Malcolm spent yesterday afternoon at the British Museum form the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. This being about Roman domesticity, penises form a large — nay, grotesquely inflated — part of the show.
… beyond a cluster fuck, worse than a FUBAR. Continued attempts to correct the situation only make the situation worse and more embarrassing.
This is La Treneman at her brightest and best, doing a delicious vamp:
Welcome to Eurovision, Westminster style. I had no idea when I went along to the Private Member’s Bill ballot yesterday that it was going to be so much fun. For this is not a ballot at all. It’s more a raffle, with a bit of bingo thrown in and also darts, as in when they bellow “One Hundred and Eighty!”
Our Master of Ceremonies was Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker whose sense of fun and Lancashire accent are proving a huge hit these days. He had a glamorous assistant, of course. Tall, thin, dressed as a penguin with a white bow-tie, his real name was David Natzler and he was Clerk of Legislation but, of course, we started to call him Debbie.
She concludes:
“Shake ’em up!” cried Lindsay as the big moment arrived. “The winner of the day is … ”
“One hundred and ninety-nine,” announced Debbie.
“Oooohhhhh!” cried the audience.
Lindsay flipped through his list. “James Wharton!”
We looked at each other. Who? Still, within minutes, we were being flooded with information about Mr Wharton. He was the young (aged 29) Tory from Stockton and a Eurosceptic. His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.
Sorry, but it’s true. It may not be in the best taste but, then, this IS Eurovision.
Two after-shocks:
1. Malcolm’s classical eddikashun makes him want to prefer the plural form as penes. It is also the Oxford Dictionary‘s preferred plural form, where penises is dismissed as Brit. Curiously, penes is also the term used to mean “in the possession of …” or “in the hands of …” One hits upon it occasionally in footnotes and bibliophile commentaries. Logically penises are commonly “in the hands of …”, but there is no direct etymological link.
2.Then there’s the business of It may not be in the best taste but …
Forty years ago there was a previous Pompeii exhibition in London. As Malcolm recalls, it was sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. An acquaintance of the Lady in Malcolm’s Life was commissioned to produce the educational poster to accompany the show. The artist’s proclivities were well enough known for the instruction to include “and definitely no penises”.
This became a challenge. Sure enough, there is at least one member, suitably disguised, included. Malcolm still has the mounted (ahem!) item in the Redfellow Hovel attic.
Prime Minister David Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.
William IV was third son of George III, whose elder brothers were the future George IV and … Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.
Taraaah!
Said Prince Fred is generally accounted to have been the Grand Old Duke of York, who:
… had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again. And when they were up, they were up. And when they were down, they were down. And when they were only halfway up, They were neither up nor down.
Fred, who now is dead, earned that reputation because of the futile Flanders campaign of 1799.
Cameron’s hill-climbing and descents are as well-established as Fred’s; but he doesn’t have ten thousand men. He has just 304 MPs, and 48 of them are definitely not men. Though many of those women have more balls than their male colleagues.
Further back
Malcolm can’t be bothered to work out what the precise relationship is; but Cameron must be related somehow to the Stuarts. Which brings us to James II and VII.
After the near-rout at the Boyne, James sweatily arrived back in Dublin where Lady Tyrconnell enquired how the battle had gone. He replied, “My cowardly Irish have run away.”
She responded with a hint of acid: “Then I see your majesty has won the race.” Again, a speedy characteristic to be observed in Cameron’s hereditary nature.
The gift of leadership
This is an art or a talent in which Cameron has rarely excelled. Particularly so on matters European.
David Cameron was trying to work out how on earth to deal with the latest Europe row in his party. He heard them demanding legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, and this evening, after nearly a year of letter-writing and speeches, he announced that the Tory party will publish a draft bill doing just that. They still can’t get it through Parliament through the government channels, so they’ll be putting it up for any willing backbencher (of which there are many) to adopt in the Private Member’s Bill ballot.
