The Party’s Over

As the Labour Party conference draws to a close, it’s almost time for the faithful to unite in the traditional song. 

This is the conference that brought us unprecedented levels of sophistry and doublethink (Rachel Reeves, we’re looking at you), a vote against a key government policy by the rank and file and, of course, Keir Starmer’s tribute to ‘1066 And All That’ - ‘for sausage read hostage’ - a slip so crass and unpleasant in the context that it surely warranted a subsequent apology rather than a quick correction and then effectively ‘move on, nothing to see here’. 

(Would he have made the same kind of slip speaking of George Floyd or BLM, I wonder - “Black puddings…er, lives matter!” - and if so, would he have ignored it and continued with no apology? It beggars belief that this man actually trained - and apparently succeeded - as a barrister!)*

Anyway, things have clearly changed in the old Independent Labour Party since the days of the original Keir and his trusty cloth cap - I wonder what Hardie would have made of the designer clothes, penthouse apartments and pop concerts, or, indeed, of the fact that they came courtesy of a millionaire donor. 

The rot that set in under Blair (and Cherie - millionaire-chaser extraordinaire) has clearly been spreading beneath the surface ever since and the party really ought to consider a change of name to reflect its new priorities; suggestions would be welcome.

Meanwhile, perhaps it’s time for some new words: 

The People's flag is deepest red, 

But now its staunchest sons are dead 

And in their place a man who’s sold 

His own integrity for gold. 

He’s willing to evade and lie, 

Accept the gifts and not ask why.

So do us all a favour, Keir,

And stop the grift and lying here.

*Alternatively, a cynic might consider the possibility of a deliberate  - and largely successful - ploy to generate ridicule and divert attention away from the matter of the hostages and Labour’s policy towards Israel, even at the cost of the leader’s dignity.

Or perhaps the cynicism is on Labour’s part; it might be significant that the mid-phrase error effectively negated its value  as a soundbite expressing clear support for Israel.

What lies beneath

In the high and far off times, when Angela Rayner thought Stockport so good she lived there twice, a strikingly similar scenario was playing out down south: 

A senior aide to Jeremy Corbyn has hit back after allegations that he is engaging in electoral fraud.

Our hero is one Sam Tarry, erstwhile paramour of Ms Rayner and undeclared house guest in Lord Alli’s New York penthouse flat during Our Ange’s surprisingly inexpensive New Year’s Eve break, and there’s something oddly familiar about his unconventional domestic arrangements a decade ago…

The Sunday Times alleged that, while Tarry says he lives in a flat in Barking [where he serves as a councillor], he actually lives in Brighton with his wife. The Brighton address is on their marriage certificate and Land Registry records show that Tarry and his wife jointly own the property.

Tarry’s claim to have been permanently resident in Barking for most of the duration of his marriage seems a bit rough on his wife - and, for that matter, on the two children they somehow managed to produce under the circumstances before he bunked off with Angie a few years later. In any case, it all sounds as if it might have been a bit cramped at the Essex end of things:

The newspaper also reported that a trade union official, named Elly Baker, lived at the Barking flat. Tarry’s lawyers said she was his lodger. 

It’s all more than a little reminiscent of Angela and her brother/lodger supposedly enjoying domestic bliss two miles down the road from her husband and young children. So what might connect two people (three if you count Mr Rayner) extracting the maximum benefit - political or financial - from declaring distinctly odd living arrangements despite the contrary paperwork and anecdotal evidence of their neighbours? 

There may be a clue in the fact that all three are former trade union officials and thus, especially in matters relating to finance or public life, likely to have sought advice from union lawyers - certainly Tarry and Rayner’s confident public denials of wrongdoing suggest a complacent certainty of being covered by a technicality.

