The Snug

This is a tale of emotion, a Tory boy speaking his mind and a dead chicken. And for once it doesn't involve prostitutes.

Boris Johnson didn't have a great time in October 2004. The Spectator magazine he edited had printed an article in the aftermath of Ken Bigley's murder in Iraq that generally criticised the populace for a perceived trend to mawkish sentimentality and went further to single out the people of Liverpool for indulging in a bit of "vicarious victimhood".

Well this didn't go down well, despite being a fair comment (one minute silences seem to happen at pretty much every football ground on a regular basis now), the tabloid press and scousers generally didn't like this. Conservative leader Michael Howard condemned the editorial, saying "I think what was said in The Spectator was nonsense from beginning to end", and gave Boris a nosebleed by sending him further North than he had ever been to apologise to a lot of people in shell suits.

Boris was kicked off the Tory front bench and after a suitable interlude was allowed back. Time passed as it has a habit of doing. In fact a year and eight days passed until Boris was surprisingly proved quite right in allowing that editorial to be published, and doubly so in it's reference to those of a scouse persuasion.

"Stop grieving, it's only a chicken" will stand as one of the greatest news headlines this country will ever see. It's certainly one of the best opening lines of a police statement ever too. On 24th October 2005 a member of the public called the police, thinking that he had spotted a foetus in an alleyway in the Anfield area of Liverpool. The police arrived and duly cordoned off the area. It soon became apparent that whilst they did indeed have a foetus on their hands, it was chicken and not human. Unfortunately by this time well-wishers had laid more than a dozen bunches of flowers at the scene, along with cards and teddy bears. A police spokesman said, "The flowers and cards are obviously the result of local gossip, but we can assure people that the remains were not human." This wasn't enough to halt the flow of grief that had started and consequently the best police statement in the history of the world came into being.

3 months have now passed and as yet there is no sign of a scouse contingent descending on Boris's home constituency of Henley to offer formal and public apology and to admit that he was in fact right.