Figures close to the Prime Minister were hinting to Tory MPs this evening there would be a move for legislation, but they were taken by surprise when, just a few hours later, the announcement was made that the draft bill will be published tomorrow.
So is this it? Is the Conservative party falling on its knees with gratitude? Unsurprisingly, MPs are not doing anything of the sort.
Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray. Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Maché?” Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone; Jubilation T. Cornpone, he really saved the day!
Isabel was being as polite as the circumstances permit. For sheer vitriol — and a longer view — there’s Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, subtitled in near Marxist terms — and with a flourish from Mao for added relish:
Drama is giving way to farce. The eurosceptic demands are now plain odd
Touchingly, they really believed it would work. When David Cameron pledged a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU four months ago, his team were certain it would pacify eurosceptic Conservatives, disarm the UK Independence party and ensure he would not need to talk again about this electorally esoteric issue for the rest of this parliament.
That speech, his most important deed as UK prime minister after his austere fiscal policy, has failed on all counts. Tories now hound him to go further, Ukip romp on, and he is condemned to revisit the subject periodically on behalf of his party.
Downing Street is mystified by the collapse of the January truce, and commentators also scribble their surprise. But it is not surprising at all. It was predictable, and predicted. We are now a quarter of a century into the Tories’ rancorous fixation with Europe, a single-issue neuralgia that knows no equivalent in any major party in the west, and the pattern is familiar: no concession satisfies those who ultimately want to leave the EU, even if they say it will before receiving it. Mr Cameron, remember, has withdrawn his party from the centre-right caucus in the European Parliament, vetoed a fiscal treaty and cleared a path to exit. On each occasion, Tories have summoned a practised glee before returning to their core view of him as the craven running dog of a europhile establishment.
It may be, as some Tories tried to explain yesterday, that a cunning new strategy is evolving before our eyes, one that Mr Gove and his friend Mr Cameron are developing as part of their wider campaign to shove Labour – and the Lib Dems – on to the wrong side of popular causes. By this theory, Europe is no longer a divisive, dangerous issue for the Tories to be caught arguing about, but is in fact a vote-winner. Look at us, the Conservatives are now shouting, we are so crazy about Europe that we are desperate to give you a vote on it and – nudge nudge, wink wink – we might just join you in voting to get out. By allowing his colleagues to say it all in public, and say it loudly, Mr Cameron is giving himself free advertising for his Euro-robustness two years early. The tease of a referendum, the catwalk of Tory beauties sashaying in their see-through ideological out-fits, the Cabinet loyalists talking naughty – it’s all part of a great plan. By allowing his colleagues to talk up the possibility of a British exit, the Prime Minister’s hand is strengthened in the EU negotiations to come. First welfare, then immigration, now Europe: everything is lining up in Mr Cameron’s favour.
Except it isn’t, of course. No 10 has lost control of this one. Even those involved admit it’s a Euroshambles. After all, can any of this truly be said to advance the cause of a Conservative victory in 2015? Surely the first part of Mr Cameron’s negotiating strategy requires winning the general election? Does an inward-looking spat about Europe really fit alongside the message about a global economic race and the importance of the EU/US trade deal that Mr Cameron found himself promoting in Washington yesterday?
Surely soon we must be reaching the end-game? That can involve just one (or both) of two possibilities: the defenestration of Cameron, and/or the collapse of the ConDem coalition. Either way the lunatics have taken over the Tory asylum.
The Tory bourgeoisie are heavily into the Great UKIP furore. Over on the Spectator‘s Coffee House blog, James Forsyth is keeping the pot on the simmer: Why the Tories need their own Nigel Farage.
To which the answer inevitably and unarguably came:
Was Nigel Farage not the Tories’ very own Nigel Farage?
Malcolm offered his own take:
When I was an active candidate, the assumption was differential abstention. Our lot went down because our buggers wouldn’t turn out, not generally because they had defected. Anyway, the other mob quickly gave them a sickener, and soon enough (say two years) they were back on track.
