LORD PRESCOTT

SIMILARLY TO AN ISSUE I DEALT with four years ago in relation to John Prescott then being the “Deputy Prime Minister”, I am concerned about whether I agree with the fact that a decent working-class ex-waiter should accept a position in the House of Lords simply because “her at home wants t’be a lady”. Mr John Prescott was an excellent MP and a decent deputy PM, despite being criticised for having an affair with a woman (nowadays it would be acceptable if he had been fooling about with another man).

ON AFFAIRS, HOWEVER, MY TAKE IS why on earth any decent gentleman should be remotely concerned about how many affairs with a secretary another gentleman has or does not have. But perhaps there is the rub: gentlemen may be forgiven for having the occasional glass of Port after work in the company of a secretary, and if one has one too many and if this leads to what is vulgarly called “sex” then this is all well and good as long as the gentleman does not tell anyone about it and the secretary does not ask for money.

INDEED, IN A SENSIBLE WORLD THIS SORT OF ACTIVITY would be compulsory. After all, everyone benefits in the end: the gentleman gets more value for money from his employee – and everyone knows that secretarial wages are a scandal nowadays – and the secretary benefits from close contact with refined, upper-class manners and visits to decent restaurants in Juan-les-Pins or Avignon perhaps, before she goes on to get married to, say, an insurance representative and settles down in Wolverhampton.

HOWEVER, THINGS CANNOT BE SEEN THROUGH the same prism when we are dealing with a member of what is laughingly called the working class. One cannot but cringe at the thought of the smell of tripe, black pudding and brown ale during a kiss, or candlelit dinners in wine bars in Putney, or the flat, twangy northern declarations of affection, using words like “lass”, or, perish the thought, copulation in the dark, which, I am reliably informed, often takes place among people who buy their underwear in supermarkets.

EVEN SO, PRESCOTT DESERVES his nobility simply for the fact that one of the highlights of an incredibly dull period of politics over the last ten years or so was the sight of the Right Hon. Member “duffing over”, as he would no doubt put it, one of those irritating hooligans who find amusement in insulting their superiors during political campaigns on a visit to some unpronounceable settlement in North Wales. I have watched with extreme horror while protesters have hurled eggs, flour and tomatoes at decent chaps who, nonetheless, have remained passive, yet all the time wished to move in with a stout hickory crop and give these unwashed curs a good thrashing. But, fortunately we have an obedient police force in England and Wales, so no doubt a thrashing is administered behind closed cell doors by blue-clad johnnies wearing what is termed “body armour” today.

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

It is public scandal that constitutes offence,

and to sin in secret is not to sin at all.
Le Tartuffe

ONE WONDERS WHAT MOLIÈRE MIGHT BE WRITING nowadays if he had been paying attention to the behaviour of our Liberal Democrat leaders over the last twenty or thirty years. Indeed, almost every snide attack M. Poquelin made on the French nobility, court, middle class, liberals and soi-disant politicians in the early XVIII century may happily be applied to our splendid coalition partners today.

THE ‘OUTING’ OF DAVID LAWS AS A HYPOCRITE might be drawn straight out of The Misanthrope, and new boy Danny Alexander seems to be going the same way, suggesting that these chaps have simply not understood that golden rule about glass houses and throwing stones. After one speech in the House of Commons by David Laws, on Thursday 27th of May, warning MPs that they cannot expect to have their “frills paid for them”, the Daily Telegraph of Friday 28th of May outed him as having claimed for his “frills” for eight years. On Saturday 29th he resigned.

CONTINUING IN MOLIÈRE’S RICH VEIN, the Liberal Party, whether Democrat or not, has never been a school for husbands, and much less one for wives. We may go back to Jeremy Thorpe, Simon Hughes or Mark Oaten or to see an embodiment of their ideals: many of them want the libertarian freedom to indulge in smutty behaviour behind closed curtains in suburbia without telling their wives, husbands, boyfriends, children or, more importantly, voters.

DAVID CAMERON WAS SURELY WARNED by the barons who run his party that when one gets into bed with a Liberal one gets into bed with all his friends, and all their friends, and that somewhere along this daisy chain of bourgeois gentlemen there will be someone with dirty fingers. The millionaire David Laws, so secretive that his party didn’t even know his address and that he himself did not know he had been living with a male partner for eight years, was obviously a live one for Cameron. No wonder the Lib-Dems want CCTV banned.

THE ROYAL ASSENT

NOW THAT WE HAVE HAD ANOTHER spirited public intervention from our beloved, now divorced, ex-third-in-line-to be-Queen-of-England, the pouting, flame-haired Sarah Ferguson (see Sunday Mornings passim), coinciding with the forming of a new government of right-thinking gentlemen from good families, I imagine that we may be able to re-assess the role of the royal family once again, something which has not been done since the days of King Edward VIII.

