How Not To Be A Political Wife

Sarah Vine’s account of the misery of being Mrs Michael Gove

Another Tory account of the worst successive governments in modern history, with barely a sorry in it. Another magnificent acquisition from Beckenham library, just to reassure you, dear loyal readers, that I’m not contributing a penny to Sarah Vine’s hardship fund. More of that later.Think of this as selfless public service on my part. I’ve read this dull trudge so that you don’t have to.

On the surface, this was a book with massive potential. It tells the story, from an insider’s point of view, of the rise and fall of Michael Gove, one of the key movers and shakers in the Cameron project, and Brexit, and its aftermath. It’s a tale rich in snobbery, sycophancy, the psychological alienation of the class traitor and Shakespearean levels of betrayal. Throw in a broken marriage and a trail of lost friendships and you have a recipe for a juicy stew. Unfortunately, it tastes like a tin of bland, mass -produced soup with not enough salt.

Just like that other towering political tome, Ungovernable by that Complete Unknown, Simon Hart, Vine’s book is a virtuoso display of Not Reading The Room. The levels of denial, delusion and deceit are off the scale. Vine and her ilk simply cannot conceive that any other government than a Conservative one is either possible or legitimate. Any break in that hegemony is merely a temporary blip, an annoying hiatus while the ruling class have to wait a bit until the billionaires do their work through the media, mainstream and social, telling enough lies to make the electorate forget exactly how ghastly they were in office. For years the enemy for the Ghastly Party was Labour, but strange things have happened in recent years. Now, Labour in government have metamorphosed into a vile tribute act for the people they replaced, saying and enacting a whole series of authoritarian, dumbass policy positions that are just as bad ( and in some cases worse) of those espoused by the party that have just been ousted. Their brilliant advisors have concluded that the thing that will really seal the deal with an electorate who were heartily sickened by the corruption and incompetence of the Tories, apparently untouched by the collapse of civil society and its infrastructure, is to, um, pretend to be the Tories. New Labour transformed miraculously into New Tory. Was this Blair’s secret plan all along? Yes, Peter, that will do it. You really are a tactical and strategic genius.

I digress. Vine’s book provides a terrifying portrait of the world inhabited by the ruling classes and those temporarily given house room in return for services rendered: Skiing holidays (where she copped off with Michael Gove – that tells you how bad it must have been), Tuscan villas, hobnobbing with minor royals, wine-fueled jollies at Chequers. And it’s made very clear that both Gove and Vine were intruders, not quite made of the same right stuff as the Golden Cameroons and their entourage. There’s a telling recollection of George Osborne’s reaction to the news that Gove was hitching his colours to the Leave campaign.

“But..but..” he spluttered, “We made Michael Gove. Who was he before? He owes us his whole bloody career! How can he not support us?”

Class will out. In their eyes, Gove and Vine (particularly Gove), were oiks, to be laughed at behind their backs. Vine shows a Gove desperate to keep up, to be accepted, to varnish over his background. Spending too much on wine, clothes, stuff, anything and everything to signal he knew what the accessories were that were needed to keep your place, socially and in terms of your career, at the top table.

Vine is also strangely keen to put to bed, as it were, the persistent rumours that have dogged Gove about his sexuality. To do so she furnishes the sympathetic reader with clinching details about Michael’s life, including how he is always drenched in the most expensive and exclusive fragrances, beautifully dressed and before he met Vine shared a number of flats with scores of very gay and very out men. Honestly, it’s astonishing the hurtful rumours began in the first place.

“Michael enjoyed the intellectual company of men probably more than women. And he did have a lot of gay friends (still does) plus as a minister he had a habit of surrounding himself with incredibly handsome gay men. But that was all circumstantial. A few swallows do not a summer make.”

Vine’s razor sharp wielding of evidence to the fore as usual. That’s those rumours comprehensively scotched.

Other details are helpfully provided to give a full and rounded picture of Gove the polymath. Her account of his heroic struggle to liberate Working Class children from the tentacles of the Communist Education Establishment (aka Local Education Authorities) is a textbook example of the careless disregard of facts so entrenched in Journalism (particularly those taking the Daily Mail shilling). Take a few vague and fuzzy impressions circulated endlessly by the establishment (Working Class kids are thick, State schools are useless, Posshies are innately superior), come up with some populist “common sense” solutions (make kids read 19th century Literature, turn the curriculum into a relentless list of facts to be learned, swamp the system with grinding and irrelevant exams and resits) and bingo you have a recipe that will inevitably have to be unpicked at some point in the future as the full scale of the disaster it will inevitably create becomes impossible to defend.

She adds stories that illustrate Gove’s difficulties in navigating the humdrum world of us mere mortals: repeatedly crashing the car, not doing the washing up, head always stuck in a very expensive book (he’s very clever you know). This latter habit was deployed very helpfully when Mrs Gove was in labour and again when they were moving out of the family home. Not for Mikey the workaday drudgery of filling packing cases or loading the car or checking on the children. No sir – he had to take care of the polymath type tasks, reading another impenetrable, expensive (but oh so impressve) tome on yet another 19th century Tory bigwig politician grandee. Much more effective than insisting the midwife bring on the epidural. “What is pain?” mused the Govester loftily, in between his wife’s screams, as he sipped another glass of vintage red after a hard day in the House of Commons.