By the same token, I have always suspected there really is a subterranean “nasty party” based on bloody-minded ness and perverseness, which only transpires to cause pain and grief to us decent types (of any proper persuasion). This vegetable growth, vaster than empires and more slow, is about the only political leaning that is thus burgeoning.
Moreover the hysterical media – Speccie excepted only on grounds of socio-economic classification – have laid the responsibility for all our woes at the door of the EU. Then only because Gordon Brown was no longer in town. This is scapegoating (my spell-check threw up “scape-gloating”, which is about the right flavour). Once the scape-gloaters have identified the scapegoat, all that remains is to drive it out of the hamlet.
Which, of course, received the usual raspberries.
Still, he’s a dogged old soul, and came back with:
No, I still don’t get it.
Nationally, UKIP has 147 out of a total of 2,439 council seats (say 6%). Tories have control of half the Councils (and will effectively add to that with by local arrangements with odds, bods and sods). On the usual deplorably-low turnout, UKIP scored 23% of the vote — what’s that: six or eight per cent of the total electorate?
It’s mid-term, and — thanks to the centripetal instincts of both major parties — local authorities have minimal residual powers. It’s child-welfare, street-cleaning, dustbins and dog-catching stuff. Yawn!
There were areas, and even regions, where UKIP did much better than average. So, what? Farage’s rag, tag and bobtail are never going to be the disciplined cohorts that the SNP or SF manage.
Then there is a specific example: Barking and Dagenham. When, in 2006, the BNP surged to a dozen seats on the local authority, it finally shook the local Labour operation out of its complacency, somnolence and decrepitude. Four years later, the BNP were wiped out.
Similarly, those areas where UKIP have made a showing tend to be where the old parties (especially the Tories) are at best lackadaisical, at worst senile. I’d be putting my money on the likes of the Greens being a bigger long-term threat to the established order than UKIP — particularly so if environmental issues can be brought to the fore, and folk can be induced to love windmills.
If there is one great, fat non-issue in these parts it is the EU. Outside the Tory kennel (the Torygraph, the Murdochery, and — were it to be considered a “newspaper” — the Express) the whole EU thing is of less national importance than whether Wigan can avoid the drop. Short of a real dog-fight the EU isn’t going to rise up the agenda.
Here’s a small Malcolmian prophecy: were the EU referendum to come about, barely half the electorate would bother to turn out. The in/out/shake-it-all-about decision would be made by around a quarter of the adult population of the UK. It’s like the old TUC retirement joke: “The General Committee have passed a vote of thanks for your services by 15 to 8, with 22 abstentions.”
That was the week [*] that was, It’s over so let it go.
[*] Actually it’s been ten days — or an aching void of tooth-grinding boredom for anyone not committed to an asylum, the Daily Mail, the Times world-view, or the Tory Party. Though those four possibilities may merely be variations on a theme.
No need to stick around beyond the first two minutes, unless one is a media-archaeologist. Just relish the delights of Millicent Martin at her devastating best.
Two final Malcolmian thoughts:
1. Pity the Goldthorpe counter-event didn’t get more coverage:
Britain mourned, the old banners were hoisted up in Goldthorpe and the miners went on the march.
At 2pm today, after waiting for a separate funeral in the South Yorkshire town to come to an end, an estimated 1000 former pit workers started a procession through the streets in protest at Baroness Thatcher.
An effigy of the former Prime Minister was placed in a coffin with the word ‘SCAB’ written in flowers on the side. It was then placed on a cart and towed by two horses towards the site of the former Goldthorpe colliary, which closed in 1994. A bagpiper led the way and the miners marched behind, some holding placards, most clutching cans of beer.
The entire town appeared to have turned out to join in the protest and chanted ”ere we go’ and ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, down, down, down’ as they walked. Banners from the original miners’ strike were waved on proud display.
“We have waited 28 years for this,” said David Fallon, a former hydraulics fitter at Goldthorpe colliery, who worked at the site for fifteen years and was wearing his former pit tie – complete with the white rose of Yorkshire.
