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HOUSE DIARY
AUSTIN MITCHELL MP
These are the times that try men`s socialism. Polls disastrous. Morale low. New chums wondering if ritual suicide might be helpful. Blairites in the ascendant with crazed proposals to force the disabled back to work (assuming the Poles leave any jobs) or proclaiming the virtues of wealth, Mandy announcing that Gordon has forgiven him, and Tony sucking up more jobs in his flibbertigibbet progress to the throne of Charlemagne II.
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Tuesday 11 March Linda departs for New Zealand for a school reunion with other old bats from Wellington Girls` College, the potting shed of the New Zealand rose, where several roses did get potted but most became headteachers, top civil servants, World Bank economists or Nobel Prize winners.
My day starts at 5.30. Called to the Today studio to do a debate about hung parliaments. Car drops me off at the Television Centre (which seemed odd), at an empty reception (even odder). Wait half an hour. Nobody comes. Meanwhile Today is ringing our flat to find out where I am. Eventually find a working phone and ring them. “Why are you there? You should be here”. “Where`s here?” Eventually someone finds me and I`m trundled into the studio with minutes to spare.
Then to the press launch of the Hansard Society booklet on Hung Parliaments. I want a well hung Parliament and the Daily Telegraph reports that I`m to have the Whip withdrawn for the same crime as Clare Short.
Lunch Oldie of the Year lunch. Hockney harangues me for voting for the smoking ban, announcing that it will be the death of reflection. It will certainly be the death of pubs. Indeed I regret my vote every time I walk into town in Grimsby past crowds of freezing smokers, all of whom denounce me loudly as the cause of their misery/pneumonia/hypothermia.
Sit next to Peter O`Toole who tells me he`s fed up of a country where the politicians all lie, the weather is lousy and everyone`s watched on CCT. “Why don`t you emigrate?” “Well, I spend January and February in bed reading good books”.
The Oldie lunch is like the House of Lords, with the old familiar faces of the media over the last thirty years, all amazingly well preserved.
Evening To New Zealand House for the farewell party of Jonathan Hunt, the departing High Commissioner and an old friend. Go home knackered and forget to vote against the Euro Constitutional Treaty which has wasted so much of our time devising amendments that aren`t discussed and couldn`t be implemented even if they passed. It should be renamed the Hoon-Clegg Treaty after the two guys who smuggled it through.
Wednesday 12 March To the dentist to have a painful tooth removed. The pain and numbing are a useful preparation for a Budget which is tough, mean, and thoroughly boring.
It leaves little to be said except exhortations of the Dunkirk Spirit. Which don`t go down as well as they used to, but as I speak I emit a Hattersley spray which turns out to be blood. My notes and the seat in front are as liberally splattered with blood as a Tibetan Paddy Wagon. Shouldn`t be spitting blood about a Labour Budget.
Thursday 13 March Life is decomposing. The water heater switched itself off and I don`t know how to start it. I`m running out of shirts and underpants. Where does she keep toilet paper? Normally she`d be ringing up every day, three times an hour, to check up on me. Now that I`m too old for naughtiness she`s totally silent.
Ring my kids for help but they`re all hostile since I called them an idle bunch of layabouts who I wouldn`t trust to take the dog for a walk.
Go down, slightly smelly, to the judging for our Jessops Annual Photography Exhibition. I`ve spent a small fortune on a huge panorama. It`s immediately rejected. So are several of what I consider my best pictures. The judges spend the morning singing the praises of George Robertson. NATO`s loss is photography`s gain. Damn him.
After lunch to Grimsby to open the Grimsby Photographic Society`s exhibition. The National Express train is late and packed so I have to stand all the way to Doncaster. Where I`ve missed my connection. Arrive at the exhibition just as they`re going home.
Friday 14 March As Chair of the Yorkshire and Humber Seafood Group I launch our new Code of Practice for Processors to upgrade processing standards. I`m trying to re-brand our East Coast catches as “Yorkshire Seafood Builds Brains”. This doesn`t go down well in Grimsby.
Afternoon Chinese restaurateurs come to complain that new immigration rules make it impossible to bring in Chinese cooks. I explain that Liam Byrne`s policy is to keep out Asian doctors, Chinese and Indian cooks, Commonwealth visitors, and British descendants to leave more room for the Poles who he can`t stop. Why don`t they train up Poles to do Cantonese cooking? Inscrutable silence.
Saturday 15 March After a surgery crowded with insoluble cases I join the firemen`s protest march against cuts and closures, but refuse to march behind a huge coffin after ribald suggestions that at my age I should be in it.
The last time we had a demo as big as this was when Mrs. Thatcher was in power. Have we come full circle? Like Animal Farm?
My speech about how we should all be prepared to make sacrifices to see the country through its economic difficulties is not, for some reason, too well received and at the end everyone goes leaving me with a coffin I don`t want to be seen dead with. I always get stuck like this. Richard Whiteley left me with a huge Big Ben after a Countdown reception in Portcullis House. He`s dead, but it`s still stuck in my office.
Sunday 16 March Linda has left empty fridge and larder and strict instructions to lose two stones while she`s away. I`m two and a half ounces on the way but so hungry that I wander off to the pub and eat a huge, calorific, but delicious fish pie. Life is slowly breaking down. Now the kettle has burned out.
Tuesday 18 March Shona`s Adjournment Debate on fire service cuts. I ordered my enormous office staff to watch but they report that during my half hour speech colleagues behind were falling asleep or feigning death.
Afternoon To a School Conference in Central Hall sponsored by the EU. Theme of my section is why aren`t the media fair to the EU. Answer: because it`s a boring, incomprehensible structure built on lies and run by foreigners.
That seems to satisfy the audience. Then I`m asked why the media hate teenagers. The answer is that the media are us. They drizzle us with our own faeces and prejudices and hate kids because we all hate kids. Seeing what a scruffy lot they are I can quite understand this. Audience reaction hostile.
Evening Invited to a party at 10 Downing Street but it turns out to be a focus group of Labour MPs. Two things emerge. We all support Gordon but want him to reveal more of his warmth and vision rather than grumping around.
Second, Labour`s done a good deal for the wealthy, the high earners, the City and Finance (who are now turning against us) but not enough for our own people. They`ve been squeezed by fuel, food and utility prices, declining spending power and rising debt and need help. Will the message reach Gordon?
Wednesday 19 March Avoid the Post Office vote by going to Grimsby for a Freeman ceremony. Had I been around I might have had to vote for the Tory motion because we are making an appalling mess of post office closures. It`s a Blair legacy which we should have stopped and the process is a steamroller not a consultation, closing post offices which are profitable and support businesses, viable with them but certain to close without. Here we are closing community centres and bankrupting the pubs. Government should get a subsidy for Tesco.
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2008 will be a lost year. Battening down hatches might work but only if it`s the prelude to a dollop of Keynes next year. Raise the level at which tax is paid. Restore the 10% band, increase the top rate as a measure of social justice and splash out goodies to our people. They deserve compensation for the long squeeze.
So splash out in 2009. Go for an election in 2010. It`s a Maudling strategy which nearly worked for the Tories in 1964 and would certainly work for us. Are you reading this, Gordon? I`ll pop round at any time to explain it. You can book an appointment on line and if you can get a researcher to do my washing I`d be grateful. |