Well, we all know what he got up to there. And in clubs across the land after his unfortunate divorce.

https://share.google/images/HtaTeVFvyBXyzu8Uv

The book only becomes interesting when Vine talks about her childhood. It’s a sad tale, and one that succeeds in creating some sympathy for the hitherto unlikeable author. Her father sounds absolutely ghastly and Vine’s life was made very difficult by the incessant undermining and criticising of her by a drunken, philandering patriarch. She’s done well to survive it, quite frankly.

But that’s as far as my sympathy extends. It’s hard to feel for someone who makes their money from endless articles in The Daily Mail churning out utter tripe – nasty, vindictive, xenophobic, classist nonsense designed to tickle the prejudices of their “patriotic” readership. She (and it) have a lot to answer for.

Finally, we get to the main psychological cry for help that runs like a golden thread throughout the book: her friendship with Samantha Cameron. Her evident neediness makes it uncomfortable to read at times. The fallout from Gove jumping ship over Brexit led to an immediate and draconian excommunication from the Golden Circle of The Cameroons. Vine howls in disbelief, pain, apology. You can almost see the snot-stained, tear-drenched face of the deranged jilted lover.

To parody John Crace, the digested read of this book can be only one thing:

“Please, please, Sam, (cos I’m her closest friend, readers) take me back. Be my friend again. Let me back in. Please… I’ll do the washing up”

Ungovernable? Unspeakable more like

A review of Simon Hart’s Political diaries

Just to give you a flavour of Simon Hart’s powers of political analysis, here’s a memorable sentence from the book:

Their styles are so different, that I’ve decided that when it comes to politics (thank goodness for this clarification!) Boris “fucks” and Rishi “makes love”. Both are strangely effective.

Both presumably guarantee an earth-moving orgasm every time. No such joy from Simon Hart’s political memoir, which will not trouble the scorers in the pantheon of political history. The lack of an index is a bit of a giveaway. This is not serious history, just tittle-tattle, self-justification and whining about unfairness. By the end even Hart seems a little embarrassed about how the thin gruel is that his book contains, (yet rather pleased about the raunchy sentence above – Tories are sexy, Labour are dull. Yawn.)

Several factors conspired to bring me to this book: a series of glowing reviews (“remarkable insight”, “engrossing, entertaining, ..so funny”,) an unquenchable appetite for revelations about the disaster of government since 2010, and the serendipity of finding it available, pristine and untouched in my local library. Circumstances that were too good to turn down at the time, but, in the end, I almost wished I had passed on this and got something else instead.

It barely delivers on the shocking revelations front, apart from a couple of scarcely believable, tawdry anecdotes that were well-trailed prepublication.

The first was the tale of the Tory MP ringing in the middle of the night to be rescued, having found himself in a brothel with a Russian spy (well, we’ve all been there).

The second was this beauty: “ a departmental SPAD went to an orgy at the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another persons head…..in a separate incident a Commons employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Saville and ended up having sex with a blow up doll” Obviously, apart from that, the Tories are straight up regular guys.

Don’t read the book if you’re expecting page after page of scandalous behaviour like this by the naughty party. The majority of the book is mind numbingly dull: endless reports of Cabinet awaydays, PMQs, events in Wales (Hart was Secretary of State for Wales at one point) and name dropping accounts of drinking sessions or meals out with sycophantic journalists. It does, however, perform an invaluable public service in reminding us just how ghastly, how inept, how morally bankrupt the Tories in office were. Barely a page goes by without details of one Tory after another getting found out for a misdemeanour: child abuse, rape, corruption, bullying, watching pornography in the commons. The cases accelerate when Hart becomes Chief Whip under Rishi Sunak, presumably because in that role he was privy to information about all badly behaved MPs. The main conclusion Hart draws from this is that the Tory party needs to improve its candidate selection process, to avoid the serial sex offenders, criminals, bullies and freeloaders. It seems to have escaped him that the Johnston intake, in 2019, was so full of those sorts of loathsome chancers that a better vetting process would have left them with a list of suitable candidates down to double figures.

To everyone else in the country, it was perfectly clear that these rogues were quintessentially Tories. Their sins, not aberrations or mistakes, but an essential part of who they were and what they believed in. Born to rule, rich, entitled and convinced that the rules laid down to regulate behaviour were meant for the little folks, not for them. It was The Bullingdon Club writ large.

It appears from these diaries that virtually no work of any meaningful kind goes on. Yes, there are late meetings and early meetings, but they are all fuelled by expensive lunches and dinners, where the drink flows freely. The meetings involve endless wrangling, navigating a route around different political factions, leading to absolutely nothing in terms of improving the lives of people. All of their energies appear to go into party management to ensure a compliant parliamentary party, using patronage and threats of exposure to keep everyone in line. This becomes clearer in the years when Hart was chief whip, when the diary is overwhelmingly about Tory MPs relentlessly hassling him for honours. Hart himself says that he was thinking about calling the book ”About my Knighthood” because that’s how most Tories started a conversation with him. It’s a portrait of a system that runs on naked corruption, and self serving venality. These people ooze entitlement, and the notion of serving their constituents seems never to cross their minds.