Sound familiar? This is the Party whose leaders have, in recent weeks, made deliberately misleading statements - ‘I didn’t go to New York with anyone’ and ‘There isn’t a document on my desk’ - perfect examples of sophistry by being economical with the truth*. I suspect that, this time round, Labour’s spin doctors have been joined by a hidden crew of lawyers ready to advise on loopholes, technicalities and sneaky evasions all, of course, for the greater good; as every Socialist knows, the end justifies the means.

I have a horrible feeling we are going to be seeing much, much more of this in the future

(Expanded from an exchange of comments at AK Haart’s place)

*A fitting coda from Starmer in a recorded interview broadcast this morning:

“Well, look, there was no breach of the rules or anything like that. We complied with everything.”

Also, from Guido Fawkes:

Starmer’s team have made changes to the register this year following “advice” sought from authorities. They said they “believed we had been compliant, however, following further interrogation this month, we have declared further items.”

A Fairytale of New York (and elsewhere)

I thought I’d closed the Tavern doors for good but sometimes the Muse strikes and resistance is futile.

(With apologies to fans of the original…)

“It’s New Year’s Eve, babe, 

In a Manhattan flat

Lord Alli’s lent me, so why not come along?

He says it isn’t wrong;

‘Just put the figures through

Two-fifty a night we’ll say, Ange, just ‘cos it’s you.’

Aren’t we the lucky ones?

We’ll never lack for funds

As long as Lord Alli is here for me and you,

So here’s to freebies

New York holidays,

The best designers; he’ll make our dreams come true.

“We’ve fine jackets and scarves

When the weather gets cold;

Who cares about WFA for the old?

We can sit in the front row 

Among VIPs,

And then claim it’s self-sacrifice rather than sleaze.

It’s our cultural duty!

Go see Taylor’s booty,

Take the kids to the footie - the donors will pay.

Give Downing Street passes

In exchange for free glasses

Then cover our arses and go on our way.”

But suddenly the voters know

And say it’s not fair play;

Will they rat each other out to get away?

“You're a leech!” “You're a skunk!”

“Were you clueless or drunk

That you never once said ‘All this might be misread’?”

“You scumbag! “You maggot!

If you want it you’ll blag it,

Kiss a millionaire’s arse to come up with the brass.”

Or, though people hate hypocrisy 

And wish they’d go away,

Will they keep on selling out day after day?

‘All of Them Witches’

It’s probably a good thing I never went into business on a grand scale as, yet again, I appear to have been overestimating the intelligence of the American public.

A K Hart’s recent thought-provoking post on the resurgence of myths in modern society touches on a theme which has made several appearances here in the past few weeks: 

Myths facilitate mass assimilation where technical explanations do not. Myths provide simpler and more widely accessible ways to guard against surprises, just as belief in witchcraft did. Burn the witch and if that doesn’t work there must be another one lurking somewhere.

The parallels between today’s Western society and the witch hunts of the past are increasingly inescapable; a preoccupation with conformity to a set of puritanical standards and a willingness to condemn and punish those who violate the norms imposed by fanatical believers are, sadly, with us again, this time with social media pouring oil on the flames, not least by encouraging the resurgence of the idea that, whatever goes wrong, someone, somewhere must be to blame.

Some weeks ago, I mentioned a competitor on ‘Masterchef’ who produced a witch-themed dish, inspired by an American movie, to ‘take the judges back to seventeenth-century Salem’. At the time, it baffled me since it was surely common knowledge that there were no witches there; just a group of unfortunate townsfolk (including a four-year-old child) who, for a number of reasons, found themselves falsely accused by a group of young girls supported by fervent religious fanatics.

As anyone who has experience in dealing with teenage girls en masse could tell you, it is highly plausible that a mixture of mass hysteria, religious indoctrination and groupthink led to this terrible situation, particularly if some of those concerned had eaten rye bread contaminated with ergot, now known to cause convulsions, itching, parathesia and psychosis. Add in the petty disputes and prejudices of a small town and potential for settling old scores and you have a situation where the false accusations would be readily accepted by the authorities.

