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In Grimsby re-selection rages. People on every street corner and pub discuss whether they want a geriatric MP or a thrusting young woman: they shall not grow old as we that are on the Left grow old. As I struggle round the streets on my Zimmer frame, "blitzing" in slow motion, humorists ask "Didn’t you used to be the MP for Grimsby?" Retirement homes (though not yet the Lords) bombard me with brochures.
So until re-selection is complete just let me say: Tony Blair is the best leader we've ever had. The achievements of this government are wonderful to behold, I strongly support government policy to ban foxhunting, join the Euro, and fight withholding tax on the beaches. Or not. As the case may be.
***
Wednesday 17 November
So busy taking photos of the State Opening, the Queen, the Speaker and the men dressed as playing cards that I hear nothing of the Queen's Speech. That doesn't prevent me from commenting on it for TV. Yet when I do read it it sounds like a bit of a rag bag. Lots of hard work, and fear creation, particularly on traffic measures, which aren't going to be implemented anyway, but nothing to benefit the mass of the people much. Clearly, this is not an election programme. We'll need to set out a better stall in the run up to May 2001.
Thursday 18 November
A fax from the secretary of Grimsby Labour Party. My re-selection was finished weeks ago but they forgot to tell me. Fax back that the MP for Grimsby has unfortunately died of suspense, but there will be a séance in the Lords to ask him if he wishes to stand posthumously. Stop laughing at my own jokes when a terse fax comes pointing out that the local decision still has to be ratified by Millbank.
Friday 19 November
Shona and I meet the North East Lincolnshire Council. The news is bad. The Tory government never allowed us enough to cover the costs of going unitary but Labour hasn't made good that gap and has added extra obligations but not enough new spending. It's made too little allowance for our deprivation and for disadvantages, more severe than in most parts of Yorkshire. So the Council is forced to cut by £6 million and I must defend cuts worse than we ever had under the Tories. Including the loss of much of what the Council has done to make this a better place to live. Protests to the DETR have been met with a stony silence but they may meet us once the dirty work is done. Big Deal. This is sickening.
Monday 22 November
Michael Brown, former MP for Cleethorpes, now a very good lobby correspondent, gloats that my government is being nastier to North East Lincolnshire than his ever was. Defensively I reply that at least New Labour's intentions are better.
He says the balance of nature is being maintained and an area which had one government and one opposition member when he and the Tories were in, still has the same now Shona has taken over and New Labour is in power. Could being in opposition explain why I'm now getting from bright, new Labour ministers the same replies, in many cases verbatim, that I got from Tory ministers? Decide to fetch my files back from Hull University Library and match up the answers. Unless they re-select me.
Thursday 25 November
Grimsby Labour Party Christmas Fair. Disappointing turnout. My book stall takes only £82. Less than I spend at the cake stall. None of my books on the Third Way, stakeholdering or Etzioniism are even picked up. At the end of the evening I've more books to take home to store for next year than I brought in. Massive demand for Jeffrey Archer books but I haven't got any.
Friday 26 November
To Keighley's University of the Third Age to debate the Euro with David Currie and a massive audience of pensioners so numerous that my brother, dropping in after work, is refused admission because they're infringing fire regulations. Beforehand I take my son to lunch with my old history teacher from Bingley Grammar School. She denounces my writing, grammar, dress and behaviour throughout the lunch. Yet I notice that at the meeting she does vote for me. Unlike Joan Wicken, personal assistant to Julius Nyereve for 26 years and now living in Keighley. When I get home afterwards I realise that I've left my jacket in the hall. Ring the organiser who tersely asks if I'm suffering from Alzheimer's.
Saturday 27 November
Wakened at 5.30 am by Linda who's managed to get the New Zealand television live coverage of their election results on the Internet. Wonderful. It's forty years since I sat in New Zealand listening to the 1959 British election results on the short wave. Now here we are watching the live New Zealand television coverage and drinking New Zealand champagne (none of this French muck) as the tide flows to Labour. Ring Helen Clarke and suggest I'd make a good Finance Minister. The most she'll do is invite me to the inauguration of the new government, as Chair of the Party's London Branch. That might be an opening. Spend the rest of the day half asleep but happy. Until I take my grandchildren to Shipley Glen to see the Glen Tramway Santa Claus. He doesn't arrive until next week. The Fun Fair is closed. The pub has no hot meals. It's raining. Bliss is it in that dawn to be alive.
Tuesday 30 November
Decide to join the Parliamentary group for Older People. Depressed to find they're all so much younger than I. Jeff Rooker, after I demand a pension increase, tells me I'll shortly be due for free TV.
Evening
To the Van Dyke Exhibition, courtesy British Airways. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Could I retrain as New Labour's Court Photographer? Even a baby photographer. I'll drop a note to Tony.
