​What's the story in Balamory? Tony Blair had lost the plot - Vladimir McTavish

​Thank goodness the festive season is behind us and we can finally get back to watching full-length news bulletins on TV.

​Suzie Sweet ran Balamory’s village shop along with maths whizz Penny Pocket who could have counted Blair’s refugees

For some reason, both BBC and ITV appear to assume that nothing of any importance happens between Christmas Eve and the start of January, so the news is truncated down to around fifteen minutes.

On New Year’s Day, when we should still have been watching the ten o’clock news, the BBC were showing Mrs Brown’s Boys. Seriously? Shoot me now!

Of course, lots does happen in the week between Christmas and Hogmanay. For some reason, the BBC assume we don’t want to know. Or think it’s best not to tell us.

Around New Year we tend to get releases of previously embargoed Government information, which is always a revealing insight into the deranged mindset of our elected ruling class.

Hence, last week we were finally able to find out that, contrary to popular belief, Tony Blair had completely lost his marbles after only twelve months in power.

We had all previously thought that Blair went gradually insane during his years in Downing Street, and ended up totally unhinged around the millennium, culminating with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

By then, he was so crazy that it appears he was considering a plan to process asylum seekers offshore, not dissimilar to the current government’s Rwanda scheme.

Except that he was seriously thinking of setting up refugee camps on the Isle of Mull.

What makes this all the more ridiculous is that the idea occurred to him at the time that the BBC were first broadcasting its hit children’s show “Balamory”, filmed on the island.

As Blair was the father of a young child at the time, it is not beyond imagination that he had tuned into an episode and thought “that looks a good place to send refugees”.

Perhaps he imagined Archie the Inventor’s pink castle would have made a perfect holding camp.

Anyway, it seems Blair went insane several years earlier, around the time he pretended to be a Newcastle United fan despite knowing nothing about football.

Recently released cabinet papers bear this out. In 1997, prior to the Good Friday agreement, he floated the utterly crackpot idea that Wimbledon FC should be moved to Northern Ireland and rebranded as Belfast United. This was intended to bring peace and harmony to Ulster.

What about the people of Wimbledon? A few years later, they were up in arms about the club moving to Milton Keynes, which is less than a hundred miles up the M1 and not the scene of a thirty-year-long civil conflict.

It would undoubtedly have united both factions in the North of Ireland, as they would both have agreed it was utterly ridiculous.

Plus it would deprive them of their trips across the water to Glasgow to exchange sectarian banter at an Old Firm game.

Back to today. While Blair’s daft “Here’s the story in Balamory” plan may have been discussed behind closed doors, the current government’s even more bonkers Rwanda scheme has been played out in full view of the public.

God alone knows what utter madness they are actually talking about in private. Sadly, we will have to wait over twenty years to find out the true extent of their crazy thinking.