It would appear, however, that such a rational approach is beyond many; while researching a previous post, I read that a substantial proportion of the million or so tourists who visit Salem every year apparently come for the ‘spooky’ atmosphere and the association with ‘real’ witches. Thanks mainly to film and television - not to mention Young Adult fiction - people are flocking to ‘Witch City’* and they are unlikely to be disappointed; the town is bursting with witch-themed attractions and entertainments. 

It would be tempting to regard this as merely a celebration of fiction - much like the hordes of Goths who descend on Whitby in tribute to Bram Stoker’s most famous novel -  but these tourists are visiting the scene of real-life events; to embrace the witch narrative is, subconsciously, to endorse the activities of those responsible for the trials and executions, a worrying attitude in a country where, in a recent online poll, 21% of respondents claimed to believe in the existence of witchcraft and black magic.

It is, I suppose, evidence of the growing appeal of superstition described by AK Haart and a frightening indicator of the public willingness to disregard rational explanations - and, in this case, the judicial murder of twenty people and the imprisonment of many more. In a culture where student essays defend Abigail Williams in ‘The Crucible’, it’s hard not to believe that the recent shift towards equating victimhood with credibility and a growing demand that those dissenting from current orthodoxy should ‘correct their thinking’ risk creating perfect conditions for a new generation of witchfinders.

 *It is rather fitting, somehow, that they are celebrating their history-that-never-was in the wrong place; most of the trials and executions took place in Salem Village, a separate settlement, five miles away from Salem Town and now known as Danvers.

 

Sweet Counterblast

One of the notable features of the small town where I grew up was the local soft drinks factory. Thanks in part to the Temperance movement, many small towns in Scotland and Wales had independent producers  and ours was a gem. Tucked away in a cobbled side street in an old stone building, it had a small and spartan shop - just a table and a few shelves of bottles - where you brought your wooden crate of empties to replace them with full bottles of lemonade or swapped your finished soda syphon for a fresh one.

Half a century on, the local factory is long gone and, in the supermarket which now stands on the site, the shelves groan under the weight of soda cans and two-litre plastic bottles, but more has been lost than the parochial simplicity and the clink of glass. Thanks to the sugar tax, it is now frustratingly difficult to find lemonade or other fizzy drinks in which the only sweetness comes from natural sugars. For all the outward show of choice - a bewildering variety of flavours where we once swithered between lemonade, orangeade or cream soda - the options are few and far between for the shopper who wants to avoid artificial sweeteners.

The result of this, according to various smug reports, has been a reduction in childhood obesity, although one might argue that it is impossible to ascertain the exact effect in such a complicated area and numerous studies suggest that, in the long term, regular consumption of artificial sweeteners has been linked to health problems including weight gain. The NHS has jumped firmly (and predictably) on the bandwagon, advocating the selection of ‘lower sugar’ and ‘lower fat’ snacks, desserts and drinks where possible*.

It’s a classic ‘nudge’ situation, using price, availability and persuasion to change consumers’ behaviour, with a hefty dose of Nanny-knows-best thrown in, but the vast increase in what we in the Tavern refer to as SOSS (Sod Off Sans Sugar) and FOFF (Fuck Off Fat-Free) products is drastically reducing the choice available for those who prefer their food and drink to be free from lab-manufactured additives (or to avoid the bitter aftertaste of artificial sweeteners).

While larger companies have generally gone down the route of using artificial sweeteners rather than passing on the tax to customers in the form of higher prices, one avenue still remains open for those trying to avoid them; at present, small producers whose annual fizzy drink output is less than a million litres a year are exempt from the sugar tax. Their products tend to be found only in local bars or farm and village shops but they represent a tradition well worth preserving as well as a pleasing way to exercise individual choice and fight back against the nudge and I urge you to seek them out where possible.