The biggest insight the book provides is into the full, horror shit show that is the mindset of the average Tory MP: entitled, snobby, completely deluded about their values, actions, and how they are viewed by Joe Public. Everything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault, usually the media in general and the BBC in particular which Hart ludicrously seems to think is a branch of the Communist Party. Here are a few snippets, giving us a pretty accurate snapshot of the cut of Hart’s jib.

First is his description of Mark Drayford, the Labour leader of the devolved Welsh Assembley. Hart as Welsh Secretary had a lot of dealings with him and seems incensed that Drayford was more popular than him and got a lot of plaudits for his handling of Covid. Here’s Simon Hart’s verdict: “Drakeford’s public persona was one of a dull academic, the sort of lefty philosophy lecturer you used to find at Luton Polytechnic in the 1970s. A Welsh Jeremy Corbyn…” “ Drakeford looks like a scruffy old university lecturer with dirty shoes” Multi-layered snobbery or what?

His contempt for public service is also never far from the surface. Here is one example he casually throws in when describing Starmer. “ He may have been the Director of Public Prosecutions but as some of our MP lawyers observe, any decent lawyer goes into private practice”

His political judgement is hopelessly awry. Every description of PMQs, whether it be Johnson, Truss or Sunak at the helm, gives the impression that the Tory incumbent aced it every week, with Starmer missing open goal after open goal. He is baffled by the reputation of Gavin Williamson, who he describes as “one of us” and who is treated “terribly unfairly”.

He opines, with a straight face presumably, that “we have done a good job on water.” Blimey. Just imagine how bad it would have been if they’d messed it up.

He describes a lunch with Laura Kuensberg and provides further evidence of his razor sharp political antennae: “ For all the years I have known her, I would have no more clue now how she votes than on the day we first met.” Really, Simon? You must be the only person in the country with a double figure IQ who doesn’t know that Kuensberg is virtually in the Tory cabinet.

Once again, Hart provides clear evidence that the average Tory really doesnt see what all the fuss is about. It’s perfectly normal that the news should have an instinctive Tory bias because well, so does the country. If anything, the BBC is in the grip of Commies. The depth of delusion is compounded by his casual barbs about the left in general. “Why are they always so angry? It must be so exhausting.”

Perhaps because they see that all that has gone wrong with the country was avoidable. The damage inflicted as policy by a series of governments from the Right and Far right. You got away with it for so long because at first the damage only affected the people at the bottom, and no-one gives a toss about them. Things began to get sticky for the Tories in power as more and more people could see with their own eyes the damage being inflicted on the institutions of civil society. Just walk down the High Street, try to rent a flat or swim in the sea. That’s Tory shit you are navigating around.

Just like your swim, this is a book that will require you to wash your hands after reading it.

Ps – nearly forgot. Surely Hart has some insight into the Government’s handling of Covid? And the parties?

Parties? Didn’t happen, mate. Vaccine rollout. Starmer Curry.

Caledonian Road

O’Hagan triumphs with that rare beast – a State of the Nation novel with heart.

The latest novel from Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road, is a big beast, in every sense of the term. Physically, it’s got some heft. 640 pages of hard back book makes demands on the wrists. It’s also dealing with weighty, contemporary issues, so all told, the experience of reading it provides a holistic mind and body workout. Sounds like a week at a Spartan health farm, where the motto is no pain, no gain, but fear not dear readers, this novel also provides pure pleasure.

O’Hagan handles the intermingling of the personal and political with real skill and delicacy. A lesser novelist would have eschewed ideology and party politics for fear of committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of the serious, sensitive, superior and above-the-fray Literature Critics, that is the sin of taking sides. Ideology is both vulgar and limiting in this fragrant, lofty world. Evenhandedness is much more mature, much more subtle, much more human, darling. Perhaps. It’s certainly much more boring, in my opinion.

O’Hagan says a hearty bollocks to that and has dived in headfirst to this dissection of contemporary London society, and the power structures that both drive it and destroy it. He does it primarily through great storytelling. The novel succeeds first and foremost on that fundamental, primary level. The characters, their relationships, triumphs and disasters are memorable and compelling, even the utterly ghastly ones. Maybe especially the ghastly ones.

For the protagonist, Campbell Flynn, O’Hagan treads well-travelled paths. Working class lad done good, from the grim dereliction of 1970s Glasgow, Flynn at the time of the novel’s start is an academic, a cultural commentator, and a media darling down in that there London. Not a million miles away, obviously, from O’hagan’s own background, material previously plundered in his exquisite Mayflies. And not just London, but very specifically Kings Cross, an area recently reinvented by money and gentrification, but one which has pungent resonance for any refugee from the North. As a first entry point for East Coast Scots and Northerners, its streets, legends, and institutions retain a powerful grip on those arriving wide eyed from the sticks. Judd Street, the Eight till Late, the Scala, Peabody housing, Squats and Short Life flats, ULU, one hour rooms in lines of seedy hotels, kicking used syringes and condoms to one side leaving one’s flat in the morning – they are all part of the memory kaleidoscope conjured by the name Kings Cross.

