THE ROYAL WEDDING

A HOLIDAY ON THE ISLE OF MAN always seems to remind me of certain qualities of Britishness, or even, paradoxically, Englishness, that have disappeared from the face of life in the United Kingdom itself, of which the good island is not a part. Almost as soon as one boards ship in Liverpool before embarking upon the 72 mile journey to Douglas one begins to feel as if time is being turned back.

CONFIRMATION OF THIS IS PROVIDED by the impressions upon arrival and the short walk to my hotel on the bay: smart, friendly policemen with apparently nothing to do, steam trains, horse-drawn trams, white walls without graffiti, pints of beer at a pound, a double whisky for one pound seventy pence and then the receptionist at my hotel addressing me by my title and surname. There is also other evidence of England in the nineteen-forties which I must not mention for fear of being clapped in irons.

NOTHING APPEARS TO HAVE CHANGED on Man and Sodor for at least fifty years if not more. One feels strangely cut off from the real world, thrust back into a bygone age and out of touch with today. The curious animal life, such as the cats without tails and the odd Loaghtan sheep (above) with four or even six horns, seems to be the result of close inbreeding.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE ROYAL FAMILY? I imagine you may be asking. The reason is that this brief holiday was curtailed in order for my good lady wife to be present for the wedding today of our dashing Prince William and his paramour Catherine Middleton, an actress who, I believe, played Hermione in the dreaded Harry Potter films, and who has since grown up.

WE FELT THAT CELEBRATION OF THIS EVENT should not be spent eerily trapped in a past that stubbornly refuses to move forwards – we can leave that to the Windsors themselves.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

THE BRITAIN IN WHICH I WAS YOUNG was an easy place to understand. Conservatives were rich toffs, the Labour Party was full of useless no-hopers, the Liberals were a joke and there was a bubbling-under threat of violence and extremism. The early seventies was also a time when travel to the continent was an unearthly expense, most people had to think hard about the cost of driving a car and the England football team was an international joke.

ALTHOUGH SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE, as in the England football team, from the eighties on two remarkable politicians managed to alter this comfortable state of things. The accrued efforts of Messrs Thatcher and Blair and the support of a shaven and coiffured, well-dressed middle class managed to turn Britain into a dynamic, vibrant powerhouse of economic development and financial strength, putting the UK on a footing with the USA on all fronts in the early nineties – compared with 1973, when Britain had to borrow money from Holland to stay afloat. This disappointing state of things was also made possible by the fact that the “upper” class, under both leaders, was forced to cough up a fair whack of its income, and benefits to the unwashed were cut, making people who had a natural bent for the sofa (at both ends of the scale) get up, turn off the TV (or put the Port bottle away) and get out and work.

FORTUNATELY, THERE IS ALWAYS BLIGHT at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long it is, and thus came Brown and then Cameron, beaming in their joy at sending us back to the seventies. Brown’s part in all this was to ruin the value of the economy by talking about joining the Euro and to reduce the value of work by increasing benefits for unemployment to a state where it was almost foolish to want employment if you had two children. Brown was unable to complete the job, however, and so it has been left to Cameron to reduce taxation at the top end so much that it is once again possible for rich people to remain as idle and drunk as they were in the XVII century, watching their incomes spiral off the balance sheet from the bar of the House of Commons or Lords, according to which one they have persuaded the boy Cameron to let them enter.

ALL OF THIS WAS TO BE EXPECTED when we are governed by people who have never worked and have no idea of the “real” value of money in the “real” world (both Brown and Cameron), but what was lacking until yesterday was the final touch, that little je ne sais quoi that tells you that we have finally returned to the good old days of solid English Conservatism. Cameron’s “major speech” yesterday involved all the old clichés that Conservatives love. Immigrants and foreigners “cause havoc”, “discomfort and disjointedness”; they ruin our national character and “way of life”; and finally, the pièce de résistance, “many of them cannot speak English” and “don’t fit in”.

MUCH OF THIS IS NOT FAR FROM the British National Party (known as the National Front in the seventies) and its “we like foreigners but we think they should live in Foreignland” policy or its view that one can tell who really belong in this country “just by looking at them”. And, more importantly, it is much more of a vote-winner in the upcoming local elections than Cameron’s last major message in his keynote speech last month about hard times.

