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Misery, gloom, doom, despair and the worst Christmas I remember. Lousy weather. Miserable mood. Low morale. Wife gets Christmas cards from David Cameron and Alex Salmond. I don`t even get one from Tommy McAvoy. Every poll shows us heading for disaster. All economists predict recession, repossessions, rising unemployment, falling house prices, a more miserable mess than even Norman Lamont managed and only Tony Blair`s speech fees keeping the balance of payments from total disaster. I began Christmas feeling things can`t get worse. They do.
Sunday 9 December North East Lincolnshire is so desperate for revenue it`s now issuing parking tickets to church attenders. At the Salvation Army Evening Carol Service I get an £80 parking ticket. The Mayor`s car was on a yellow line but gets nowt.
Tuesday 18 December Escape the Alcoholic haze which has engulfed Westminster to meet Jim Flynn who I worked with in New Zealand. He has found world fame at 73 while I`m not even well known in Grimsby. He`s discovered the Flynn effect: IQ is increasing over the generations (a process now slowing down he tells me. He`s refuted the Bell curve. Now in What is Intelligence he`s shown that the brain is a muscle. The more we exercise it the smarter we get. Super Brains, Geoff Mulgan and Mathew Taylor, nod in agreement with him at the Royal Academy and massage their foreheads while the audience one by one announce that they`re MENSA members. I fall asleep. It often happens these days. Interestingly three Tory top brains (two of them Willets) come to learn how to develop brains outside Eton. No-one from the Government.
Thursday 20 December To Royal Mail to see the early post. Usually I go at 6.00am. Now, thanks to EU regulations, they start two hours later. Usually it`s cheerful and friendly. This year it`s harried, overworked and hostile. They appear to hate a government which is pushing them, and everything else in the public sector, harder and closing post offices. Two in my constituency. Both profitable, both community centres in a deprived area, both supporting other services which will now probably close. But government wants 2,500 closed. So they have to go with the loss of eight jobs, whatever the effect on the community, the poor, the old, and the deprived.
My annual Christmas party for everybody who`s nobody in Grimsby is ruined. No-one turns up because the Lib Dem council has thoughtfully closed the road opposite, the only place to park in a two mile radius. Guests are reduced to driving past throwing out Christmas cards, mostly hostile, many attached to bricks.
Christmas. 24, 25, 26 December Miserable weather. Lousy presents. Grandson, George, suddenly develops chicken pox. Rest of my grandchildren announce they aren`t coming. I run to the internet to read about the symptoms of shingles. It warns of the dangers of infection when resistance is low. After three weeks of coughing and a dose of `flu which won`t go away mine`s rock bottom. Gloom overtakes me. The onward march of Labour must be halted while I recover. Linda orders me to snap out of it and join the fun. Since there isn`t any I go to bed and think of death. At my age it`s replaced sex as a mind filler
Thursday 27 December Parky gets a Knighthood. Richard Whiteley was OBE. All I get is abusive letters from Tommy McAvoy, demands from Lynne Jones and John McDonnell that I should have the guts to stand up for their principles and abuse from constituents about the size of my expenses. I should have stayed in show biz. Services to Tommy McAvoy aren`t an honours category and I can`t afford a seat in the Lords at present prices. Unless they come down with houses. Besides, who`d want to be in the Lords when Jack Straw`s finished messing about with it?
Saturday 29 December Chicken pox child gone home to die. So other grandchildren arrive en masse bringing with them their new dog. Linda refuses to have it in the house. They refuse to come in without it. I go back to my sickbed, nose streaming, coughing and spluttering and lie cowering listening to the sound of distant rows and crying children.
Tuesday 1 January Disastrous start to Anno Gloomio. Generously take Linda, my daughter and the grandchildren for a birthday celebration at TG Friday. On the way home we run out of petrol on the M62. Police arrive in the middle of a loud row about whose fault it was – not mine clearly. Finding us hysterical but not pissed, they push us off the motorway into the car park of a pub. The RAC take an hour and a half to arrive while we sip coke in a pub full of totally sloshed Tykes. Archie sprays them with foam. In the face of threatened violence we withdrew to the car park and freeze.
Happy New Year. My `flu is worse. My nose streams. The grandchildren are all carted home. Linda explains that she`s never had such an awful Christmas. It`s all my fault. Contemplate suicide. But I`m too young to die.
Wednesday 2 January Helen Clark arrives to stay to recover from another of her insane Norwegian cross country ski marathons. We declined to accompany her this year, having gone with her three years ago. It left us exhausted for a week. I couldn`t even stand up on the skis and developed a frozen bum. Decide to take her to the Captain Cook museum in Whitby which they agree to open for her. When I rang the famous Magpie fish and chip shop to see if we could book as I was bringing a Prime Minister, they tersely replied “I don`t care who yer bringing. Yer must queue wi`t rest”. PM`s Queue Time.
Thursday 3 January Exciting news. Blairites are to stop sulking. Their prince is finally across the water, whether it`s Tiber, Jordon or Atlantic, so they`ll now back Gordon as the best available PM.
Big Deal. They and their policies are now as relevant as Gladstone. It`s time Gordon stopped trying to be a bumbling Blair implementing Brair policies to please them, and started pleasing the Labour Party. Blairism means bashing the public sector, fighting the unions, plunging into passing wars, glorifying wealth and starving our own people. Waste of time now.
On the Home Front a new disaster. The cellar floods with raw sewage. All that over-eating now lies stinking in the basement. A lovely piece of symbolism showing what will happen if we continue Blair policies.
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It`s been a wasted recess. No preparation or thought for the coming triumph of socialism, merely a gloomy foretaste of the miserable year which lies ahead. Young Miliband holds out the delights of twenty days debating a Constitution we`re not allowed to alter and can`t put to the people as we promised. Yvette Cooper proffers a Housing Bill, half of which brings councils back into the housing game while the other half is devoted to bullying them out of it. The Chancellor is embarked on a whole series of unnecessary fights, like the refusal to allow married women to buy back pension rights, stupid cuts in further education and the Open University, cuts in Art grants, and petty meanness to the Police. This saves a piddling £30 million but will produce a rash of leaks about Labour MPs and candidates suspected of paedophilia, rampant homosexuality, drug smuggling, drink driving, or even eating, phoning or using a catheter at the wheel. If there`s anywhere left where we can create a little ill-will Alistair`ll find it.
This can`t be the new start we were promised. I`ve not got too many decades left to await the dawn of socialism if it`s coming at this pace. You don`t win elections by doling out misery, deflation and cuts or by endlessly “fighting inflation”.
We`re now in the same situation as the Macmillan government in 1962. Then Super Mac saw what Super Gord hasn`t – the need to accelerate out of gloom and despair by a dash for growth. So he boosted demand and spending to create the well being governments need to win elections by making Maudling Chancellor and going for a boom. That would have won the election had it not been for prostrates and prostitutes. You won`t get either from Labour. We don`t have a Maudling either but, boy, do we need one. |