*Its ‘healthy living’ web page recommends replacing chocolate (ingredients, at least before the ‘nudgers’ got there with the vegetable fats and emulsifiers: cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla) with ‘a lower calorie hot instant chocolate drink’ (ingredients: Whey Powder, Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder, Skimmed Cows' Milk Powder, Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Coconut Oil, Polydextrose, Thickener:Guar Gum, Carrageenan:, Salt, Maltodextrin, Milk Protein Concentrate, Flavouring, Sweetener:Sucralose:, Anti-caking Agent:Silicon Dioxide:, Stabiliser:Potassium Phosphate.)

... as Christian does

Much has been made of the recent Times survey of the clergy and its conclusion (built on the somewhat sandy foundation of a 25% response rate) that Britain is no longer a Christian country.

Our distant rural forebears charted the year by the Christian festivals - Lent, Easter, Lady Day, Lammastide and so on - and attended church services as a matter of course but, for the most part, religion as practised by the general population of England was, as Elizabeth I pithily expressed it, not a matter for ‘making windows into men’s souls’ as long as they observed the correct rituals and obeyed the law of the land.

This tolerance, however, will not do for today’s C of E, at least in the experience of one of the elders of Clan Macheath. She isn’t religious but believes strongly in the importance of the village church both as a vital part of the local heritage and a hub at the centre of a small community; for her, it’s always been a clear case of ‘use it or lose it’, supported by a keen appreciation of ecclesiastical architecture, choral music and the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible.

For years, she attended Matins (but not Communion) most Sundays, helped with the various flower festivals, fetes and celebrations and placed her widow’s mite in the collection plate, but that’s all over now thanks to what she calls ‘the P45 sermon’, in which the vicar made it clear that those who do not actively profess sincerely-held Christian beliefs should not be attending services - non-Communicants especially should get confirmed or stay away.

Quite apart from the incongruity of a supposedly Christian church telling people they are not welcome, it seems more than a little short-sighted to alienate members of the already-sparse congregation. The original impetus seems to have come from the Diocese, but this particular vicar seems to be pinning his hopes on recruiting the young; toys litter the side aisles, even though there are only ever a tiny handful of small children in evidence, and the church has expensive new amplifiers for electric guitars.

When the church closed for lockdown - a massive error of judgement; aside from the obvious spiritual considerations, the high ceilings and under-floor heating meant it was probably the safest indoor space in the area - the vicar confined his ministry to Zoom calls and WhatsApp, ignoring the many elderly parishioners, including the bereaved, who weren’t online; my relative and her friends asked around but found no one who had received a phone call from him, let alone a socially-distanced visit in person.*

Faced with this desertion in a time of need, a mutual support network evolved within the churchgoing community and extended its sphere into the wider village; parishioners checked up on each other, ran errands and passed on news of where help was needed or where a phone chat might lift someone’s spirits. Several of the people who kept this going throughout lockdown and beyond are among those now cast out by the vicar for being insufficiently evangelical or for the sin of not having being confirmed in childhood.

In this question of faith or good works, who, I wonder, is actually living according to Christian principles?

*By way of a contrast, a recent newspaper article described a vicar who, for as long as the churches were closed, made himself available to all by sitting outside his church door for three hours every Sunday, rain or shine..

Credit Where Credit’s Due

One of the hallmarks of what passes for fame today - as manifested by a host of ‘influencers’ and television personalities - is having a ‘clothing line’, a collaboration where the celebrity earns money by endorsing a range of apparel, generating sales from social media publicity and the inevitable press attention. 

For the most part, the celebrity's role in the process is to select items from the manufacturer’s range of possible garments (I believe the influencers’ preferred term is ‘curate’, as if they were the Elgin Marbles or impressionist paintings); aside from superficialities such as colour or trimmings, all the labour over sketchbook or sewing machine is done by nameless employees of the company.

This week has seen a similar attempt to cash in on celebrity in a novel sphere, so to speak; the 19-year-old star of the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ appears on the cover of a new work of fiction as the author, even though the actual composition of the thing was the work of a ghostwriter. 

