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Pandora: 'The Sun' signs its own Warsaw pact

Oliver Duff
Monday 19 May 2008 00:00 BST
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(© Tim Sanders)

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Crack open a can of Tyskie, show some hairy builder's rear cleavage and shout "Na zdrowie" (cheers). The UK's Polish handymen migrants are to finally get their mother-language edition of The Sun, as revealed here seven months ago. Despite denials then, the red-top is to publish the Polish versions during June's Euro 2008, which the England team will miss owing to ineptitude. "Tits and bumskis for the plumbers" at last. The Sun axed hostile coverage of this key growth sector of the white working class and now praises Poles as "such hard-working people that Britain wouldn't be the same without them".

Behold the clatter of zlotych!"Indeed, plans are afoot," confirms a stilettoed spokeswoman, tapping Murdoch's corridors of power. Surely it cannot be long before we meet buxom Czeslawa, 19, from Krakow?

Ramsay's run-in over the school bus F-word

Cup your ear and you may hear pots and kettles clattering to the flagstones in Gordon Ramsay's top-spec kitchen.

The excitable chatter at the gates of the prestigious south London boys school to which the sweary chef sends his eight-year-old son, Jack, is that Ramsay Snr, pictured, is unhappy with the coarse language blackening the air on the school bus collecting boys from tree-lined groves at the start of the day.

"There is a competition to teach Jack Ramsay one new swear word every week," says a reliable and concerned source.

According to parents, the bus is notorious for the boisterous behaviour of some older pupils aboard, whose concerted efforts to expand the younger lads' vocabularies and expose the little chappies to risqué material on mobile phones – a particular favourite is said to feature livestock – has not gone unnoticed around parents' dinner tables. The charmers.

"Ramsay was furious. The [school] Master is a leather elbow patches man, austere, a bit like the Wizard of Oz. He can make you quake for days if you're called in to see him. Ramsay won't have any of that though, he's not paying north of 10 grand a year for his son to learn how to eff and blind."

When contacted by Pandora, Gordon – who sends pulses racing among the fragrant, man-eating mothers of Jack's classmates – declined to comment.

Fruit-based drink for the local?

Life in Iraq is not exactly a 24/7 fiesta. Difficult to know what the residents might make of the sight of a sunburnt Al Murray appearing over the horizon in a British tank turret, clutching a dark swirling pint of Pope's Crotch (or similar).

The comic's bigoted pub landlord persona is, of course, a fiction. In 2004, Murray, the Oxford-educated son of paratrooper Lt-Col Ingram Bernard Hay Murray, fronted Al Murray's Road to Berlin, tracing Allied footsteps from Normandy, using tanks, Spitfires and parachute-jumps with veterans.In the green room at the Sony Radio Awards, the 40-year-old, left, tells Pandora he wants to film a Road to Basra series about the British Army's Iraq campaign: "It's something I want to do, definitely. I'm a bit of a history nerd you see. I'm very interested in soldiers because basically I'm a coward.

"That lifestyle is always worth talking about."

Gull's egg and scrambled ego

Dealing with Marco Pierre White is "like sitting with your pants down on a meat cleaver" (© G Ramsay). White now thwacks the back of Heston Blumenthal's head with his wooden spoon, berating our culinary Victor Frankenstein for his scientific "molecular gastronomy".

White tells Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine: "I just don't get it. Does it make food taste any better? Last night I ate gull's egg with mayonnaise and watercress, a dish I enjoyed for its honesty. The great cooks are those who have the confidence to cook simply."

Caution, Marco. Blumenthal used to experience white rages: he once fired a gun when "dodgy people" turned up at his parents' home, and chased a driver with "the door of my car open and [I] was driving and hooting and screaming at him". His wife sent him to see a cranial osteopath, for calming skull massages.

Book worm

Chris Smith's appointment as chair of the Environment Agency is either reassuring – proving the potential for comebacks – or terrifying. He has flown below the radar since leaving the Cabinet in 2001, but did try to establish heavyweight credentials with his 2006 book, Suicide of the West. Smith's staff, tasked with protecting us from apocalyptic flooding and the like, may care to acquire a copy. Written as if Melanie Phillips had overdosed on Prozac, it argues that because of the abandonment of six fundamentals (Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism) "collective suicide is quite possible. It may even be likely." Christ alive! The volume was politely ignored. David Miliband admitted: "Chris Smith sent me his book but I am afraid I have not been able to read it."

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