Wednesday 1 December
First try at the new Division II Chamber. I love it. So much more relaxed and friendly than the Premier League.
Evening
Launch of our Parliament in Pictures book to an angry crowd who look at it, find they're not in and go away, muttering. Fortunately, my co-authors got on Schindler's List as hostages for good behaviour so they're still in the Lords. Clearly, photography has been taken into account. It should be in re-selection, too, though one impertinent asked me if my camera shakes like that because of age. Sell two copies of the book on H.P. and take the publishers out for something to eat at my club, the Westminster Abbey Coffee Club.
Thursday 2 December
My Christmas card this year is a direct steal from Tony's cards. A lovely picture of me sat in the middle of a large and adoring family group with grandchildren crawling all over the place to give the impression that I'm really the father, still young and vigorous. I've ordered a thousand with the wonderful message "Merry Christmas and a Magic Millenium from the Mitchells". Tony will love it. So will the entire NEC to facilitate their decision on re-selection. Joyce rings. "You've spelt Millennium wrong. It has two n's". Should I pulp them? Decide no. Young people can't spell. So it could do me good.
Friday 3 December
Shona and I, working in joint harness as usual, meet a series of interest groups including the new Primary Care Group, where she is magnificent in taking a firm line on birth control clinics. Then it's the NUT and we're asked to fill in a questionnaire. Shona firmly gives the government line. I nervously ask them what they'd like me to say and put that.
Evening
Shona's loyalty is paying political dividends. Council cuts have now extended to flowers and gardens, always excellent in North East Lincolnshire. Now all the hanging baskets, the Town Hall flowers and the floral hall are to be cut in Grimsby. The flower beds on the front at Cleethorpes and their hanging baskets are to be kept on. Loyalty pays.
This begins a torrent of florid phone calls from middle-class ratepayers denouncing the cuts and demanding that the parrots, Macaws, and exotic birds which the Council has in its bird house in People's Park, should not be flogged off but kept in public ownership in their old age. "After all, you'll know how upsetting it will be for these old birds, Mr. Mitchell" one caller adds ominously.
Saturday 4 December
Attend a demonstration of life saving and resuscitation by Lincolnshire volunteers, arriving just as they've packed up to go home. They unpack and demonstrate the equipment. One volunteer looking me over wonders if I've thought of carrying a defibrillator in my car. "Just in case something happens to you".
To St. Andrew's Church Christmas Fair which I normally open. The Churchwarden tells me "We decided to have someone younger this year". In comes the Mayor. Buy several copies of Cliff Richard's Lord's Prayer to show I'm young at heart and several pounds worth of plastic crap as toys for my grandchildren. "Oh, we're not expecting a happy event like Mr. Blair, are we?"
Tuesday 7 December
Invited to the London Eye, British Airways' Big Wheel. Arrive hung down with cameras and half an hour early to find that not only are we not going up it but that this is a lecture to the Parliamentary Engineering Group who're so intent on asking boring questions about the engineering (much of which appears to be Dutch) that we only get the briefest look at it from 200 yards away. My efforts to break through the barriers and climb the structure to get the first high level photographs are stopped. It's a wonderful thing but MPs will not be allowed to ride it until next year after its safety has been tested on members of the press. "Applications from MPs are being vetted by Bob Ayling. He's a close friend of Tony Blair's".
Wednesday 8 December
The Daily Mail rings to ask how I feel about the fact that the questioner driving Peter Mandelson to fury in a film about the Dome was me. Shocked rigid. I'm delighted that I killed Surf ball "the sport of the 21st Century" but horrified that anyone should think I'm critical of Peter. Gladstone gave the last decades of his life to trying to pacify Ireland and failed. Mo Mowlem kissed and hugged for two and a half years and failed. Peter has solved it all in eight short weeks. Criticising him is now like attacking the Queen Mother. Or Mother Theresa.
***
A Merry Christmas to both my readers. I am leaving immediately for New Zealand. The National Executive prefers to consider whether to refer my re-selection to an electoral college without the embarrassment of me sobbing in the street outside Millbank Tower.
It will be exciting being at the New Zealand State Opening and watching old friends take power. I've kept up my membership of the New Zealand Labour Party in case I don't make it in this country. My chances of a job may now be better there than here.
It will be marvelous to be away from the Dome and all the Millennium hype. We are now coasting on bubbles and I'm worried about what happens when the Millennium bubble bursts and people wake up on 1 January to the same old vomit-strewn streets, a cold, grey winter and the usual Hogmanay hangover to find it isn't a wonderful new world at all?
The resulting depression could burst all the other bubbles. We have a growth bubble in defiance of all the facts of a grossly overvalued Pound and interest rates double Europe's. America's bubble economy, pumped up by stock market Keynesianism, keeps the world going. Labour's political bubble keeps the longest honeymoon in history going. Will the bubbles burst next year? Perhaps it's better not to come back. |