As a big beast, the novel is teeming with characters, so much so that O’Hagan thoughtfully provides a cast list of two fully crammed pages. It’s essential if you want smooth passage through this behemoth, and a trick that Dickens himself could have profitably employed. The plot is multi-stranded and brilliantly handled, so that by the time the book has reached the halfway point, every time a new section of the book begins, there’s a sense of excitement at the resumption of that particular plot thread. That happens for all of the separate threads. That’s a real achievement. Usually, there’s always at least one thread that the reader has less engagement with, where you feel you’re treading water and sticking with, out of a sense of obligation. Here, all of them sing.

It’s a novel with laudable ambition, tackling big, serious issues. Any analysis of the current, woeful state of the UK would examine these topics in some depth, and O’Hagan looks them straight in the eye and explores them with both a pitiless forensic gaze and nuance, which allows him to eschew simplistic judgements and portray the issues and the characters with multilayered complexity. These are not the scribblings of a naive schoolboy marxist. He manages to cover

People trafficking
Cancel culture
British exceptionalism
The aristocracy
Public Schools
Russian money laundering
Social Media
Celebrity Culture
Gentrification
Housing

All of this produces an excoriating picture of the malign influence of the British establishment, their sense of entitlement and superiority, and the devastating impact they have had on destroying Civil Society for everyone except the super rich. The “freedom” this class espouses becomes simply freedom for millionaires to become billionaires without the state interfering.

There will be readers at this point who are thinking, “Bloody hell, this sounds far too political for me. I don’t understand this stuff and/or I just want a story about people and relationships” Keep the faith, you apoliticals! O’Hagan delivers on that front as well, with a huge range of individuals and families, all of whom, even the nasty Tories, are portrayed sympathetically. It’s Dickensian in that sense, and similar in many ways to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. An energetic, densely populated romp set in multicultural, class-riven contemporary London, it is, like Dickens, a serious work masquerading as an entertainment. Or the other way round.

There was one dud note for me at the beginning. His portraits of Media stars, the establishment, and the political classes all rang true and had the hallmark of authenticity. I found, at first, his depiction of knife wielding, estate dwelling, drug dealers less successful. It felt as if he had spent some time eavesdropping on an unfamiliar underclass and had produced a two dimensional portrayal. By the end, however, I was convinced and O’Hagan had totally won me over. This is A Great Novel, and I can’t wait for the adaptation, film or TV. Already commissioned, apparently.

My Novel of the Year – by a mile.

One last push, madam

Lest we Forget…..

Before we start, it’s always good to remind ourselves of the calibre of Tory MP we have had to suffer for the last 14 years…

Ah, that’s better. Now, lets think about the election for the last time.

At the time of writing, the general election is only four days away. It can’t come soon enough, after what has been a thoroughly miserable, profoundly depressing campaign. And the polls haven’t shifted a notch in terms of closing the gap, so we might as well have had a seven day campaign and spared everyone the grief. Instead, there’s been five weeks of watching a dwindling band of Tories, the few left who are still prepared to debase themselves, lie through their teeth on the media treadmill every day, which has left me feeling very detached from the whole business. Those Tories that have declined to take part in the undignified circus have done so, not because of an outbreak of guilt, or remorse, or shame, or the sudden rediscovery of a moral compass, but because they realise the game is up and there’s nothing in it for them anymore. Some (Jenrick, Patel, Braverman) have been largely silent and/or invisible because they are busy plotting their post election-rout leadership bid. Others like Jenkyn have been shamelessly brown nosing Nigel Farage, and fantasising about their dream merger with Reform and a possible comeback for Johnson. Students of 1930s Germany might recall strange parallels with Von Papen, Hindenburg and Hitler. That didn’t end well for anyone. Others have gone on holiday (Baker), gone to the betting shop (Williams) or gone mad (Nadine Dorries, Liz Truss) Yes, I know Mad Nad is not standing, but it’s always good to remind everyone just how ghastly the last fourteen years have been. Johnson posted one troop-rallying video, looking like a man who had just returned from a treasonous Bunga Bunga party in a Russian Oligarch’s Italian mansion, security detail nowhere to be seen, having over indulged on everything he was offered: cocaine, call girls, state secrets. When nobody took any notice he clearly thought, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I’m off” and buggered off back to the Sardinian villa ( paid for, of course, by some other gullible rich bastard who hasn’t the wit to realise that Johnson currently has the establishment clout of Matt Hancock, is shagging his wife, and has left a steaming turd in the middle of the villa’s marble floor.)

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has just plain gone, being helicoptered in to factory after factory wearing yellow hi vis and a glassy fixed smile giving the same answer to every question: “bold action….no plan…no surrender…” The loyalty troops (James Cleverly, Mel Stride) in the party are talking up the idea that losing but getting over a hundred seats would be an act of heroic, leadership brilliance, before preparing to shaft him on July 5th. “Et tu, Jimmy?” gasps Sunak as the knife strikes. It almost makes one nostalgic for Matt Hancock, who has been airbrushed from History. I sometimes wonder whether someone called Matt Hancock did actually exist, or whether I just keep having a recurring bad dream. It can’t be that though, because when I wake up, the reality is even worse.

