It was discovered this week that the remains of Adolf Hitler, being kept in Russia, are, in fact… not the remains of Adolf Hitler. New examinations of the remains have revealed it to be that of a young woman (and not Eva Braun either). It raises some intriguing questions, particularly for conspiracy theorists. Why did Hitler shoot himself in the skull instead of taking cyanide like Eva Braun did? Why did the Russian troops who discovered his expired husk insist on burning his body there and then?

Quite clearly, the evidence continues to mount, it seems, that Adolf Hitler is indeed alive and living on the moon with Elvis and Marylin…

[Probably not WITH Marylin exactly; I find it unlikely that the Fuhrer would've been Marylin's cup of tea - maybe just on the same street, under the same atmospheric dome...]

And, speaking of the Holocaust [or Holocaust denial, at any rate]…

The ongoing drama of Iranian nuclear weapons development… goes on (hence, the ongoing); with the pariah Islamic Republic testing its new missiles, and choosing a Jewish holy day to do so (coincidence?). Oh, well; we can be sure this particular pantomime will plod on for many years to come. Unless some manner of catastrophe occurs. One wonders how long President Ahmedinijad will remain in power: will our children’s children still be seeing him on the news decades in the future?

After all, anti-American world figures have a tendency to stay around for infeasibly long stretches of time; Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Gaddaffi, and, of course, Fidel Castro, to name the obvious examples. Ahmedinijad has already been in power in Tehran longer than Caesar was in Rome.

It would take a Jesus-sized miracle for Gordon Brown to remain in power anywhere near as long, the way public opinion is looking. He may be lauded at present in the New World, but in Blighty he’s about as popular as Cristiano Ronaldo was  three years ago when he got Wayne Rooney sent off for trying to castrate Ricardo Carvallho. I can’t help but feel the PM’s unpopularity is less a matter of people’s political clout and more a matter of people’s innate (and maybe even subconscious) desire for star quality, a’la Tony Blair or Boris Johnson. You can’t help but feel that if Brown smiled with Colgate teeth and was more twee, he’d be a bit more accepted, in this X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent generation of popular consciousness.

Do people really think David Cameron would run the country better, or is more equipped to run the country, than Gordon Brown? Having said that, we’d prefer Cameron I’m sure to Nick Griffin – and one would sincerely hope that all those strange people who voted the BNP into the European Parliament this year are too inebbriated to vote come the General Election.

The point, in any case, is that Gordon Brown might be little more than a Wikipedia footnote by the time President Ahmedinijad is celebrating his third decade in power. Which is, it must be said, a pretty dystopic view of the future. And an Obama, meanwhile, can only do a maximum of eight years anyway, and could easily be replaced at the end of his second term by another Neo-Con apocalyptic, just to make sure we’ve got a good dynamic of fruitcakes on the world stage.

Would it be unreasonable for this blogger to suggest that Brown losing the next election would be a waste of a potentially effective Prime Ministership, and that he warrants some more time?

But, alas, the knives are out, soon enough from every quarter; and sooner or later Brown, like Caesar, will have to watch for betrayal from even his closest allies. And now – shock horror – The Sun has donned its turncoat and turned against him and New Labour too; switching its allegience to the Tories. Cameron will thus, of course, be invincible now, with his army of bare-breasted page three girls and Katie Price-obsessed journalists backing him…

Speaking of world figures with long-lasting careers, Gadaffi’s recent speechmaking in the United Nations General Assembly apparently made for quite a spectacle. Most of the dignitaries (predominately the Western delegates) were unmoved and even outright provoked by Gadaffi’s poorly scripted tirade, whilst others were visibly bored by it. A number of the delegates, however, were seen to be enthralled, treating Gadaffi’s presence like a special appearance by a rock star; some of them holding up their phones to take pictures of him as he spoke.

It’s hard for most people to figure out whether Gadaffi is a good guy or a bad guy: the reality is likely to be that, like the overwhelming majority of politicians in any sphere, he is neither – he’s just a politician; albeit, one who’s Octavian-like longeivity has left him perceived as more of a declawed cat than a dangerous leapord. He has, like many dictators, ended up a cartoonish figure; and this is something curious about our media culture, in that we seem to caricature dictators and very powerful men almost to the point of making them seem unreal or of limited seriousness. It’s been done with Gadaffi the most, but lately with Kim Jong il. Of course, it was largely done with Saddam Hussein too for many years; right up until the point where we hung him.

Whether it says something positive about our reaction to the overly powerful, or something negative about our tendencies to parody very serious subjects, is open to debate.

And speaking still of world figures in for the (presumably) long haul; the Popemobile will be speeding into the UK next year for a long-awaited tour. Rumours that Pope Benedict might be doing fifty dates at the 02 have been quashed, probably considered a bad omen, but His Holimoliness the Pontiff will make the first Papal visit to our shores since his predecessor John-Paul II’s stopover in 1982. He should be alright, now that that nasty old Henry VIII’s out of the way.

Though he might be misinformed if he thinks masses of the British public have any interest in flocking to see a wave of the hand from a relic of a long-diminished and once all-powerful institution, whose divine right to power was based on spurious notions of succession. Oh, no wait; come to think of it, it’d be business as usual for us priveleged subjects of the House of Windsor…