Button gluttons

SO, nearly a year in to the most ridiculous and inept presidency in history, we finally get to the heart of what really concerns the man in the White House – the size of his nuclear button. I suppose it's only appropriate at the end of a year in which a battalion of other men have been accused of flashing their, er, nuclear buttons, that the most powerful man in the world invites us into his room to be amazed and enthralled by his one.

The mine-is-the-biggest brag came in a tweet by Trump on January 3, which the normally restrained New Yorker magazine said “may have been his nuttiest” so far. “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the 'Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times',” wrote the man known as The Dotard in Pyongyang political circles. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

I'd like to report that the tweet was accompanied by a picture of Trump wearing a Stars and Stripes mankini and a holding a cardboard sign saying “Does my arsenal look big in this?”, but sadly that isn't the case. Perhaps it is just as well, though. Not sure I can afford the years of therapy I'd need if I had clapped eyes on such a horrific image.

Kim Jong 'Rocket Man' Un, who increasingly seems to be the less bonkers of the two oddly-coiffed leaders, has responded by re-opening a telephone hotline to the south – do Uber Eats deliver pizza to Pyongyang? – and the North Koreans have also intimated that they might deign to send a team of ice skaters to the Winter Olympics, which take place in South Korea next month. There's a special “peace village” on the border between the countries where they're going to meet for a chinwag about it. And maybe share a pizza, if Uber Eats really don't deliver to Pyongyang. Compared to most of Trump's actions since he took office, that looks almost sensible.

Street wars

IF Donald Trump is still concerned about the size of his nuclear button when he leaves office – which happy event could come sooner than he imagines: one bookmaker is giving odds of 5-4 on him being impeached this year – then he may want to get his tiny hands on an address which bolsters his sense of physical self-worth. If so he could do worse than move to Bell End, a residential street in the West Midlands which (though I haven't actually checked) doesn't currently have any former US presidents living there. He'd be cock o' the walk.

But he might need to hurry. In common with the residents of Canada's Swastika Trail (see last week's diary), the good people of Bell End have petitioned their local council to have the name changed to something less likely to make sniggering motorists stop for pictures (this is where I enlighten those readers currently scratching their heads and reaching for their phones to Google “bell end”. First up, don't do that, unless you have the parental controls set to On. Second, it's a slang term for what the Daily Telegraph delicately calls “an intimate part of the male anatomy”).

No, I think The Donald and his entourage would be quite happy in Bell End. It kind of suits him, don't you think? And I'd love to see his face when he discovers the name of the street Bell End leads on to just after the junction with Greenwood Avenue – Mincing Lane.

Cheer up love ...

Virgin Trains will be one of the beneficiaries of those whopping price hikes at the same time as they benefit from not having to pay billions to the Government thanks to Grayling letting them withdraw early from their contract to run the east coast main line, which they hold in partnership with Stagecoach. This will effectively save them a great deal of money and Labour peer Lord Adonis, UK transport secretary under Gordon Brown, has called it “a scandal”. “Handing a cheque worth hundreds of millions of pounds to Richard Branson and Brian Souter [chair of Stagecoach] would be indefensible at the best of times, but we are now at the worst of times, with a Brexit squeeze on the public finances and with rail fares going through the roof,” he told The Observer newspaper.

At the time of writing, 16,773 people had signed a petition on website We Own It calling for Grayling to row back on his offer of this “bailout” and instead bring the east coast main line into public ownership. They join the 67,598 who have signed a similar petition on website Bring Back British Rail to have the whole kit and caboodle re-nationalised. There's even a T-shirt you can buy with that same message emblazoned on it.

So you can probably see why it would have been politic for whoever was in charge of the official Virgin Trains Twitter account to keep schtum over the Christmas period. Or at least keep on the right side of polite. Instead, when frustrated passenger Emily Cole took to Twitter to complain about a Virgin Trains “mess up” and in particular the “hideously patronising” language of the male train manager (he called her “honey”), the official Virgin Trains Twitter account put this out: “Sorry for the mess up Emily, would you prefer pet or love next time?”

Ooh la la.

“Wonderful to see that [Virgin Trains] take complaints of rude and misogynistic behaviour seriously,” Cole fired back, adding: “Stunned”.

The Virgin Trains tweet was later deleted and the company apologised “unreservedly”. Chris Grayling's thoughts on the matter are not known, but I suspect those online petitions have been racking up signatures aplenty ever since.

Feel the gloom

AS if we didn't know that January is a depressing month, those pesky statisticians and demographics wonks insist on hanging portentous names around days in the calendar in order to remind us. Tomorrow, just so you're forewarned, is Divorce Monday, it being the first Monday back at work for couples whose already-strained marriages have been pushed past breaking point by having to spend time with each other (and each other's families) over what's laughingly known as the festive period. Hopefully yours isn't going to be one of the fingers punching the number of a family lawyer during the coffee break.

Hang on, it gets worse. The following Monday is Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year (though it may actually come for you on the Monday after that: there's an equation you can do to work it out, which involves variables such as the weather, your level of personal debt and the length of time since you gave up on your New Year's resolutions).

Most depressing of all, though, was Fat Cat Thursday, which fell on January 4. It's the date by which the Chief Executives of the FTSE 100 companies had already earned more than the average British worker will in the entire year. That's a whole three days, in case you can't do the maths. Just makes you want to go back to bed, doesn't it?