Well, it’s been another sequence of days leaving us spoilt for choice when it comes to highlighting yet again just how detached so many of our elected representatives are from me and thee. I suppose it makes sense to start at the top and work our way down, even if the top is a pretty lowly starting point to begin with where this lot are concerned. Okay, so the bad smell that is both Boris Johnson and the legacy of his No.10 tenure continues to infect headlines with the news that the former PM has been referred to Knacker re claims he broke lockdown rules during the pandemic; yes, it might feel like this is merely a re-boot of an over-familiar franchise, but it’s one story that thankfully keeps re-emerging every time the guilty try and sweep it under the carpet, and it won’t do any harm to be regularly reminded of what was going on in the Covid-free zones inhabited by the Cabinet while the rest of us were under house-arrest. The moment we neglect to remember is the moment we let them get away with it.
Scotland Yard has justified its latest perusal of the Ministerial diary by declaring, ‘We are in receipt of information from the Cabinet Office passed to us on 19 May 2023, which we are currently assessing. It relates to potential breaches of the Health Protection Regulations between June 2020 and May 2021 at Downing Street.’ Thames Valley Police have also got in on the act, as Boris is alleged to have received visitors at Chequers during the same time frame. Nothing new there, then; but further material for the investigation into Boris’s lockdown shindigs for the Commons Privileges Committee, I suppose. The justifiable anger that greeted the initial revelations of these always warrants being rekindled, even if the element of surprise is long gone; after all, nobody expects anything better of Ministers anymore. The lockdown party scandal was perhaps the most extreme example of how they evidently regard themselves as superior beings too high and mighty to abide by rules they impose on the plebs; yet this week so far has been dominated by another potent example of this – the Suella Braverman speeding saga.
As we know, the Home Secretary was caught speeding last summer when she was still Attorney General. Her privileged position clearly entitled her to special treatment, or so she imagined, allegedly asking Home Office civil servants to assist her in avoiding acquiring points on her licence. According to the Sunday Times, Ms Braverman tried to organise a one-to-one driving awareness course, something that would prevent her having to attend the usual ‘group therapy’ course ordinary motorists/mortals are dispatched to as an alternative to points on their licences. Having known a couple of people who’ve attended these, I’ve been told they’re not exactly fun days out on a par with Alton Towers; a dozen unlucky strangers are sealed in an air-tight vault for hours, humiliated and lectured in a condescending manner as though they’d just passed their test and know next to nothing about driving. It’s not difficult to understand why someone inhaling the rarefied air of high office like Suella Braverman might try her damndest to wriggle out of the whole embarrassing episode. However, when the one-to-one proposal was rejected, the Home Secretary’s aides then apparently tried to arrange an online equivalent whereby Braverman would hide her identity to prevent the story leaking out. In the end, she was forced to accept three points on her licence.
Braverman – who, it has to be said, is something of a repeat offender when it comes to breaking the Ministerial code – is still clinging on at the Home Office, awaiting the judgement of Rishi, rather than falling on her sword; her one-time Cabinet colleague Dominic Raab, on the other hand, has opted to bow out with as much grace as he can muster, announcing this week he’ll be standing down as an MP come the next General Election. One suspects that when he departs there won’t be a moist eye in the House. His downfall – much like the relegation to the backbenches of another leftover from the Boris era, Gavin Williamson – was due to bullying allegations, a factor viewed by the opposition as further evidence of this administration’s rotten core. Labour’s habit of selling itself as the honest alternative – demonstrated yet again by Suella Braverman’s opposite number Yvette Cooper staging a master-class in self-righteous indignation in the Commons when pressing the Home Secretary for the truth – can be a risky game to play, however; it requires maintaining a whiter-than-white public image that makes big demands on those involved and means when the facade of integrity invariably slips, the accusations of hypocrisy ring louder than when a Party of whom we expect nothing less than endemic double standards are similarly found out.
Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, was this week caught letting the holier-than-thou side down by tweeting a pic of her BA ticket en route to New York, a ticket revealing she was sat in the airline’s exclusive £4,000+ Club World Business Class suite; the tweet may have been deleted with as much speed as Emily Thornberry removed her sneering ‘white van’ tweet a few years back, but as we all know, once it’s out there it’s out there for good. After accusing members of the Government of enjoying a ‘five-star luxury lifestyle’ on their numerous overseas jollies in the thick of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’, a leading Labour figure not flying economy class – which we surely expect of our noble puritan warriors – comes across as just a little bit hypocritical. Yes, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s use of a £10,000 private jet whilst touring the Caribbean and Latin America is more like it; that’s just the kind of extravagance the wicked old Tories should be indulging in at the expense of the taxpayer; but an MP from the Labour Party flying on a ticket that entitles her to a private lounge at the airport, keeping her safely separated from the smelly old salt-of-the-earth whose interests she and her Party are fighting for? Hard to comprehend, isn’t it.
