Five Opinions I'd Be Happy to Defend on Good Morning Britain

"Opinions are like arseholes", so the saying goes. If opinions are anything like my arsehole, then I have great sympathy for opinions. Constantly in pain, not knowing whether they’re coming or going, always in an emergency, fearful, callow. It’s a yelping, teething infant, a wrinkly plughole of turpitude. But this phrase is not about my arsehole. The latter half of the phrase is "everyone has one", which is true, unless you were born with an imperforate anus. Those people do not have one. I wonder if they’re also incapable of forming opinions as a result.

The maxim is true enough. Everyone has an opinion, though increasingly these days opinions have gone from something you think about a certain subject, to expert musings on everything. Everyone on planet earth must now be able to deliver an hour-long TED Talk on all things that have, can, and will ever happen, and everyone who has, does, or will ever exist. It’s great, and is the way we should all be, because as the other popular phrase goes, “everyone loves a know-it-all”.

It has also meant that, more than ever before, being a professional opinion-haver is perhaps the easiest job on the planet. As long as you can wag your finger hard enough while pontificating about why the Bakerloo line is now “cancelled”, you can rake it in as a cultural and political foghorn. I am one such foghorn, so this is a message to all those people at Sky News, BBC News, Good Morning Britain, The One Show and the rest, that I’m here and ready to have an opinion on just about anything. The following are five opinions and views I’m more than prepared to back up on national TV, given the appropriate fee and requisite champagne reception.

Assassinations can get real messy real quick, and the streets are already rife with gun and knife crime. Surely the antiquated execution method of poisoning is much better – and, in many ways – much more British than a silenced pistol to the back of the skull?

What do you do when a child cannot behave itself? You take away its toys. It’s clear that the enfants terribles of the Middle East cannot control themselves, so let’s just hand the keys over to the more mature zaddy neighbour Lebanon, and see what they can do with it. If you can’t play nice together then no one gets the ice cream sundae (or in this case, sovereign state). At this point it can’t hurt to try can it?

It’s becoming starkly clear that the only thing we ever were or will be good at is washing away lives, cultures and history with a tsunami of misery delivered on some cool boats. If we just take over Europe, from Calais to Istanbul, from Athens to Malmo, we don’t need to leave the single market, because we’ll BE the single market. Colonialism isn’t really a very cool word any more so we’d have to call it something different, like EuroCucking, to engage with the kids (if you can get them away from their bloody Fortnite games, am I right mums?)

One exceptionally excellent thing that the opinion piece wind farm has whipped up in recent times is journalists proclaiming things like a mum falling off a chair on You’ve Been Framed and other totally neutral ephemera as “performance art”. It’s a kind of double bluff that aims to posit someone who likes middle of the road things as extremely interesting and cerebral. What’s more normal and middle of the road than the President of the United States of America? Grab her by the pussy? Performance art. Muslim ban? Performance art. It’s an easy way for you to not have to think critically about anything at all ever again.

If you’re a man with any access to a TV, a newspaper, the internet or just the views of any woman within a certain age bracket, you’ll be aware that unsolicited dick pics (penis pictures) are not the done thing. Women categorically, almost across the board, do not like receiving them. Yet, though the men of the world must know this, they persist in sending them ad infinitum, filling whole server rooms with below-ball shots of their turgid members, their faces pulling a satisfied yet stoic grimace in the background, like you’re looking up at a proud father fighting back tears on your first day of school. It’s because sending dick is balm to the soul. What’s really the difference between sharing a selfie to Instagram to elicit love-hearts-in-the-eyes emojis and get a confidence boost and sending a picture of your oft unseen pe-nis out into the ether? Personally I take a mental health day every month to sit on ChatRoulette masturbating at unsuspecting strangers. It’s called self-care guys, look it up.

So if you’re reading this, bookers and agents of the morning-to-daytime TV world, let me know: I’m willing to spout some nonsense I may or may not believe for attention, because that’s what life is now and I’m just trying to ride that crazy train to Comment is Free City, buy a house, sit on the floor and eat my own stool until I die.

@joe_bish