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The Dog Star rages. Something funny is going on. I’m not sure what, but everything seems to be moving towards some kind of climax as life gets more frantic. It`s not just the Christmas party build up. The new hours make every day frenetic. Everything has to be crammed in before seven. Tony is a driven man, desperate to get his flagship follies through by his classic leadership technique of throwing himself off a cliff to force the party to catch him.
So life has the air of some kind of end game compounded by the huge new signs at the end of Victoria St telling me, and Patricia Hewitt opposite, that 270,000 people have a heart attack every year, 33,000 die of lung cancer and l6 000 of colon cancer. Cheerful thoughts to start the day with.
Monday 1st December I’m the only MP at the Yorkshire Day lunch but it gives me the chance to heckle Bernard Ingham’s marvelous speech. “Why do I disagree with regional government?” he asks. “Because you’re barmy!” I shout to a shocked silence followed by cries of “Thee shut thi great gob”. Exit without being allowed to buy the bargain suit lengths, Home Rule for Yorkshire ties, and Evenings out with a Wensleydale Sheep, which are the benefits of membership. A bit much when I’ve spent forty years disguising my Yorkshire origins from Grimsby Yellow Bellies
Friday 5 December To Hull for a sixth form Any Questions. We’re expecting questions on Europe, on which Phillip Norton and I are ready to defeat the Euro-mush brigade, Iraq and GM Crops. Not a word. They want to talk about university fees, university fees and university fees. Phillip doesn’t dare unveil the Tory position, which is to maker the universities so mean and miserable no one wants to go there. The Liberal MEP proclaims the virtues of taxing the rich without saying that Lib-Dems have spent the proceeds five times over. I tell the truth. Which is that I don’t know why we’re rushing it in when we promised not to and I don`t understand it. We should have an enquiry to answer the basic questions. Stunned silence.
Monday 8 December To Tonbridge Wells Fabians. The Chair introduces my talk on regional government. I didn’t know that was what I was talking about. I have nothing relevant to say on it. Announce that I’ll talk about government policy, so it will be short. They are Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells en masse. Mostly with the Labour Party. Fail to convince them that it’s all for their own good.
Tuesday 9 December Miss the fishing debate because I’ve got to go to Grimsby to oppose the Lib-Con coalition’s effort to give away all our council houses. Wherever they come to power in the North the Lib-Dems are a disaster. They usually fire all the staff and flog all the assets to prove they have bigger choppers than the Tories. Now they`re proposing to give the council housing stock away, fire the housing staff and slash council spending, while the Tories endorse it with one-handed clapping. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is right behind them in their lunacy. What they`re doing is government policy.
Wednesday 10 December Go to the Christmas Lunch of the Slovakian Ambassador who recommends their national drink. The name is unpronounceable but the taste delicious. I demolish several glasses which has a curious effect as I stagger round the room, crashing into people, inanimate objects, and other members of the House of Lords, and talking as if this is the Czech Republic. A senior diplomat tells me “This is Slovakia. We separated from the Czechs a decade ago”.
Once I’ve sobered up, go to meet three grandchildren for Keith Vaz’s Annual Christmas Kids Party. A great event as usual but my grandchildren disgrace themselves by charging round playing football, trying to take off Bart Simpson’s shows and jumping every available queue. Good to know they’re New Labour. In the interludes from trying to control them restaurant staff, several of whom have been here longer than I have, tell me they’re all being made redundant. I didn’t know this. It’s monstrous. All because of the stupid new hours. Advise them to write to their MP. In gratitude they tie thirty balloons round my granddaughter’s wrist. Desperately try to give them away to other young children who don’t want them. Cram them into a taxi with the kids because the steady bang bang of Archie’s efforts to burst them is bringing machine guns to the ready. He then bursts them one by one in the taxi all the way home.
Sadly, I had to leave Gordon to make his pre-Budget statement on his own. He’s kindly implemented a number of my proposals but the extra money for local government is a bit late. Last year North East Lincolnshire desperately needed it, John Prescott was unrelentingly mean, so Labour was thrown out. Thus year Gordon comes to the help of the Lib-Con coalition with a new dollop of money to prevent them enduring the same fate.
Thursday 11 December. To the Politics Show with Julie Kirkbride who complains that Cherie told her off for forcing herself into the Downing St reception for our rugby players. The Blair kids were excluded as a result. We handled this with maximum churlishness but gritting my teeth I read out Cherie`s personal statement that she had to tell Julie off for ogling and trying to touch the rugby players.
Friday 12 December To York Fabians to begin the Great Conversation. They appear disgruntled and so angry about top up fees and Blunkett’s proposals on asylum that I’m wasting my time.