And as Rachel Reeves tucked into her braised Welsh leg of lamb along with potato au gratin and minted peas as well as smoked salmon and apricot soufflé with vanilla custard and a cheeseboard accompanied by fig chutney – all washed down with a bottle of premium champagne – one wonders what her Labour colleague, Angela ‘Thingle Mother’ Rayner would’ve made of it all; she’s the one who accused the PM of ‘jetting around the country on taxpayers’ money like an A-list celeb’ whilst ‘families up and down the country are sick with anxiety about whether their pay cheque will cover the weekly shop’. A member of the Labour frontbench should naturally exist on a diet of bread & dripping and make their way to any function by horse-and-cart – that’s a given. Or, alternately, they could dispense with any pretence to being at one with the wider electorate and simply admit they belong to a separate political class, emphasising their true metropolitan credentials by adhering to an insane ideology nobody beyond Guardianista circles buys into whatsoever.
That’s what Lib Dem leader Ed Davey did this week, adding his name to the impressive roll-call of Honourable Members jostling for the right to be the most out-of-touch Parliamentarian when it comes to those whose votes they’ll be courting again a year or so from now. On an LBC phone-in, the man who clearly fancies his chances of ‘doing a Clegg’ next time round declared that women can ‘quite clearly’ have a penis; perhaps his missus is hiding something from us or maybe he’s just riding the latest convenient bandwagon with a fair few passengers already weighing it down on campus. Disregarding the blatant abuse of the naive appeasement of a tiny minority by Scottish paedophiles and other brickies in drag who fancy venturing into the few safe spaces remaining to half of the natural-born population, Sir Ed hardly gave floating voters who are desperate for an alternative to the shower of shit running the show much in the way of confidence. These are your options, folks. Good luck.
© The Editor
Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?fan_landing=true&u=56665294
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/824916098
I know it feels like 100 years ago now, but if you can possibly cast your mind back to the eve of the 2019 General Election, you might recall there was an unprecedented rash of preemptive exits as a wipe-out of the Westminster Remoaners beckoned following months of undemocratic chaos when they tried their damndest to reverse the 2016 mandate delivered by the people. The fragile majority Boris Johnson had inherited from Theresa May was whittled down to a minority as numerous Tory Members crossed the floor of the House and the PM removed the whip from 21 rebels; some even formed their own Party in conjunction with Labour MPs dismayed at the Momentum dominance within Corbyn’s Labour – anyone recall Change UK? – and some relocated to the Lib Dems; but all were desperate to prevent the General Election Boris was eager to call in order to sort out the problem once and for all, preferring the red herring of a Second Referendum. When it became clear this wasn’t feasible, there were even characteristically bonkers suggestions such as the one proposed by the Greens’ Caroline Lucas, which suggested an unelected emergency administration should be formed with her (naturally) at the centre of it. All of these moves served as a blatant indication as to just how much the Remainer elite within Parliament mistrusted the British public to do the right thing.
In their former guise as non-Democrats, the Liberals once presided over one of the most celebrated results in by-election history – and it happened exactly 60 years ago, when Eric Lubbock overturned a Tory majority of 14,760 in Orpington and transformed a safe Conservative seat into a 7,855 majority for the Liberal Party. The Tories had been in government for 11 years at that point, yet had already acquired the weary detachment from the electorate that is often a by-product of a decade in office; the familiar whiff of a sex scandal that can accompany such tired longevity was just round the corner, though in 1962 the name John Profumo had yet to become a household one; ditto Christine Keeler. Last night in Tiverton and Honiton, it would appear history was going through one of its routine habits of repeating itself as the Lib Dems inflicted one of the most comprehensive and humiliating defeats on the Conservative Party ever seen at a by-election as former Army Major Richard Foord triumphed over the Tory candidate, wiping out a majority of 24,239 in a seat that had never been free from Conservative hands since its creation. And the by-election only happened because the sitting Tory MP Neil Parish was forced to quit after he’d been outed for watching porn on his phone in the Commons.
If ever a county could be labelled a traditional Tory Shire, surely Shropshire has always ticked the requisite blue boxes. Still unique in that it remains a sizeable landmass in the middle of England without a single city, Shropshire is the largely rural border between the West Midlands and Wales, with its sole concession to post-war redevelopment being the Newtown of Telford. A familiar feature of 19th century novels penned both before and after the 1832 Reform Act, the campaign trail of the landowners’ chosen candidate is so entrenched as part of the archaic fabric of English political life that it’s revealing to discover such a system survived the termination of the old Rotten Boroughs. The Parliamentary constituency of North Shropshire was established the same year as the Reform Act, yet continued the practise of electing two members to Parliament, initially divided between the Tories and the Whigs. Within a couple of years, both victors represented the Conservative Party and the dual members remained that way until further reform in 1885, when the constituency was abolished and split into four separate constituencies electing one member each.