SARAH DUCHESS OF YORK, although technically no longer of the Royal Family, is simply continuing a tradition that has often been used by ambitious girls in the past: using the obvious influence attached to being attached to a member of the Windsor-Battenberg-Schleswig-Holstein-Sondeburg-Glücksburg clan in order to promote oneself and to do a good business service to the country of which we are all proud. Indeed, many people will consider that “serving Britain” was the main reason why Mrs Wallis Simpson tried to sell the country to Hitler in 1936.

IT IS NO SHORT OF A NATIONAL DISGRACE to see otherwise worthy members of society being reduced to taking money for favours from dubious, shifty foreign businessmen when the sensible thing to do would be to restore dignity and purpose to our God-appointed leaders by legitimising their positions. Thus, as I wrote in The Sunday Times today, could we not save time, effort and money by giving members of the Royal Family and those occasionally attached to them positions in government, replacing the millionaires currently appointed by the Camelegg Twins? Prince Charles could be the Prime Minister, Prince Andrew and Duchess Sarah Chancellor of the Exchequer and Trade Secretary, Prince Edward and Countess Sophie Foreign Secretary and Minister for Sport and the Olympics, and Princess Anne could have Margaret Beckett’s old job. Prince Philip could remain in his position as the Highest Peer. I’m not sure that many people would notice the difference.

THE GREEN PARTY INVADERS

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN BRITISH POLITICAL HISTORY a constituency MP has been elected in the name of a green party, more specifically the Green Party of England and Wales. European onlookers may imagine that this is a phenomenon similar to that which has happened in certain countries on the continent, where “the greens” range from being left wing idealists or communists in Latin countries to terrorist criminals in Germanic ones. This would never do in Britain.

INDEED, VOTERS IN BRIGHTON PAVILION, the well-known home of eccentrics and defenders of alterative lifestyles, would be alarmed to think of “lefties” walking up and down their faux-medieval alleyways. These good people are committed to greenness in the sense that they will only smoke organic marijuana and only eat free-range crocodile steaks and ostrich eggs, as well as insisting on making their own muesli, knitting their children’s nappies and recycling their own political opinions.

OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, the electorate of central Brighton have had an excellent choice of weirdoes to vote for, and everything indicates that many of them seem to have thought that green Dr. Caroline Patricia Lucas was yet another. Previous candidates in this constituency, to greater or lesser success, have included the following:

CITIZENS FOR UNDEAD RIGHTS AND EQUALITY, with Soraya Anne Kara, which advocates the retirement age being increased until after death, research into finding cures for Zombie bites and full civil rights for the undead;

THE FREE PARTY, with Bob Dobbs, whose party proposed to select its policies from a wheel of fortune;

MAKE POLITICIANS HISTORY, with its leader Ronnie Carroll, advocating abolishing parliament and a return to city-states. Since the late nineties this party has evolved, being known as (in order) the VOTE FOR YOURSELF PARTY, the www.xat.com Party and ultimately the RAINBOW DREAM TICKET PARTY, led by Rainbow George Weiss; and finally,

THE NATURAL LAW PARTY, which advocated transcendental meditation, music by The Beatles and yoga as a solution to problems in society.

AFTER ALL THIS, NO WONDER the people of Brighton voted green, even if they thought they would be electing a Martian.

COME HITHER THE CAMELEGG

JOURNALISTS IMPRESSED BY HOW GOOD David Cameron and Nick Clegg look together as they stride about arm-in-arm in front of the cameras have been struggling to find a term that can best describe them. I am pleased to see that at least one of them (Ann Treneman at The Times) has come up with the same name I have been using, although she makes it sound a pleasant epithet. I prefer to see it as representing something extremely unlikely, given that dromedaries, like most mammals, keep their eggs inside them while they hatch.

CAMEL DROPPINGS OR CAMEL DUNG are terms used offensively by many of our fellow humans who live in desert areas, and so I am naturally worried that less responsible commentators, such as those who write for Private Eye or The Daily Mirror, may end up taking advantage of this new “unified” name to insult our beloved leaders. Equally, there may be those who see in it some resonance of the unfortunate incident during the elections when a hooligan spattered Davy Cameron with an egg, or see in the pig-headed, mule-like obstinacy of the camel some reference to qualities which might be glimpsed in the behaviour of politicians on occasion.

IT IS A SHAME THAT SUCH A LOVEY-DOVEY arrangement was not made between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the past, under previous leaders. Then we might have had the Cashdown to guide us through our financial problems.