VOTERS, PARTICULARY LIBERALS and the middle classes, are fed up of being told to “cut back”, to reduce their spending and, as Ken Clarke stated, tighten their belts and go on a diet. Going on a diet involves tough choices about what to eat and drink or not. Perhaps we should follow the footsteps of the last Liberal leader. He decided to give up food altogether and do an alcohol only diet. He managed to lose about two days a week.

(My picture shows Mr Cameron, not behind bars, but with his wife on their recent midweek break in Foreignland)

HEMLOCK AND AFTER

JOSÉ SOCRATES PINTO DE SOUSA, the outgoing prime minister of Portugal, is surely not the incompetent, devious, arrogant, lying, corrupt and insecure thief that many people here in Portugal believe he is, but one cannot argue with the statistics that state that his policies have ground entrepreneurial initiative into granite dust and led a third of the population to regularly fill up their petrol tanks over the border in Spain.

SOUSA’S RUNNING THE ECONOMY has its calamitous precedents in the governments that came before him: since the late nineties we have seen mismanagement, dishevelled and often deranged projection of policies by politicians who might have been better used in mental hospitals, hurried announcements of half-baked projects and the widespread use of the “brown envelope”, which, I must state here, was never the case of Mr “Socrates”, the son of humble country, goat-milking folk who now is the owner of two apartments in the most prestigious areas of Lisbon.

“SOCRATES” SEEMS TO HAVE ACCEPTED that he and his bloated government of fat-wallet investment bankers and bespoke-suited cronies are about to go down the toilet. Several of his original horn-rimmed supporters have already bitten the bullet and skived off into the private sector so that they could at least fork out massive loans to their children before the heavy hand of the IMF or the European Commission (in the hands of another Portuguese robber baron) can come along as they are fleeing the country and ask questions such as: “And did you pack this suitcase yourself, sir”. Of course he did. He packed it. “And does it contain any sharp objects or liquids, sir?” “Yes. The Portuguese economy.”

LE LOOK MIDDLETON

TRAVELLING THROUGH LONDON LAST WEDNESDAY served once again to remind me what buffoons French people are. My arrival at Gatwick Village International Airport, my brief stay fathoming out its arcane wonders, my train journey to Victoria, my ride through London on the number 73 bus from Victoria to Euston Square and my short stay in Euston before being whisked off by train to more civilized climes in aristocratic Chester – all of this was punctuated by shrieks of delight from giggly French girly girls who had descended upon our capital in search of all and anything related to the forthcoming royal wedding.

MANY OF THESE JEUNES had already adopted “le look Middleton”: boring blazer-style double-breasted coat with big buttons, navy blue skirt, blue stockings, blue shoes or Ugg boots and windswept hair. While this style of dress is no example of buffoonery, what we are witnessing is fanaticism for things royale by children of a nation that was happy in the extreme to cut the heads off their own aristocracy in the hope of a better society. Some chance. If they had kept their own lunatic rulers they might be saving some money now.

PERHAPS MANY OF THESE GIGGLIES think that they might have a chance at Harry, the most – this pains me to state it – eligible bachelor on the planet. If they do, they will be aware that for girlies like Kate one can gain the world on a wing with the only concession being that on occasion one has to lie back, close one’s eyes, open one’s legs and think of England. Added to this is the fact that the men in the Windsor clan do not seem to be the type to want to “do the naughty with their fillies”, as I am informed they term having a full, loving, sexual relationship with their wives to mean, very often, so the job should not be too demanding.

FULL MARKS ALSO FOR OUR VERY OWN QUEEN ELIZABETH. She has not only made it clear that she does not want “cheap” souvenirs on sale involving our lovey-dovey royals, but has forbidden the regal lovebirds from endorsing such tat. One may think, of course, about the meaning that Elizabeth grants to “cheap”. I presume that she means she does not want to see dish-cloths and toilet paper with Kate and Wills on them. If so, she may be in for a little jolt of the voltage: the girly girl Frenchies were already holding whoopee cushions with Kate’s face on them, lunch boxes with the smiling couple beaming halitosis to us and, of all things, “Kate Middleton lipstick”, on sale at Victoria Station. I am disgusted. (My picture shows Kate expressing her disgust.)