All credit to the Daily Telegraph for that: a good deed in a naughty world. The intent was, presumably, to shock Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
What Disgusted will have missed is the whole event is not pure anger — though that would be well justified across the South Yorks coalfields. It’s more a first-class example of South (formerly West — don’t fret on it) Yorkshire humour. Just remember to wear a respectable association tie, with a white rose. Since Dear Old Dad originated just down the road from Goldthorpe, Malcolm knows the mood well. It was likely a bloke from Goldthorpe or environs who addressed the Great Len Hutton, having scored a double century, with “Ah hopes ta see thee do better in t’ second innings.” Such a type is one who looks out of the window on 23rd June and observes how the evenings are drawing in.
Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn will lead a House delegation to Britain to attend the funeral of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Wednesday.
“Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest champions freedom has ever known, and her funeral gives Americans and friends around the world an opportunity to pay final respects,” Boehner said in a statement.
The delegation also includes Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and George Holding (R-N.C.).
four times awarded 100% rating by the American Conservative Union: i.e. off the normal political spectrum, and impervious to reason. To be fair, she is now down to 87½% , and only the 40th most conservative member of the House as rated bt the National Journal.
Malcolm explains his concern with such trivia because it gives cause for recalling Simon Hoggart’s Sketch of the occasion in today’s Guardian. It is juicily headed:
Politicians reassure themselves of their importance at Lady Thatcher’s funeral
No wonder Gordon Brown looked happy as the great and the good gathered to say farewell
It concludes with the pungent:
A scattering of celebrities, just on the right side of “who on Earth?” Jeremy Clarkson, Joan Collins, Jeffrey Archer, even Michael Fabricant MP, his lustrous hair-style topping for once dimmed by the dazzling lights of St Paul’s. And Alex Salmond, who acknowledges his gratitude; her decision to start the loathed poll tax in Scotland was a huge impetus towards the notion of national independence.
A disappointing turnout from abroad, good in numbers if low in fame. But then this was about British politics rather than international diplomacy. From America, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich – surely she would have found him deeply distasteful? – and former vice-president Dick Cheney, whose poor health over eight years meant, in Garry Trudeau’s words, that George W was “only a heartbeat from the presidency”. But neither Bush nor Clinton and no Carter. It was hard to ignore the niggle that she was, perhaps, more world famous in Britain than she was in the rest of the world.
How does this sound for a realistic policy on home rentals? —
In addition to restoring security of tenure to every decontrolled house, we are appointing rent officers and rent assessment committees for fixing fair rents. The new Act also gives basic protection to almost everyone in his home, including the lodger and the worker in his tied cottage. Today it is a crime not merely to evict without a court order but to harass or to persecute anyone in order to force him out or force his rent up.
It’s from the 1966 Labour Manifesto. The preamble to that seems almost more pertinent in the present context:
The 1957 Tory Rent Act inflicted injury on hundreds of thousands of families by decontrolling their homes in a period of intense housing shortage. Labour was pledged to annul this social crime.
Back to the future
Malcolm reflects on that, if only because his entry into leftist politics was at a time (the end of the 1950s) and a place (Norfolk) when tied cottages — particularly for farm workers — was a very live issue.
In case anyone missed it, it’s about to come back again. Hidden behind Caroline Spelman killing off the Agricultural Wages Board is her other announcement: the Agricultural Dwellings Housing advisory committee would also be dissolved. All of which might, being generous, make sense if the workers on the land had the clout to negotiate a proper wages-and-conditions agreement. But, of course, it will always be cheaper for the agribusinesses to import cheap immigrant labourers and house them in caravans and Portacabins. With, if not the complicity, at least the active encouragement of the supermarket chains.
Only a cynic (perish the thought) would draw a direct line between a “free market” in former tied cottages, a chronic shortage of affordable housing, Iain Duncan Smith’s “welfare reforms” and ‘Gids’ Osborne’s budget, promising second homes on the back of government loans.