It looks like the ever wonderful Channel 4 news’ undercover filming of the Reform racist members/ workers/volunteers might shoot Farage’s fox, or at least wound it so they take votes from Tories, but not too many. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of them not taking any seats and having a lower share of the vote than the Tories. It would be the icing on the cake if Farage were to fail in Clacton, but that remains a real risk. The undercover filming was like one of those mad bits of social research that pop up now and then. You know the sort of thing, a research project that concludes that school students in classes that suffer from poor behaviour tend to achieve less well academically. No shit, Sherlock. I’m sure it’s come as an earth shattering shock to most sentient UK electors, that people associated with the sexist, homophobic, racist Reform party, led by the sexist, racist and homophobic Nigel Farage, are, deep down, er, sexist, racist and homophobic.

And yet, it still feels like squeaky bum time, regardless of what the polls say. What would be the perfect outcome, in Fantasy General Election land?

A narrow Labour majority
Lib Dems as second largest party.
Greens having 4+ MPs
Tories below 100
Reform with 0
The last two items generate wider support for PR
Starmer drops the mask, acts according to his centre left instincts, pushed by the Lib Dems, and jettisons the woeful policy positions taken up to appease the Daily Mail.

I am planning Election night, laying in a choice selection of fine wines and delicacies, having cleared my diary for the day after. I am determined to enjoy the evening because the cold-light reality of the next day will be depressing: a hangover, a Starmer-led Labour Government, with a shameful list of frit, populist policies and a weather forecast of rain. I’d like to think that, if the choice of 2024 General election songs was between Steely Dan, Change of the Guard (If you live in this world, you’re feeling the change of the guard”) of The Who, Fighting in the Streets (“Yeah, come meet the new boss, Same as the old boss”) then Steely Dan would win. But no, I fear The ‘Oo will triumph. Have a listen here and make your own mind up

We Dont Get Fooled Again

But I suppose it could be worse. Biden or Trump, anyone?

Finally, just to remind you where all the hollowing out of British society started, have a look at my memories of the infamous 1979 election, and the day I broke the law in the struggle against fascism. Or Margaret Thatcher at any rate. Enjoy the night, comfort yourself with how much worse it would have been under the fascists, and get ready for disappointments ahead,

Back to the Future. Part 1:1979, Margaret Thatcher, and the end of Civilization

Stop Press! The last word to Rishi Sunak, who this morning trumpeted his opinion that life in Britain is much better now than it was in 2010. Clueless.

Liars!

Rish! and The Tories exposed as desperate and shameless after only two weeks.

I write this after two weeks of an already dismal and depressing election campaign – almost a third of the way through. Nothing much has shifted in terms of the polls – Labour are still a country mile in front and the Conservatives are still resolutely useless. So much so that my ingrained fear of the media establishment lying the Conservatives back to power, reinforced by enduring many unsuccessful campaigns in the past, has not really kicked in. I should be sitting back enjoying the campaign assured of victory, but I’m not. First, it’s extremely depressing watching a series of Tory ministers (or at least the few that are still standing ) lie their way through interviews, knowing that the supine interviewers will not call them out on their lies.

Second, unlike 1997, we are deprived of the delicious prospect of watching one grotesque Tory criminal after another being trounced by tactical voting. The biggest of beasts is vulnerable to ending their career in a rerun of the Portillo moment, shuffling from foot to foot in a drafty sports centre, as bepearled supporters sob uncontrollably. It’s petty and unworthy, I know, but it’s been the only thing keeping me going since 2010. Who would give the most pleasure? Jacob Rees Mogg? Michael Gove? Priti Patel? Cruella Braverman? Mark Francois? Andrea Jenkyns. Dear me, even reading the list sends a shiver down the spine, as the full depth and breadth of the Tory fuckwittery is laid bare. Deeply stupid. Deepy incompetent. Deeply callous. In some cases, vaguely criminal.

The trouble is that evolution has not produced a creature with a more acute nose for danger to their own self interest than the average sitting Tory MP. They’ve known for at least the past year that their days are numbered, and so they grandly announce their intention to stand down, citing privilege and honour, having made sure that they have secured a lucrative directorship or three of some businesses involved in their area of ministerial “expertise”. No reckoning for these charlatans after all. Michael Gove, taken by surprise by Rishi’s shock election call, didn’t even tell him he wasn’t going to stand. His announcement that he was standing down produced the most extraordinary paeans of praise for this supposed modern day titan of Westminster. The bar is set very low indeed if Gove is a titan. Coke head, drinker, lickspittle, his main achievement is proclaimed by the Torygraph and The Spectator as the rescuing of Education from the clutches of the Blob, all, supposedly in the name of “Standards”. Standards my arse, as Jim Royle might have commented. Now there’s someone who would have made a better Education Secretary than Gove. Along with Pingu, and Ant and Dec. What an interview shortlist that would have made.