Saturday 13 December After surgery go down to the fish dock to talk to fishermen. Sadly, they are all in the bankruptcy court, their vessels tied up and moldering in the final triumph of the Common Fisheries Policy.
Grimsby grew wealthy on fishing the prolific grounds in the North Sea. Now that they’ve been ruined by the idiotic CFP principle of Equal Access to a Common Resource our remaining vessels are not allowed to fish there. Later in the day comes the news that the European Summit on Giscard`s Constitution has failed. Tony instructs us not to gloat. As Willy Whitelaw said, “Wrong to Gloat. Not right to gloat. Mustn`t gloat. But I can’t help it”. In between bouts of hysterical laughter. People edge away from me nervously not having heard the good news. Can we organize tours to Euro Ground Zero, like 9/11 to visit the wreckage and see the brave Commissioners struggling to put Humpty together again? If they do we must, at the very least, have pre-legislative scrutiny on it and a free vote.
Sunday l4 December To Grimsby’s National Fishing Heritage Centre, which is closed for the winter because the government has spent so much on white elephants centres elsewhere, it won`t help the one successful venture which the Council itself financed. It`s opened up for a broadcast about the fishing Summit which turns out to be disastrous. It’s cut down because of Saddam who is obviously intent on driving fishing out of the headlines. I’m not allowed to hear whet Ben Bradshaw is saying, though I’m supposed to reply to it. Finally transmission fails as I begin my first answer, so no one hears my brilliant reply.
Then to lunch with the Rector to decide what we’ll say when asked the inevitable question about what the Huntley trial does for Grimsby’s image. Every town has bad apples in its barrel. London’s full of them. But it was in our tight-nit little community that the first warnings came from Grimsby folk ringing the cops to warn that Huntley was a wrong `un. In London they`d have made him a celeb.
Evening to the Salvation Army Carol Service where they have much the best tunes. Afterwards a lady warns me that God has told her I didn`t go to the House of Commons` Prayer Meetings (which I didn’t actually know existed because He doesn`t include me in His Ever Bigger Conversation). I must go and she’ll know if I do. Another tells me that the MP for Crosby in Liverpool, who gave her her school prize twenty years ago, was also called Austin Mitchell. What a funny coincidence.
Monday 5 December Chair the Environment Select Committees enquiry into the WEE Directive. I`m totally unprepared and panic when the Clerk deserts me complaining that I have B.O. We interview DEFRA and DTI Ministers while the Metal Recoverers signal from behind that they`re talking a load of rubbish. We should put them on the other side of the table and let them fight it out.
Tuesday 16 December Out to buy arctic kit. My demented wife has decided that I need a holiday break. Having booked for gentle walking in Turkey the threat of terrorism has deterred us, but the travel firm won`t refund. So we’re changed to Norway and cross country skiing, which neither of us have ever done, in a land where Grimsby fishermen tell me there`s only four hours` daylight. It`ll be a disaster. I`ll end up frozen in a glacier like some other Mastodon to be brought back to Grimsby in a block of ice. The perfect New Labour MP.
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If I do get back it will be to begin our local version of the Great Conversation, the Grimsby Converszione. It`s easy to laugh at the Big Con and I duly will because the idea of Tony, who never listens to the party or its MPs, listening to a nation which really wants to talk about shooting asylum seekers, locking petty criminals up forever, and declaring UDI from the EU is not unhumerous.
Yet there is a serious issue. Tony is trying to cut out the party and open a direct dialogue with the people. Just like Mussolini. He realizes that political parties are dying. Their roots in local government have been cut. They can`t even offer a decent pool of recruitment for the kind of chaps Tony wants to recruit. So why not cut out the middle man and commune with the people directly, preferably through the internet where physical contact is minimal?
But what do we commune about? Something`s going on that we`re not being told about. Tony is finding difficulty in coping with a situation in which, for the first time in six years, he can`t walk on water because everything, Ireland, Europe, flag-ship policies, is going wrong, and he`s no longer loved. A good friend in Grimsby reports, “I have been today to a private dinner with eleven other men. Nine are voters in Grimsby, eight voted for you last time. Now one says he will still vote for you as a person but only because you appear to be against Blair. One says No because of the damage the government has done to their business (fish) and also because the Tories seem to be getting their act together. Two say No because of the unjustified war. Two say No because of the university fees (both former Labour Councillors). One says No because Blair is a liar (no specific lie was mentioned). One will not vote because of the depths to which politics has sunk.
In fact after the last one had said he would abstain some of the others decided they would not vote against you but would not vote at all. I really hope your personal vote holds up for you next time.”
Gordon, by contrast, exhibits that lessened moroseness Scots call happiness, and as for we mushrooms (kept in the dark with manure periodically thrown over us, in case you don’t know the joke) we`re told nothing. This could be a Thunderclap Newman moment. There’s something in the air. |