Duncan Smith, lest we forget, is possessed of a a £2m+ Tudor home (with ample spare bedrooms, five acres of gardens and a swimming pool), by courtesy of a very wealthy wife, heiress to the Cottesloe millions and 1,300 acres of Buckinghamshire.
It goes with the squirarchical mind-set
In the next few days anyone in social housing with that mythical (but Big Brother designated) “spare bedroom” faces a cut of 14% in benefits. Oh, no! It’s not a tax! Anymore than cutting the 50% tax rate for multi-million earners (those deserving bankers and plutocrats) is a benefit!
Let’s take Mr and Mrs Whatsit, who have lived in social housing for thirty-odd years, since they married. There they raised two strapping sons, who have done well, moved out, and left that “spare room”. As a result Mr and Mrs Whatsit, both heading towards retirement, but young enough not to come under Iain Duncan Smith’s oh-so-generous OAP waiver, are faced with a major cut in their income, or the unlikely prospect of finding smaller accommodation — there are 180,000 families in the Whatsits’ position, but just 70,000 one-bedroom flats available.
Now, here’s the suggestion: why was there not an incentive — rather than a fine — to persuade the Whatsits to move? Especially since we now know that Osborne has squoodles of money available for second homes:
The Budget included a £3.5bn Help to Buy programme under which the Government will provide up to 20 per cent of a deposit and the buyer only 5 per cent for a new-build home. The Government made clear that could not be used to buy a second home but failed to do the same for a separate scheme to underwrite £130bn of mortgage lending for any property.
But, then, when did a functioning Tory prefer to persuade rather than to coerce?
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the fine details of Press regulation, but having returned from David Cameron’s (fairly hastily-arranged) media conference on the issue this morning, I’m struck by something that may have wider implications.
As he explained his plan to put his own proposals for regulation to the Commons next week, Mr Cameron used a striking phrase.
“Look, we have a hung Parliament,” he said. “In the end Parliament is going to have to decide. Parliament is sovereign.”
Now, at one level, that’s fairly unexciting: it is a simple fact that the 2010 general election led to a hung Parliament, where no single party has a majority.
Yet this is the first time I can recall Mr Cameron explicitly admitted that; I don’t think he’s ever used the phrase “hung parliament” before, though I’m happy to be corrected if anyone can find another case.
In effect, we are where we should have been in May 2010, and where we were bound to be long before 2015: the Tories are governing as a minority administration, with limited aid and assistance from the LibDems. The LibDems are kept “on board” by a love of red boxes, some fancy titles, personal ambition, a need to strut — all at the cost of underpinning ‘Gids’ Osborne’s continued slash-and-burn on the national economy.
The men in grey suits approach!
We have, it ought to be admitted, gone past the moment when this administration was serving any useful purpose. The only wonder is that there is any public support left. The Tory party nationally is in revolt against its elected members. The parliamentary party is riven asunder. Things have reached a pretty pass when Adam Afriyie can seriously be viewed as even a stalking donkey. Whether Mrs May is a more serious proposition remains to be seen (and Dave Brown at the Indy seems to relish the thought):
It was the marvellous Alan Watkins who came up with the term “men in (grey) suits” — the political undertakers who arrived to tell a party leader the time had come for his early departure from the scene. While the old notion was that “loyalty” was the Tory Party’s greatest asset, the truth is that the Tories are the most ruthless assassins of a failing leader.
Prognostications:
Two years out from a General Election is getting very close to the moment when a failing leader (Tory, LibDem or whatever) can be defenestrated, and party loyalties re-connected;
It is difficult to see how — short of Pope Francis leading an Argentinian landing party at Port Stanley — the credibility of the present government and its Prime Minister can be recovered;
Well, actually, one scenario — the nuclear option — offers: Cameron dismisses all the LibDem ministers, reshuffles, goes far Right (he still wouldn’t be believed or trusted by those he seeks to appease), invites the UKIPper defectors back into the tent, and abandons any hope of the centre ground;
If he doesn’t quell the dissent on his right, Cameron limps on until the men in grey suits toll the knell of parting Dave;
There’s a large section of Cameron’s speech today devoted to the topic of debt. Par for the course, you say: it’s the bog-standard Tory incantation.
