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TS Eliot was wrong. May’s the cruelest month. Not April.
Bloody weather. Boring business. Disastrous elections. Collapsing morale and falling membership.
William Hague casting clouts and only little Leo on the other scale.
Yet what did we expect? Labour councils are our front line.
We’ve treated them as the enemy within, penalised them, squeezed them, and forced them to cut spending and increase council tax then shot them in the back as they went over the top for us. As for the pensioners, we’ve told them so often we’re doing the right things for them. Only Alzheimer’s can explain why they’re so upset over 75p. That’s more than a Euro!
Tony’s view is that tout expliquer c’est tout pardonner. Sadly, it ain’t. People are perverse and unworthy of us. It’s infuriating. The best government in two decades, a Prime Minister whose only fault is to be too perfect, explanations pouring out of every orifice. Never has so much good will met with so much ingratitude.
*****
Wednesday 11 May
Visit the Bank of England with Labour MPs. We’re assured that all’s well, it’s just that we don’t see it. Even if it isn’t, nothing can be done. I antagonise Eddie George by telling him I’m right and he’s wrong. So when I ask, "have you stopped screwing up manufacturing lately?" he replies testily that I am totally out of date. Loud cries of approval from colleagues which turn sour when he suggests prayer to bring the exchange rate down.
Monday 15 May
The whips have so little for us to do, except vote, that they should take a block booking on the wheel to give us something interesting to do until we’re needed. Take the grandchildren rowing on Dulwich park lake. Maisie, aged four, goes with her friend whose mum says she recognised me and asked Maisie, "Is your granddad famous?", "Oh yes. He’s an optician". Back to the fun factory for the Film Group’s viewing of Saving Grace. Wonderful and all about pot smoking. Elizabeth Murdoch advises us not to inhale.
Wednesday 17 May
Charles Allen comes to to tell the Media Group about Granada but tells me before hand that he’s found a film of me judging Miss Topless Tassel Twirler of 1970. We’ve had several copies made", he says ominously. I remember with horror lying on the floor taking photographs while topless dancers with enormous boobs gyrated. "Do you think Tony might like to see it?" I was studying double jeopardy in fact but the implied threat ensures that I applaud every word Charles says. In New Labour we’ve all got pasts to live down but Raving Trotskyism is more readily excused then sex in these PC times. Fortunately the new breed of candidates coming forward now are tainted by neither, being GMO bred in and by machine.
On to a debate chaired by the Bishop of Durham about devolution. When I attack the speaker from the IPPR as a "soft, silly sell out" the Bishop denounces this as racism and closes the meeting abruptly.
Thursday 17 May
To Barnsley for the funeral of Joe Kenyon, founder of the Claimants Union and scourge of authority, social security, MPs and Labour governments. Joe was a unique combination of Yorkshire bloody mindedness, Barnsley buggeration and miner’s toughness. He knew the social security regulations better than the officials and used that to fight for the people.
I enter his council house. Shock! Horror! There’s Joe. In Barnsley they display the deceased in the coffin, in a white suit and red tie. Mourners paid their respects by kissing, touching, or straightening his tie. "Ee looks well" mingles with "Tha’d never a thought he war dead". When the lid was screwed down relatives, miners, claimants, sociology professors, welfare experts and television producers, set off to the Crematorium. We’ll never see Joe’s like again. We’re the poorer for it. The poor even more so.
Friday 18 May
I’ve invited De Anne Julius, the only sane member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, to Grimsby to see how Bank policies hit the real world of manufacturing, producing, exporting and competing.
Visits to Grimsby are always exhausting; a dinner last night and a 6.30 am start on the fish dock. To build up the picture of the hard times there’s fewer fish than for a long time. We ate more for breakfast than was sold on the market.
On to the food producers who benefit from a high pound because they import their fish. Finally, the manufacturers and chemical industry who’re really feeling the pain and fear that multinational investment will be diverted to more competitive locations. De Anne does a brilliant job on behalf of an unworthy bank, charming them all and murmuring her hopes that the pound will come down.
Then down to London for the Fabian Fundraiser. We’re following the party by organising high ticket price events - at London’s best venue, the Penthouse at New Zealand House where we can scan the skies for signs of a Star in the East. Simon Hoggart is the floor show, repeating jokes you have loved from the News Quiz. I lecture on the aesthetics of my photographs, displayed on a wall at the end of the room. Taking it’s photo is the nearest I get to power these days though my pic.of the leader was so bad he sent a hand-written protest to Amateur Photographer and all my applications to photograph THE BABY have been mysteriously rejected. Back to the Women’s Institutes. Get more nudes that way.