Apparently Ms Brown contributed to the process with ‘a couple of Zoom calls’ and some WhatsApp messages about her relative whose wartime experiences inspired the story, but the writing itself - the flesh and bones of the book - is the work of a woman as sidelined on the cover as the staff in the design studios where celebrity-endorsed garments actually take shape.

In the words of Longrider, who, with a number of highly readable works (and some wonderful characters) to his name, is better qualified than I to comment on this story:

Writing a novel takes a bit more than sending messages on WhatsApp. You have to be able to craft your story, build worlds and learn how to write prose and dialogue in a way that is digestible to the reader without jarring. In short, it takes effort.

Celebrity autobiographies have long used ghostwriters - a mercy, given the tortuous grammar and paucity of vocabulary of some sporting or TV personalities - and it’s common practice for accounts of real-life events, where the emphasis is on documentation rather than creation. Fiction, on the other hand, is an art form which relies heavily on the quality of the author’s prose to create a self-contained world and set the tone of the narrative.

I wonder whether Brown feels any moral qualms at passing off another woman’s work as her own or whether, as a true child of her time, like the influencer who talks of ‘designing’ a sportswear collection, she believes that her own limited input is all that matters.

On Fermi’s paradox

 I can’t be the only who thought of this...

Meanwhile, the natural forces on planet Vogsphere brought forth […] elegant gazelle-like creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 

...when I read this: 

People taking selfies with ponies at a tourist hotspot caused a new-born foal to fall to its death from a cliff.

BBC Wales

Never mind splitting the atom; I’m inclined to believe that, Adams’ fictional creation notwithstanding, we are completely alone in the universe because no civilisation could ever survive its equivalent of the smartphone and social media.

The Writing on the Wall

J

source

The discovery that one can buy shit-jumbles word clouds as wall art (see previous post) raised an interesting analogy, and, perhaps, a suitable musing for a Sunday post. 

Once upon a time, the walls of many British and American homes were adorned with texts of a religious nature - ‘Thou God seest me’, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ - often carefully crafted by friends or family members. These days, the writing on the wall is likely to be rather more secular (and effort-free); a plethora of mass-produced variations on ‘Love’, ‘Home’ or ‘Happiness’ can be picked up from the supermarket shelves along with the bananas and yoghurt, while larger framed or self-adhesive versions can be acquired at the click of a mouse. 

All of this got me thinking; for whom is this display intended? The framed religious texts of bygone ages were intended to serve a spiritual purpose for the occupants of the house; a comfort in hard times and a reassurance of divine protection, perhaps, or an exhortation to stay on the straight and narrow. While such texts, whether embroidered, carved or hand-written, were often a demonstration of skill and diligence of the part of their creators, the choice of subject matter reflected a greater purpose founded in belief. 

Today's words on the wall are far more likely to be aimed at impressing an external audience; social media has provided a way to share the contents of a private space with the world in general and show that you are keeping up with fashionable trends. While I can see the appeal of a specimen of elegant calligraphy as something to enjoy in one’s own home, much modern word art, bypassing the levels of interpretation required by more complex images, is designed to send a direct and somewhat peremptory message about what the observer should think or feel, making it the perfect art form for today’s lazy and emotionally incontinent social media culture.

Rather like the lettering on a bowl labelled ‘Dog’ - the dog can’t read and no one else is likely to eat out of it* - the content of today’s secular domestic texts is largely irrelevant to those living with them. However beautiful the lettering, written instructions to ‘cook’ and ‘eat’ in the kitchen or ‘wash’ in the bathroom are surely an exercise in redundancy, while a loving family is hardly likely to need a word cloud to testify to their mutual affection (though it’s grim to think that there are probably deeply unhappy homes out there lavishly decorated with words like ‘BLESSED’, ‘FAMILY’ or ‘HOPE’.)