Except it wasn’t all about the dreaded public debt:
We will not be able to build a sustainable recovery with long term growth unless we fix this fundamental problem of excessive government spending and borrowing that undermines our whole economy.
Second, we had over-indebted households borrowing from over-indebted banks.
Banks lent more than they could afford to — spurred on by an irresponsible banking culture that rewarded short-termism and unmanageable risk-taking.
And households borrowed more than they could afford to — spurred on by an assertion that we had ended boom and bust.
So, when the crash came we didn’t just have over-indebted banks, over indebted households and a big budget deficit, we had the most over-indebted banks and the most over-indebted households as well as the biggest budget deficit of virtually any country, anywhere in the world.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the average indebted household increased their non-mortgage borrowings by £400 between 2008 and 2010, to £3,200. In total, households’ financial liabilities rose 10.3pc from £85.9bn to £94.7bn in just two years…
Howard Archer, UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “It seems reasonable to suspect that household debt has risen further. While employment has been resilient, people’s purchasing power has been squeezed by extended weak income growth and elevated inflation.”
He added that the debt burden was likely to hold back the recovery.
“Increased debt levels highlight, along with extended squeezed purchasing power, why consumer spending remains so limited compared to pre-crisis levels,” Mr Archer said. “The extended need for consumers to deleverage is likely to limit the upside for consumer spending for some time to come, and hence constrain overall growth prospects.” …
Mr Archer claimed conditions for households had worsened since the period the survey covered. “Another recent survey from the ONS shows that the economic position of households hit a five-year low in the first quarter of 2012 … [and that] in the third quarter of 2012 real income per head was still 2.4pc below the peak level seen in mid-2009,” he said.
Which means that Cameron is correct that private debt has been a drag on any recovery: the whole 2010 rosy prognostication was based on an assumption that consumer expenditure and, therefore, private debt would carry the economy to the blue horizon. But he is whistling in the dark: not just because (see Archer above) he hasn’t got the statistics on private debt, but more to the point because it has patently increased, rather than been paid-down, since 2010.
Sir Nick Harvey MP can have few reasons to be wholly in sympathy with the ConDem coalition. Actually, his relationship with his own LibDem party might be considered to be … semi-detached.
Let’s tick off a few reasons:
Newly elected in 1992, he was the unique LibDem to vote against Maastricht;
He was less than effusive about the “leadership qualities” of Charles Kennedy;
He opted out of being the LibDem front-man on Culture, Media and Sport to spend more time with his family (now there‘s a new one!);
He was LibDem Minister of State at Defence from the start of the ConDem coalition to last September’s re-shuffle. He distinguished himself at the outset of the Libyan adventure by shrugging off questions of exit-strategy: “How long is a piece of string? We don’t know how long this is going to go on for.”
For that, or other infringements, he was returned empty (except for the knighthood) to the back-benches.
— She’s a mum-of-four. This is the mantra that Mrs Hutchings and others keep repeating in their campaign to present the Tory candidate as ordinary, straight-talking and down-to-earth…
— She doesn’t come from Eastleigh but appears to have earned some local stripes by staying here with her family after a defeat at the 2010 general election. Back then, she promised to live in the town and commute to Westminster each day.- Her local credentials were somewhat undermined when she was accused of cutting and pasting a description of Eastleigh’s history from its Wikipedia page
— She is a former Labour supporter who once confronted Tony Blair on television over the lack of schools and services for her disabled son.
— Despite her outspoken nature, she rejects the idea she is a feminist as she “doesn’t like labels”. She was one of a band of ambitious female wannabe MPs who use[d] to be described as “Cameron’s cuties”.