The other source of pleasure denied, of course, is the prospect of an incoming Labour government that would begin the herculean task of repairing the damage created by 14 years of incompetence, greed and corruption. But unlike 1997, when there was real excitement at the end of Thatcherism, and what a Blair government could achieve, there is no similar joy or hope. Starmer has continued to disappoint and, lately, enrage. Before any of you Labour centrists explode, ranting about middle class Corbynistas threatening to jeopardize the Starmer project and thus betray “hard working families”, let me explain. (And don’t worry by the way about non-working, non families. No-one gives a toss about them. It’s their own fault.)

I absolutely get the strategy of saying virtually nothing and making no commitments that might give the Tories an easy target. We’ve been shafted too many times before by The Sun and the Mail. But what Starmer has done has gone way beyond that, way beyond what might reasonably be deemed sensible and cautious. Their policies have gone to the right of the Tory party. Watering down of the Green deal. Processing immigrants overseas. Keeping the 2 child benefit cap. Not nationalising Water, Energy, Rail etc. Not talking about Europe and the single market. Not talking about PR. The list is endless – a Mandelson-advised Labour party outflanking the Tories on the right. Who’d have thought it?

There does seem to be a genuine prospect that the Conservative Party might split after the election. Whereas before that would have been a reason for celebration, now it would just be a bit of schadenfreude. Why? Because there’s no need for the Tory Party, given the transformation of Starmer’s Labour. The Tories, who had via Brexit turned into the English National party, can split asunder. The knuckle draggers will migrate to Reform UK, who are basically the Nazis with fewer policies. The Tories who represent seats in leafy Middle England will join Labour. Socialists and even mildly left of centre libs will join the Greens. And this inexorable drift to the populist Right will continue unchecked unless Labour is deprived of a majority and PR somehow gets itself back on the table. And at the moment, that doesn’t seem likely.

This is the mother of all own goals. After what has happened since 2010, the appetite for socialist policies in poll after poll is enormous. They are clearly popular and different to the tired old policy sacred cows that derive from redundant concepts of sound money. The trouble is you have to make the case for them over time, and in doing so, debunk the hysterical name calling that promises of increased public sector spending always provokes. But the leadership don’t really seem to believe in it any more. Despite Starmer bizarrely self identifying as a – gulp – socialist. I’m still trying to work out the Machiavellian calculations that lie behind that announcement. Perhaps he just forgot.

The latest talking point is of Rishi Sunak taking politics and his own reputation into the gutter by his deliberate, desperate and blatant lies on tax. As ever with Rishi, despite the endearing flutter of excitement amongst the Media attack dogs on the night of the first debate, it’s all gone pear shaped twelve hours later. Everything he touches turns to dust, and I predict that before the end of the campaign, there will be major defections and open warfare amongst the Tories. It really couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

It was to be expected, of course. The Forty five year Thatcherite experiment has produced a shed load of evidence of its own spectacular failure. In every area of governance, Britain is significantly worse than it was in 2010. You only have to walk through your local town centre to see it with your own eyes. And you’d have to walk because it’s too hard to get a bus or a train. Even they can’t defend the rising tide of shit their ideology has generated, so the only thing left is to lie about it. And they’re not even very good at that, apart from their lack of shame. They are certainly world leaders at that.

I am still undecided, but currently The Greens are making it hard for me to vote Labour, but I suspect I’ll wait until the July 4th and assess the state of play then. The way things are going , I’ll be able to vote Green with a clear conscience, knowing that Labour’s majority is unthreatened. Labour’s continuation of right wing policies, their timidity on economics, their disgraceful position on Gaza and Israel’s genocidal madness make it increasingly hard to support them. Ultimately though, I take the Mick Lynch line on this: the very worst iteration of a Labour government is a hundred times better than the very best iteration of a Tory one. But it’s getting very close.

Hold the Front Page! Latest Tory haplessness – just before going to press the D Day scandal was breaking. Sunak’s crack team of advisors have outdone themselves this time. I’m starting to believe a tweet I read that suggested that the only rational explanation for their campaign’s increasing level of incompetence is the idea that Rish! has got a hedge bet on that depends on him losing the election by achieving less than 100 MPs. It’s delicious – the ultimate vaccuous flag shaggers hoisted by their own petard by the Dad’s Army propaganda sheets, The Torygraph, The Mail, The Sun and The Express.

More ramblings from the election battleground next week.

I bet Rishi’s house is warm

I bet Rishi’s house is warm.
No extra jumper for him.
Perhaps a silken dressing gown
Over shorts and sliders, as
He pads across the heated tiled floor,
To eat eggs benedict and read the FT.
He never stops working, to keep the economy safe.

I bet Rishi doesn’t turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees,
Or shares the bath with his wife to save a few bob on the bill.
To be fair, she’s a non-dom, so she doesn’t live here.
Not really.
Unlike Dom, who does.

I bet Rishi has a shiny walk-in fridge, with banks of delicacies from around the world
To sustain him when he’s peckish.
He will choose between smashed avocado on sourdough
or locally sourced quails’ eggs with truffle oil.
We will choose heating on, or white sliced toast with marge.
He’s just like you and I, underneath, honestly.
Because we are all in this together.