Where our forebears would surround themselves with texts reminding them of a higher power, the focus of mass-produced word clouds leans heavily towards self-congratulation and outward show. Religious word displays and scripture quotations are still widely available, of course, although, in keeping with the spirit of the age, the painstaking craft of the past can now be replaced by wipe-clean vinyl, but, for the most part, the performative aspect of today’s word art is a striking testimony to the destructive cult of the self and the dual powers of ego and social media.

*update - just when you thought the things couldn’t get any more ridiculous: personalised word clouds for your dog, available in 17 different colour schemes...

 https://www.stickers4walls.co.uk/products/personalised-dog-word-cloud-wall-sticker-31884

Lost For Words

Some years ago, a work colleague, having been on some kind of development course, was appointed to ‘cascade’ the content down to the rest of us, including the classroom use of what she called a ‘word salad’. (Unfortunately, it being an utterly unmemorable term for a completely pointless exercise, I had difficulty recalling it afterwards and somehow replaced it in my mental lexicon with ‘shit-jumble’, which has been my private name for the things ever since.)

It was thus something of a surprise that, looking for an example to illustrate the previous post, I found no online reference to ‘word salads’ as an educational tool. Instead, the Oxford Dictionary defines a word salad as ‘a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words’, while Merriam-Webster goes one better:

‘Word salad began as a term used in psychiatry to describe the nonsensical syntax of the mentally ill. [...] In recent years, however, a slightly different use of the term which means something closer to “nonsense” has emerged. This use of word salad usually reflects a judgment on the logic or intelligence of a person’s language, rather than on the person’s mental state.’

Given that the ‘word salad’ was enthusiastically taken up by the management and the more progressive staff, I’d say that hits it pretty squarely on the head. Despite having negligible educational value, subject-related word salads soon adorned everything from classroom walls to exercise books, while pupils were even being set to create them for homework using off-the-peg software (not exactly a demanding task; with the help of an online thesaurus, the one above took about five minutes from cut-and-paste to publication, including time to try out three different colour schemes).

My online searches eventually bore fruit; it turns out that my colleague (or the leader of her course) had the official name wrong, although she was well up with the Zeitgeist. The ‘word cloud’ has broken free of its original purpose - facilitating the analysis of metadata by visually representing keywords weighted by frequency or significance - and taken the corporate world by storm; its combination of eye-catching display with easily-generated content makes the concept irresistible to a certain type of manager - as well as being very tempting to teachers looking for an instant result with minimal effort.

The word cloud - or word salad - used in this way is a perfect manifestation of style over content, shouting keywords in a nonsensical context on corporate documents or the walls of offices and public buildings everywhere (and even, bizarrely, in a domestic setting). If you set out to design something that screams ‘shallow thinking’ or ‘empty PR gesture’, you couldn’t do much better; to borrow a singularly apt description from Shakespeare, it is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

(Although I still prefer ‘shit-jumble’.)

Sucker Ponchos

If ever there were a news item one fervently hoped would turn out to be a hoax, it is the description of ‘gratitude ponchos’ enthusiastically shared online by an academic involved with NHS staff training.The accompanying image shows employees wearing the ponchos - made by cutting a hole in pieces of flip-chart paper - standing in a line (wouldn’t a circle be more efficient?) while colleagues supposedly write supportive and positive messages for them on their backs.

Now I’d like to think of myself as a reasonably responsible and well-mannered individual, but I can’t be the only one thinking that, should my employers try this (and should I be unable to think of a plausible excuse to leave), I would be sorely tempted to produce something entirely out of keeping with the wholesome and affirmative intentions of the organiser. I admit it would be a low blow, especially when someone’s back is turned, but it would be hard to resist, at the very least, some sort of backhanded compliment:“You seem to have an amazing ability to identify with Year 10” perhaps, or “Your lessons always sound so lively from next door”.

Disturbingly, such a scenario is not at all out of the question; in recent years, those of us with a sense of humour have struggled valiantly not to laugh during an earnest staff training session on ‘the coat-hanger of innovation’ - complete with gift-wrapped packs of clothes-pegs for each of us “to hang our ideas on the thinking line” - and silently applauded the dignified and erudite Head of History who, when a guest speaker concluded a particularly meaningless stream of pretentious  psychobabble and asked if there were any questions, replied, “Yes; am I alone in having absolutely no idea what you are talking about?”

