A truly nasty comment about Laura Robson by Matthew Norman

I was shocked to find the following comment about Laura Robson in yesterday's Matthew Norman column in The Telegraph

'...Robson ought to reach the top four and a grand slam final within two years given the obvious capacity for improvement. She moves with the speed and grace of an arthritic hippo'

I am staggered by that remark. Laura Robson is an athlete, an Olympic tennis silver medallist and WTA Newcomer of the Year for 2012.

Does Laura Robson look like 'an arthritic hippo' to you?

So that Matthew Norman must have truly high standards then?

Here's Matthew Norman...

Hmmm

Sounds about right

'Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, ineloquent, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation. If Pixar set out to create a CGI character to embody everything the public has learned to despise about its political class, they'd be thrilled to come up with this lizardy schemer, who may have slipped through a tear in the fabric of space-time himself. Certainly he seems best suited to skulking beneath stone archways, in a purple robe, sibilantly sidling poison into the bloodstream of the medieval Vatican.

For a decade and more, this greyest of eminences has stirred, fixed, briefed and bullied, first to remove Mr Tony Blair; and latterly in the cause – keeping his master in power – that has pushed his party to the edge of the abyss. If he has a political philosophy, it is the domineering, top-down, we-know-best, infantilising statism of Gordon himself, but it's not really about that. For Mr Balls, it is football thug tribalism – a with-us-or-against-us Manichean sensibility next to which Mrs Thatcher seems a proto-Cleggian champion of consensus. '

Matthew Norman in The Independent; I don't think he's one of Ed Balls's biggest fans! Mind you the post-election scenario that Matthew Norman paints will not happen if the repulsive Ed Balls is defeated by Anthony Calvert in his 'castration' strategy. Now that would be worth staying up late for next Thursday night...

I don't think Matthew Norman is a fan of Jacqui Smith

"Jacqui Smith, like so many adored sitcom foils, is a plain and simple imbecile. She makes Baldrick look like Roy Jenkins, Doberman from Bilko's motor platoon like FDR, Phoebe from Friends like Hillary Clinton, and Dibley verger Alice Tinker like Mrs Gandhi. So let us cherish her until the summer reshuffle, and pray that she is then retained as Manuela, the Silver Stick sequestered from that mysterious officer of state and duly adorned with jester's bells, and safely housed in a heavily padded grace-and-favour apartment in Torquay."

You can read more in The Independent.

Matthew Norman with a fine turn of phrase

"If Gordon, ever-more remotely marooned on his fantasy island of vast global influence and unfettered domestic command, backs down and muffles the stimulus hunting cry next week, it will leave him looking, to borrow from the resignation of yet another embittered former Chancellor, in office but not in power. If he doesn't – if he ploughs on with the demand for even more colossal spending and debt – he will be at war with the Bank of England, and at DefCon Two with his next-door neighbour.

There is no obvious way out of this one. He has been on his electoral death bed for ages, of course, ever since that definitive week in October 2007 when he cluck-cluck-clucked his way out of going to the country. But this may well be seen as the week he ran out of appeals for clemency, because the only quantative easing available to him now appears to involve the child-proof lid on that bottle of Downing Street strychnine."

Matthew Norman in The Independent with a Matthew Parris like turn of phrase.