He does not know how to use contactless,
Or fill his small, grubby car with petrol, bless him.
He’s too busy for that. Because
He never stops working, to keep the economy safe.

So, it is just terribly unfair
When moaners smear his wife for avoiding tax.
After all, Rishi, a very modern Conservative, 
Does not own his wife.
He just owns
Us.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Enter the Nightingale University Programme, stage left.

They really are the gift that keeps on giving. If you thought a nadir of some sort had been reached with the Dominic Cummings jolly to Barnard Castle, the Tories have shown, week by week, that they are genuinely world leaders in arse -from-elbow confusion. And that’s genuinely world leaders as opposed to Boris Johnson-type world leaders (ie embarrassingly feeble).

Each day of the Great Exam Grade Debacle, has sent the collective jaw ever further nearer the floor. It doesn’t seem possible that even vaguely sentient human beings could get things quite as badly wrong as this. And yet still their supporters plead mitigation. Katherine Birbalsingh says she feels sorry for Gavin Williamson. Her compassion does her some credit, if not her judgement. She’s joined by Toby Gobfull of Brylcreem Young, Michael Gove and his wife, Sarah Vine, who just the other day told us she too feels sorry for Johnson, saying that the stress and exhaustion of worrying day and night is bound to generate bad decisions. Nobody has ever been that worried before, judging by the tsunami of bad decisions we’ve been submerged under. And, really, Johnson’s only worry is can he get another holiday in before people start dying in their droves again in the autumn. The only person in the entire country who must be feeling rather chipper about all of this is Chris Failing Grayling, who suddenly doesn’t stand out from his peers as being a complete knob. He is surrounded by complete knobs. There is a veritable Bullingdon club of knobs whichever way he looks. He has never felt so at home. He has heard on the QT, that he has been lined up to replace Private Pike at Education, because it needs a safe pair of hands. Relatively.

But now, Gavin has other fish to fry. On the back of his frankly brilliant wheeze to save the nation’s children, by going with CAGs (how on earth did little Gav think of that one all by himself?) he has another problem to deal with. Universities now have to accommodate thousands of extra students, and there is no chance whatsoever that having clambered out of one trench of excrement, Gavin is going to dive into another by not allowing any of the Great Northern Unwashed to go to a university of their choice. (Rumour has it that Johnson was genuinely surprised, when Dom told him, that anyone from a northern town went to university anywhere. The last time he saw an oik from the north at university, it was warming his toilet seat, for a small fee and a roasting at the common room fireplace.)

Taking back control, one gaffe at a time…

Although Johnson finds it tiresome, he has been told time and time again that he has got to make an effort to be nice to the Oiks, despite their body odour and skin disease. And so he will give his imperial assent to the Great Education Plan. To accommodate the additional working class hordes, he has given the green light to the building of a new generation of “Nightingale Universities”. Because he got a lot of praise for his “Nightingale hospitals” even though no-one was ever treated in one. He said he was going to build them and build them he did. Hurrah! So it stands to reason that the same thing will work for University capacity. They’ll convert all of the empty shopping centres around the country – John Lewis, IKEA on out of town sites etc – and they will be staffed by (and this is the bit that Cummings is really pleased about) by all the new graduates who can’t get a job for love nor money. Graduate unemployment solved at a stroke. It’s just like Dom keeps saying, you just have to be prepared to think outside of the box and go for eccentrics, mavericks and loons.

And to make it as unsinkable as The Titanic, the new Nightingale Universities will be run by their new Chief Executive, Dido Noseintrough, fresh from her triumphs at TalkTalk and Track and Trace (motto: No infected individual knowingly informed), with fat contracts awarded, without tender, of course, to Tory chums in IT and Construction. And next year, when the dust has settled, a few discreet titles in the honours list. Taking back control to be World Leaders in corruption, nepotism and cronyism.

It’s clear to me that Johnson, Cummings, Gove et al have read my novel, “Zero Tolerance” and have taken it for an instruction manual. In that, the Education Secretary, Marcus Grovelle, solves the problem of Social Care, spending on the armed forces, school funding, graduate unemployment and teacher recruitment, with a brilliant solution. And I thought I was writing satire!

I’m going to publish the relevant chapter to whet your appetite for more. Coming soon!

Brexit – I blame the teachers

The pause in Brexit proceedings ushers in a period of reflection, before we all take a deep breath and go again. Although, I have to confess to being one of those Brexit nerds for whom the pause is agony, like the gaps in between Game of Thrones seasons. Just before the Easter holiday, I found myself getting annoyed when not only did Brexit not occupy the first twenty minutes of the main news bulletins, but that, horror of horrors, it wasn’t even first item. I’m afraid my habit has got an iron grip of me. The six o’clock followed by Channel 4 news (a personal favourite of mine this and so refreshing after the right wing bias of the BBC. Although one does live in permanent fear of Jon Snow keeling over live on air. He does appear to be gabbling and getting a lot of his words wrong these days. Retire Jon! You’ve done your bit. Now you can sit back and just tweet like the rest of us. Obviously, the money’s not what you’re used to, but that’s getting old for you.) Then a gap that is filled by News 24, Parliament Live, Twitter, and the Internet until Newsnight and the joy that is Emily Maitliss. Since the general election I’ve watched Newsnight religiously, partly in the hope (shameful, I know) that Paul Mason and Iain Dale will actually come to blows. He’s a big lad, though, Iain Dale. Then a gentle wind down to sleep with BBC News 24 before being woken at 6 am by The Today programme.