What worries me is that, at least in the NHS, this adviser seems to believe that the poncho* initiative, rather than eliciting universal derision (and possibly some interesting anatomical artwork), would be be taken seriously by the participants and produce the desired collection of suitable compliments to ponder and appreciate at leisure. Either she is spectacularly deluded - always a possibility in academic circles these days - or she is confident that the workplace is populated by complacent drones who would not dream of subverting such an exercise.

If it is the latter, she may have reason, al least if our recent staff training days are anything to go by; it’s noticeable that the healthy scepticism and sotto voce observations on the more egregious staff training antics are, by and large, confined to the older staffroom demographic, while the most recent recruits - the ones ready to denounce any colleague who fails to adhere to modern orthodoxy - are far more willing to play along, accustomed as they are to mass virtue-signalling and observance of progressive rituals.

A family friend, born in 1930s Germany but now a proud British citizen, says that, in her opinion, the rise of the Nazis could not have happened in Britain because of what she calls ‘the ever-present voice in the back row’: the quick-witted irreverence and mocking of pomposity inherent in our culture. It is, as my mother says, ‘in with the bricks’, a part of us which has survived wars, religious oppression and hard times but is now under threat as never before from the media-backed forces of political correctness and groupthink.

Still, let’s not give way to pessimism; when it comes to staff training days, here’s hoping that the younger generation will eventually grow up and stop doing as they are told!

*Do you think we could persuade the Mexicans to go after her for cultural appropriation?

‘And did those feet...’

Things have been rather quiet here partly because I’ve been doing a lot of walking in various scenic locations, much of it in the company of venerable but intrepid members of Clan Macheath.

Thus it was that I recently tackled a section of the Cornwall Coastal Path in the role of guide, Sherpa and helper-over-stiles to an assortment of female relatives in their eighth and ninth decades. They are a jolly and talkative bunch and, as we progressed merrily along, they were keen to explain how much of their enjoyment of the walk stemmed from their shared appreciation of a television series on the area - and, indirectly, of its presenter, Michael Portillo.

“Just think,” exclaimed one of them in awed tones, “he probably walked along this very stretch of path!”  “Ooh yes!” cooed the others, stopping for a moment’s reverential contemplation of the vista once enjoyed by the politician-turned-broadcaster. The ladies in question are relatively apolitical - although one did go rather pink as she recounted how a canvassing Nigel Farage once shook her by the hand (rather literally, I gather; she’s not very big and he was rather enthusiastic) - but Michael Portillo clearly had the collective seal of approval.

What was particularly interesting, though, was the revelation, in the discussion which followed, that none of these ladies wants to vote Conservative. They concede that they might be obliged to do so in the case of potentially disastrous local candidates for the other parties, but they are unanimous that they have had enough; enough of Party infighting and backbiting, enough of pointless targets and ill-informed virtue-signalling policies, enough of the myriad shortcomings of the NHS and, above all, enough of being, as one of them put it, ‘farmed’ by the state for fees and taxes while their interests are largely ignored.

Quite rightly, they point out that they survived bombing and wartime disruption as children (one was actually born under the kitchen table during an air raid) and then endured years of rationing for the common good. They and their friends have worked hard, many of them in public service, and raised families and have, as they see it, a major stake in the society they helped to create in the post-war decades, but now they feel utterly abandoned by a government which expects them to do everything online and stands idly by while they are vilified for their age, presumed opinions and supposed ‘privilege’.

Since election strategy, like so many other things these days, is in the hands of statistical computer types - not to mention people of an age to dismiss the elderly as irrelevant - I wonder whether the Conservative party may be under the mistaken and patronising impression that these older voters will stick to their previous voting patterns. Truly we live in interesting times!