BRING ME SUNSHINE

THOSE PLAYFUL CHAPS AT THE SUN NEWSPAPER have hardly finished cajoling their readers into voting for David “Dave” Cameron or Nick Clegg than they are setting them up to be knocked off their perches as soon as Sun journalists feel like a coconut shy is needed. In comparing Cameron and Clegg with the great comic pairing of Morecambe and Wise, the newspaper is certainly pointing out the pattern of the next five years: a barrel of laughs.


A RANDOM SELECTION OF COMEDIANS was asked last week who they would like to win the election. Despite all of them having natural left-leaning tendencies, their will was unanimous: they all wanted David Cameron to win simply because of the comic possibilities of having George Osborne and Theresa May in the public eye so often.


YET DECIDING THAT CAMERON AND CLEGG are top billing is perhaps not fair to the comic giants of the past. At the moment I happen to have been reading “Morecambe and Wise Untold”, by William Cook (the book is pictured above), and I can guarantee that no fair comparison is possible. Morecambe and Wise were professionals, dedicated to their work, determined to bring pleasure to others and committed to helping each other look good. They both came from spit and sawdust backgrounds, understood the common people, and had a partnership that lasted for 44 years. And they were funny on purpose. Let’s see Dave and Nick top that.

ASHES TO ASHES

AN ENGLISHMAN IN SCOTLAND will always possess the tingling, slightly exciting, feeling of having travelled back in time some thirty or forty years, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the stunning city of Edinburgh. The politeness of waiters and shop assistants, the old-fashioned fiduciary issue, the tatty comfort of the pubs, the Jacobethan pronunciation, the grimy tenement buildings and the fact that many gentlemen have not yet started wearing trousers – all of this softly speaks of, rather than screams of, the past. Even the elections results of last Thursday, as well as their circumstances, smack of the nineteen-seventies.

OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS I have come to realise that travelling into the past, as defended by the lunatic Labour candidate Manish Sood (see previous post), may not have to be particularly irksome. Yet in both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, the BBC TV series, the protagonists long to return to the present time. Indeed I myself need to return to the reality of my existence, but once again am caught under the shadow of ashes spewing out of an Icelandic volcano. The last dump of ashes successfully swamped my flight; tomorrow will tell us how the next batch fares.

EDINBURGH, HOWEVER, HAS A SECRET: it is among the few places in the United Kingdom where police call boxes still exist, apparently eighty or so of them in the greater Edinburgh area. These are often referred to as a “Tardis”, the vehicle used by Dr Who to travel through time and space willy-nilly. My picture above shows one of these vehicles, parked almost directly beneath the window at which I am now writing. If all else goes wrong tomorrow I will attempt to enter the Tardis and fiddle about with the commands to see if I can get back to Lisbon and the nineteen-fifties.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

NO BRITISH ELECTION IS COMPLETE without the emergence of a star performer, usually an utter idiot, capable of capturing the imagination of a voting public fed up to their back teeth with grey-suited and grey-faced politicians spouting the usual dull rubbish. Now that John “Duffer” Prescott has retired, and given that David Cameron has wisely told “Boy” George Osborne and plummy Theresa May to stay under cover and keep their mouths firmly shut, one wondered who it might be.

NOW WE KNOW WE NEEDN’T have feared. Much to the delight of the press, Labour Party candidate for North West Norfolk Manish Sood came forward with what has been described as an “astonishing attack” on our (as I write) Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Mr Sood has declared that Brown is a “disgrace”, and the worst PM in history, demanding he say sorry to the Queen personally and to the public in general (presumably not in person one by one).

CANDIDATE MANISH LAMENTS the state into which our pleasant country has been driven by Brown, and worryingly suggests that we should try to turn the clock back to the “sixties and seventies”, exemplifying his frightening views by declaring that once we could leave our money outside for the milkman without it being stolen, leave our doors open and leave our cars open in confidence.

BESIDES HIS POLITICAL AMBITIONS to rediscover a Britain in which the average citizen can commit almost criminal negligence in respect to their possessions, Mr Sood also thinks that we “need” the death penalty again, have to to get out of this “rubbish Europe”, should dress more like gentleman and ladies (presumably according to one’s sex), should give the police powers to “give young people a smack around the ear” when they deserve it, should give more power to the Queen and need to “live true socialism again”.

HE FINISHED OFF HIS DIATRIBE on all channels yesterday by saying that “these politicians in power” cannot “do the job properly” and that they should “move over” and let him in, as he is ready to take over in running the country. I wish to make it clear right now that if I lived in North West Norfolk this gentleman would be getting my vote. But that is probably because if I lived in such a cultural, intellectual and social backwater I would most likely be as off my cake as Mr Sood.