The New Conservative

I didn’t sleep well last night. I woke up laughing. Strange, I thought. Never had that before. For the first time in my life that I can recall, my dream was apparently sufficiently entertaining that I started to giggle and woke me up. A friend was solemnly telling me that Vladimir Putin was trying to poison him by injecting neat alcohol into the stem of his pen, since you ask – it must have been the mismatch between him and his assumed geopolitical centrality that did it.

I had a moment of pure joy recently, in my nightmare divorce. My youngest daughter ran back to me, threw her arms around me, and showed me all the love still left in her heart. There have been precious few ‘Kodak moments’ in my life, but this was definitely one of them: a fleeting, beautiful reminder of everything I am fighting for. I should have known it was the calm before the storm. This week, the family court delivered its final verdict on the disputed divorce conditions.

Handshaking was not the sort of event at which victory was possible. The end of term meeting with one’s tutors (sometime in the presence of the college’s Master) was the sort of thing where survival was the best that could be hoped for. The aim was to get out unscathed. Mission Accomplished, I thought when the Master cleared his throat and pronounced my efforts very satisfactory. “Anything else?”. An “ahem” to my right. That didn’t sound good.

Under Super Nanny Starmer, the Labour government never tires of lecturing us on how concerned it is about ‘child abuse’. Only last month, the Prime Minister decreed: “I am not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children, and that is why this ban must happen, and that is why this ban will happen.” Tough on abuse, tough on the causes of abuse Starmer may be, but he can’t keep an eye on everything.

Now Keir’s end is near and so he faces his final curtain. Regrets he has a few (MANDELSON), but of this much we can be certain. He did it his way. It is, I think, unlikely that politicians of future times will see the Starmer ministry as a blueprint; more likely a cautionary tale. Even the man himself displayed some inkling of this when he led his first draft of history on the Downing Street steps with one quarter’s GDP figures which are widely seen as the artefact of a broken statistical model.

My Substack’s tagline may read ‘Like politics, but more fun’, and I cover political stuff most of the time, but the thing is I don’t really like politics and I don’t like most politicians. During the recent big political happenings in Britain – Keir Starmer resigning and Andy Burnham winning the Makerfield by-election on the way to becoming the new prime minister, in case you missed it – I limited my intake of news.

I have just been in Cornwall for ten days’ holiday. This is a part of the world so wonderful, I am beginning to wonder why we came back. While I am not a separatist, I can see why the Cornish consider themselves a people apart. For a start, they are so bloody far away from almost anywhere. Even parts of Cornwall are a long way from other parts. From Hull – we stopped off in the Midlands – it took us 9 hours to get there.

I’ve often thought the Labour Party’s approach to ministerial appointments was an insider game of Truth or Dare, where the PM of the day challenges the public to notice the sheer insanity of its increasingly ludicrous reshuffles. Jess Phillips as Safeguarding Minister was a pretty good effort: the woman who once said she “didn’t give a toss” about certain victims’ issues, and fought tooth and nail to water down any semblance of a proper national inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’.

Over the last 30 or so years I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many famous people, including politicians and those adjacent to politics. I thought it might be reasonably interesting to tell you about a few of those meetings… David Cameron, ex-PM During my very brief dalliance with the Conservative Party in 2009, I met Cameron at a Party, er, party.

From time to time I dip my toe in the icy waters of mainstream political commentary, and invariably find variations on a puzzled theme: “Why are they allowing this?”, “Why can’t they stop the small boats?”, “Why does Britain feel so miserable?”.