that Sean Boscott, who set up the "Support the Met police against the London rioters" Facebook page which he endorsed, has rather dubious views on race... Boscott's futile attempts to cover his tracks have been as funny as his jokes weren't.