Saturday 20 May
Shona and I open "Child Line", an phone service so children can turn in their parents. Mrs Blair has timed the Blair Titch Project nicely to give Child Line enormous publicity and Shona lets me release the balloons. They float up, get stuck in a tree and burst one by one..
Monday 22 May
Another day of triumph for the Whips as hundreds of us are kept to the early hours of the morning to defeat opposition votes between one and fourteen. We backbenchers have become the Whips’ virility symbol. How long will we stand for it?
Wednesday 24 May
By another stroke of whip genius Wednesday is trivia but a three line whip on Thursday when we want to go home. One of those minor matters is the sordid Limited Liability Partnership Bill, a monstrous fiddle for big Accounting Houses to escape retribution for bad audits. To please them we’re allowing fiddlers, fraudsters and failures and every company that wants secrecy and lower taxes to reconstitute as an LLP.
Thursday 25 May
To the opening of Heinz’s new Learning Zone to allow workers access to computers, the internet, teaching, and diplomas. Heinz have taken over the U.B. pizza plant in Grimsby which was number one but now faces severe competition from Ireland where pizzas benefit from a high grant we can’t pay. Why does the British Government turn a blind eye to the excessive and illegal grants in the Republic? Just to keep Bertie sweet for a settlement in Northern Ireland?
Friday 26 May
Open a new Russian primary fish processing plant to bring 100 jobs and supplies of Russian fish to Grimsby. Elliot Morley was to open it but the National Federation of Fishermen Organisations has passed a vote of no confidence in him so he dare not come to Grimsby. One of the Russian directors complains that the plant has faced official obstruction, a refusal of regional aid, and customs delays, including impounding machinery imported from Iceland. "It’s just like being back in the USSR" he confides.
On to Lincoln for the unveiling of a plaque in honour of Joseph Banks, the botanist on Cook’s voyages. The Australian High Commissioner makes no mention of New Zealand and the congregation are all uncouth Australians and very couth Lincolnshire Tories. Gill Merron and I slip quietly away fearing violence fuelled by Aussie wine.
Back to Grimsby for the Policy Forum on the Party Membership is falling faster than the official figures though we can’t check because we no longer receive membership cards or lists. Give a jolly talk written for me by Shona but sullen silence is followed by an angry deluge of complaints which culminate in a warning that I’ll probably lose next year. Home in misery.
Saturday 27 May
When I read about Paul Kelley, headmaster of the Teeside school which produced Laura Spence I recall that he was the marvelous teacher who saved my kids. Unlike our leaders and betters, once elected I lived in the constituency and sent the kids to local schools, an approach summed up by Peter Mandelson in one word: "sucker". Paul Kelly took Jonathan for media studies and worked miracles, giving media careers to him and others. Nothing was too much trouble for a man devoted to teaching and the kids. Yet now he’s being accused of the horrendous crime of having a Labour poster in his house. Yet he never had any association with the Grimsby Labour party. In common with 99% of the population. Besides, he’s right, the proportion of public school kids at Oxford is little lower than when I was there. We should insist that those who opt out of the state system at eleven at University too, to subsidise the rest.
Tuesday 30 May
Like J B Priestly I’m a great Dales lover though of, not in, as he was. We set off on a great dales adventure on the Settle Carlisle Railway to get off at each little station, hike around, then get the next train onward en route to Carlisle. We’re dressed, appropriately for the Dales and the weather forecast, in arctic gear. Sadly the train doesn’t stop at the little stations. It’s crammed with tourists, mostly American. It’s boiling because the heating can’t be switched off and the windows won’t open. The lavatories are blocked.
Only the British and Northern Spirit could stage put on such a tourist disaster. The world’s most beautiful train ride and you can’t see out through filthy windows, like the train which took Lenin through Germany in 1917, and conditions worse than the EU would accept for cattle. They should put on old carriages with open windows to photograph from, steam engines, and restaurant cars serving fish and chips. We arrive in Carlisle boiled, perspiring, filthy and smelly. Yet it’s a lovely town, almost as nice as Grimsby. How much nicer England gets the nearer you get to Scotland.
Thank God for a week’s break. The batteries are recharging, energy and hope returning, the loins girding for the battle to come. If only we knew what all about. Sadly "The Project" has become government by knee jerk. The first three years have been wasted by being too mean. Now we have to pour money in too late. The manufacturing we live by is beginning its third melt down in two decades, stability becomes rigor mortis and no one will do anything. Not quite what I imagined. But not my fault. They never asked me! What did you do in the Labour Government Dan Dan?" "I read faxes." |