Philip Aldrick does a magnificent job frightening the un-lasagna-ed horses in his piece for the Torygraph.
What he is about is anticipating:
In its three-monthly Inflation Report, the Bank will warn that inflation will remain above the 2pc target until early 2015 but that the economy is too weak to cope with any attempt to bring prices back under control, through either interest rate rises or an unwinding of its £375bn quantitative easing (QE) programme.
It will also say that the pace of growth will be slow and that, although the major risks are receding, they remain a big threat, particularly from a resurgence of the eurozone crisis.
That sure saves us all from having to read the Report, when it is released. Prescience, a guided leak, or an ouija board?
Switching to another source, Aldrick manages one of the more remarkable definitions of “growth”:
According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2013 has started strongly. It has estimated that growth improved from -0.3pc in the three months to December, to zero in the three months to January.
Somehow that reminds Malcolm of a bit of dialogue from Bill Forsyth’s 1981 film, Gregory’s Girl. Gregory is faffing his first encounter with Dorothy:
Gregory:…. I hurt my arm once, at the joint. Can’t get it any higher than this. [He raises his left arm to shoulder level.]I used to be able to get it away up here, no bother. [He raises the same arm high above his head.]
“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
Now, tell, Malcolm: what was it, in the following, that nudged your memory of that, when you read this:
My old friend Bruce Anderson has penned what sounds like an extraordinary piece for this week’s issue of The Spectator. He has attacked a Conservative leader, and seemingly in strong terms. “Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept,” he writes. Bruce is a friend of the Prime Minister’s. It will be interesting to see if he has used any caveats later in the piece, such as saying that it is not Cameron’s fault or emphasising that it can all be turned around. We’ll see.
It should worry Cameron that such a loyalist and good friend holds that view, as he is someone who has supported Cameron from even before the days when his leadership campaign consisted of David and Samantha Cameron, the Goves and three other people. While Bruce has some modernising friends, he often has good instincts for what the wider Tory tribe will tolerate. He understands Tory history and the shires.
That’s Iain Martin, a young’un, but already a doyen of the Telegraph. Any other mental disturbance, such as the title of that piece, In the Tory modernising bunker it’s all getting a bit Berlin, April 1945, is entirely your own problem.
On Malcolm’s second thoughts, it’s obviously that final word: shires.
There’s the problem!
The Tory Party has entrenched itself in the green suburbs and the counties of old England. It’s been a long process;, but it was John Major — MP for Huntingdon, not surprisingly — who put it in to words:
A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.
A Malcolmian humilation
Aw, shucks! Malcolm remembers it well!
Look at those surnames. You could make the register of Malcolm’s primary school there.
The Sea Scouts lined up at Wells War Memorial, to be inspected by the Earl of Leicester, with his Home Guard medal. The Great Man doing the proper thing, stopping half-way down the line, to address a whippersnapper (who promptly saluted, on instruction, and responded, again as instructed): “Yes, y’r Lordship!”.
Thereafter followed, not contempt, but a kind of Hummph! from his Dear Old Dad.
Sadly for Malcolm’s self-esteem, Dear Old Dad, one generation from the 1912 Yorkshire miners’ strike, and despite being an inveterate reader of the Beaverbrook press, held no admiration for those as has dominance o’er us. A Dear Old Dad, who, moreover, had done his bit up in the Mediterranean and up the Aegean in an MTB, while other didn’t.
Moving on
Does this really need explaining?
The Tories remain a party which believes the fox-hunters deserve priority, while suburbanites are wakened, once a year in the early hours, by the urban vixen in orgasmic howl, and marvel they are still so close to nature.
The Tories remain a party where half the parliamentary vote goes against single-sex marriage, while most of us either are or live alongside, by the standards of Mother Church, irregular liaisons.
The Tories remains party where Euroscepticism is the norm, while most of us work for multi-nationals, take our holidays in EU countries, and actually enjoy an evening at the local Spanish, Greek or Italian restaurant.