Scent – that was what hit me yesterday. The scent of fruit and the scent of veg; the scent of freshly-baked buns and bread; the scent of girls walking past with their perfume reminding me what women smell like – indoor odours I haven’t inhaled on foreign soil for over a year. My sinuses weren’t even smacked by any unseemly B.O., which has long been a traditional and unfortunate by-product of venturing into a supermarket during a Great British heat-wave. To set foot in an interior outside of my home and not have the ability to smell my surroundings utterly constrained by a bloody mask was intoxicating as I became reacquainted with a sensation I’d been denied for too long; what a relief it was to expose this neglected sense to something other than my own breath. In fact, it’s frightening how quickly and effectively I had forgotten the aroma of freedom of choice; like the sudden restoration of so much we’ve been deprived of since the first lockdown, being reunited with such a simple gift it’s so easy to take for granted is something worthy of celebration – even if the awareness that this particular democratic right will probably be taken back with the same speed it was stolen in the first place remains uppermost amidst the celebration.
As has become evident in recent years re what can no longer be said in polite company, once words drift out of the colloquial lexicon, it’s rare for them to be welcomed back. Like ex-lovers or disgraced celebrities, all evidence of them is wilfully erased to the point whereby they only continue to exist within the context of whatever caused them to be blackballed in the first place. Many words which disappear are never seen again in the present tense; and if they happen to unavoidably feature in a work of drama produced before their social exclusion, contemporary witnesses are warned of their presence as a kind of trigger disclaimer. A few words that don’t fall into the ‘rebranded offensive’ category simply fall out of common parlance because they sound so old-fashioned or are too associated with a past no longer relevant. Random words heard routinely during my own childhood such as courting, demob suit, shop steward and goolies spring to mind. Added to that could be housewife – once a valid job title, yet nowadays usually uttered by actual housewives in a rather embarrassed tone of voice that implies it’s a poor substitute for a real career.
A woman fiddles with her hair in the mirror; we see the view she sees, so we express the same terror when the reflection suddenly shows a figure appear behind her – a menacing intruder in a gasmask. Despite the well-documented wealth of 1970s TV and film archive I own on DVD or that I’ve simply seen repeated over the decades, I’ve still never found out what this terrifying scene was from, a scene that impacted on my imagination as a small (not to say traumatised) child. We all have such moments when our exposure to cinema and television expands during those formative years, and this was mine. It defined the gasmask as a sinister object in my mind forevermore. I recall a ‘Doctor Who’ adventure a few years later called ‘The Deadly Assassin’, in which Tom Baker’s Doctor spends an entire episode in a nightmarish landscape called The Matrix – and a man in a gasmask appears in that. Oh, and for good behind-the-sofa measure, there’s a scary clown in it too.
When the BBC aired ‘A Very English Scandal’, its entertaining Russell T Davies-penned drama about the Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott affair a couple of years back, I remember explaining to a friend how the general public of the time were reluctant to believe the allegations against the Liberal leader due to him being a popular politician. I compared him to Charles Kennedy in that he was representative of an increasingly rare breed, i.e. a prominent Parliamentarian the majority of the electorate didn’t actually hate. I cited the 1975 Oxford Union Debate on the EEC Referendum as an example of Thorpe’s considerable oratorical skills; sharing the stage with plodding old Heath, as well as a stuttering Barbara Castle and a flustered Peter Shore, Thorpe shines as an eloquent and witty speaker; it’s a rare opportunity for TV viewers to see him at the height of his powers, for the Commons wasn’t televised in 1975; by the time it was, Thorpe had already left the building – in disgrace.
Talk about false dawns. Those invigorating in-between times – those by-elections and local elections and European elections – always fool us into believing they’re the harbingers of political earthquakes rocking the foundations of the two major parties; and yet, the real threat to the red and blue corners’ century-old monopoly of power, if it comes at all, tends to come from within rather than without. The Labour and Conservative Parties are more than capable of destroying themselves without any assistance from outsiders. Give them the exclusive right to elect their respective leaders and look what happens. Having said that, however, their joint ability to overcome these internal disasters is either a tribute to their admirable capacity for survival or a damning indictment of not only the other parties snapping at their heels, but the first-past-the-post system – and possibly even the electorate itself.
Barely had the bulk of the damaged vessel disappeared beneath the waterline last night before several rodents could be sighted frantically swimming away from the wreck. Amber Rudd is stepping down as an MP; Heidi Allen is stepping down as an MP. In other words, ideological allies once tipped as ones-to-watch are joining the likes of kindred spirit Justine Greening by jumping before being pushed by their constituents. The former Home Secretary scraped through by the skin of her teeth in 2017 and the current Lib Dem has changed sides twice since then; both are smart enough to recognise what comes next, but even now they won’t come clean; already, the volatile climate for honourable members is being blamed, particularly by Allen.
winegumtelegram 