And this obsessive consumption of news programmes has left me with few certainties, except these: 1. European politicians, when interviewed, are notable for many things, but in particular, their effortless command of English. Can you imagine David Davies back at the start of the negotiations, conducting a meeting in French or German? No wonder he only went over there for about forty minutes in total. They also appear to be thoughtful and intelligent. Adults, in short, compared to the embarrassment that are our shower. They have a detailed grasp of the issues, they are well-briefed and endlessly patient with our amateurish efforts. It’s been clear to everyone for some time, and I suspect, to them almost immediately, that there is no Plan B, and barely even a Plan A, apart from Theresa May Maybotting for England until time finally runs out. When highly educated members of the British establishment think Foreign Languages consists of speaking English louder, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of the population don’t think its worth bothering. We really must get to grips with our failure to teach Languages with any degree of success. And I don’t mean to smear the heroic MFL teachers battling against all the odds in our schools to challenge indifference and outright hostility to foreign languages and foreign cultures. This is a cultural mountain to climb, not just a schools’ problem.

2. Nearly every TV news programme seems obliged to show its commitment to the will of the people by having some dreadful Vox pop, which always appeared to be dominated by Brexiteers, who don’t appear to know their arse from their elbow. And that’s a fully paid up member of the metropolitan elite talking there, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The vox pop is either a panel of ”ordinary folk”, often a revisit of some group of lost souls who went through the same nonsense in the run up to the Referendum, or it’s random punters in the street who are button-holed for their reaction to a decontextualized question, the answer to which is clearly engineered to be dangerously dim and populist. These little snapshots of uninformed prejudice never seem to bear any relation to what the polls are telling us. The rise in people wanting a second referendum or who have changed their mind, that many polls have indicated in the last few months, seem to have been conducted somewhere else in the space-time continuum, if these vox pops are to be relied upon. But then again, polls are notoriously unreliable. Or, in the case of Boris Johnson, don’t actually exist. Still that story this week at least had the merit of confirming what we’ve all suspected anyway, that The Telegraph just makes stuff up. What’s breathtaking, even in these post -truth days, is their casual admission that it doesn’t matter if one of their “Star” columnists lies. According to them, Johnson was “entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions”. Or lie, in other words.

Just one example of a ridiculously loaded question arriving at the required result, was the recent poll where shedloads of people mysteriously said they’d like to have a “Strong leader”. That would be instead of a really weak and weedy leader, presumably. Amazing. It’s like giving people the choice of having a cup of coffee that tastes strongly of urine or a cup of really nice coffee. “Yes, I’ll have the piss coffee thanks.” No, I don’t think so.

These are just some of the nuggets of public opinion the vox pops have treated us to in the last few months:

“I hate the French. I’ve always hated the French”

“I thought when I voted out in 2016 that we’d just be out like the next day.”

“Why can’t they just get on with it?”

“The bloody politicians are just going against the will of the people. They are all traitors.”

“They’re talking about the European elections now. Ordinary people like us don’t know how any of that works. What have the European elections got to do with us?”

“We’re British. We’ll get through it. We used to have an Empire.”

Apologies for any inaccurate paraphrasing, but you get my drift. In my darkest moments, stuff like this awakens my hidden, dormant inner-fascist and I begin to think that participation in democracy should be contingent on the possession of at least two A levels, or equivalents. Even a BTEC would do. And then, after I’ve calmed down, that turns into a lament for the state of political education in the UK. Why are we so ignorant about our most basic political institutions and structures? Why don’t people know, with any degree of certainty, what the parties stand for, who they represent, their history? And without knowing that, is it any wonder that people vote in the same way as many people choose their horse in the Grand National. The name sounds good. Nice colours on the jockey’s silks. Democracy, it seems to me, is far too important to leave to chance like this.

We must include political education as a statutory part of the curriculum that applies to all schools, public and private, academy and local authority. It’s had a token presence in PSHE programmes, but that is just not good enough. And that’s not to demean the efforts of PSHE teachers over the years, many of whom do a great job. But too often it’s a task left to form tutors as an afterthought, and, as a result, it carries the very clear message that this stuff doesn’t really matter. It’s not important. But it does matter. And it’s not just important, it’s crucial to our commitment to an informed and active citizenry.

And so, there, I’ve done it. I’ve done what every charlatan Government minister does when there is a catastrophic failure of Government. I’ve blamed the teachers. This Brexit mess is all their fault. But don’t worry. By blaming the teachers, I have, brilliantly, identified the sure -fire solution, the strategy that is always used when the whingeing teachers are at fault. More Academies. So, how does that work, you ask? Dunno, it just does. Where’s the evidence, you childishly persist? Errr… there isn’t any. Phew! Brexit sorted.