No politics, please - we're British

The stuffed shirts wielding the power at London's Victoria and Albert Museum have banned Gerry Adams from attending a new Che Guevara exhibition this week even though the Sinn Féin leader has received a personal invitation by the guest curator behind the show.

Trisha Ziff's Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon focuses on the history and legacy of Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph of Che Guevara. It includes the posters, films, fine art and fashion that have been inspired by the image that made the face of the Marxist 'terrorist' a marketing marvel.

The new show, which opened on Wednesday, includes images of Margaret Thatcher in Che Guevara style, and Madonna from her American Life album.

V&A bosses at first blocked Gerry Adams by maintaining that no politicians were coming... and then inviting Labour's Mayor of London, 'Red Ken' Livingstone.

The absurdity of even pretending to have no politicians at an exhibition whose entire theme is the world's most famous political image of all time seems to have been lost on the V&A top brass.

Trisha Ziff, who is based in Mexico, branded the decision by the censors "arrogant".

Licking them into shape

The Royal Marine Commandos have a pretty unsavoury reputation in South Armagh and now they're turning the stomachs of their own recruits at the elite Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, Devon.

Two Marine instructors returned to the base from a drunken night. They then roused 30 teenage recruits from their beds, ordered them to smear baked beans on their genitals - and then made other recruits lick them off.

The hour-long ordeal for the wannabe commandos is now being investigated by the Military Police.

Marine officers are still reeling after two videos were leaked to the media of 16 nude recruits being pelted with eggs and another showed another group, buck naked being forced to punch and kick each other until one was kicked unconscious.

And military chiefs wonder why almost 1,000 soldiers have deserted in the past three years.

Famine lesson

Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe suggested to Education Minister Mary Hanafin in the Dáil last week that school children could be asked to remember those who died in the Famine in the 1840s by holding a minute's silence.

The Fianna Fáil school ma'am was having none of it.

"It would not be appropriate for my department to issue schools with an instruction to observe a commemorative vigil."

As Kevin Rafter pointed out in the Sunday Tribune, this wasn't the line Ms Hanafin took in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the USA when a minute's silence was indeed observed.

Sorry Haughey

Fianna Fáil TD Seán Haughey has apologised to the Mahon Planning Tribunal for failing to reveal he received €2,500 in payments between 1989 and 1991 from the development company, Monarch Properties.

The bribe busters wrote to the son of Charles J. Haughey last March, asking if he had any involvement in the Cherrywood development in south Dublin or received any payments from Monarch.

But the son of Charlie said he had no involvement in Cherrywood and so didn't think the payments were relevant. So which part of "any" payments from Monarch did Seán not understand?

Burying Thatcher

Who is backing plans for a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher? Yes, Baroness Thatcher, the woman who gloried in the title of 'The Iron Lady' as her Conservative government persecuted mining communities, trashed trade union rights, decimated the national health service, brought in the poll tax and revelled in the deaths of the 1981 H-Blocks Hunger Strikers, making her the most hated British premier ever. The man planning Maggie's big send off is none other than Tony Blair.

If it happens, it will be the first British state funeral honours for a politician since those given to war-time leader Winston Churchill in the 1960s. State funerals are normally reserved for royalty and not 'commoners', not even chums of Chilean dictator General Pinochet.

The 80-year-old 'Wicked Witch of Westminster' isn't about to shuffle off this mortal coil but plans are being laid for her funeral. Sources close to Blair have told the media that Baroness deserves the unusual honour of a state occasion because of her 'unique' contribution to British politics in the 1980s.

Peter Kilfoyle MP, a former defence minister, said:

"Few tears were shed when her own party brought her down. Too many had suffered from her narrow and vindictive approach to what should have been the common good.

"When the time comes, those who loved her will mourn her. The rest of us will simply remember."

Amen to that.