Sanctimonious Drivel
I had to admire the sheer gall of The Times columnist Matthew Parris who in one of his paragraphs berates those for speaking well of Charlie Kennedy after the former Lib Dem leader has passed away, while speaking up belatedly and in the most brown-nosing fashion for the old Labour dinosaur Dennis Skinner.
Now that's my definition of a real hypocrite.
Chuckling Charlie - a man with no pomposity
By Matthew Parris - The Times
My Week
“One of the nicest things about Charles Kennedy,” I wrote in The Times as the late Mr Kennedy was being sneered at and finally sacked as his party’s leader in 2006, “is his lack of pomposity. I cannot but believe that in some secret corner of his heart he too was smiling at the fun he could have had on Have I Got News for You with footage of these scenes, were it not that the head on the block was his.”
Kennedy could always see a scene, even when he was at its centre, from the outside. He would be chuckling now as old foes on auto-tribute feign shock at his passing. It’s raining treacle in a kind of Twitter-downpour, and all feel obliged to add their dollop. Fellow-parliamentarian Liz Kendall tweets that she “met him on Question Time”.
Well, I met him in the Commons more than 30 years ago, and now he’s dead will stick to saying what I said when he was alive: that he was a clever, good-natured man who never quite created a hard-edged political creed — perhaps because, in the words of one of Dr Johnson’s friends, “cheerfulness was always breaking in”.
The humour kept surfacing. In 2000 he had even (I reported) made Ffion Hague smile when he said of her husband (who had appeared in St Albans market with a “Keep the £” battle-truck alongside Michael Portillo) that it was a rare occurrence “of dodgy goods falling on to the back of a lorry”.
As, though, we wade through the sanctimony (from Tony Blair, for instance, whose Iraq follies Kennedy excoriated, and from Nicola Sturgeon whose party had just ended his career) I do wonder whether on those pro-forma wills you can complete, alongside “No hymns”, “No flowers” and “No gravestone”, there might be a box you could tick: “No tributes.”
Dose of clapping
Speaking of sanctimony, all power to John Bercow’s elbow in holding back the tide of applause threatening the Commons chamber. When did this infernal clapping business start? Party conferences, children’s birthday parties, even funerals these days, are punctuated by dreary bouts of dutiful applause: once a way of expressing genuine approval, now mere ritual. Now the SNP are bidding to applaud each other in the chamber, like the ghastly European parliament. Stick to your guns, Mr Speaker!
Beastly behaviour
Dennis Skinner: an apology. Having never shared the admiration for the Beast of Bolsover, having declined to buy all that “salt of the earth” nonsense, having seen a sour troublemaker where others saw a noble class-warrior, having noted his attachment to everything that has eaten away the Labour party from the inside, knowing his bullying reputation in his Derbyshire constituency, deploring the less-than-brave waste of his own considerable intelligence in a career of playing the joker, and aware of this self-styled, self-righteous funny-man’s complete sense of humour failure in regard to his own misadventures . . . I must now with reluctance spring to Mr Skinner’s defence.
I’m ready to man the English barricades against the Celtic hordes trying to push him off his accustomed perch on the Commons benches. Avaunt, you Scottish nationalists. Tribe trumps party. Dennis, I’m with you all the way.
Green icon
Last Friday some of our Times writers nominated their comic-book superheroes. Our literary editor chose Conan the Barbarian because he was hairy, Helen Rumbelow championed Bionic Woman. Sadly I was not invited to this symposium — sadly because since childhood days I’ve so admired the Mekon: villain of the Dan Dare comic strip in the Eagle boys’ magazine. The Mekon is small, green, super-brainy and infinitely resourceful. Ruler of the Treens, he has a huge cranium and shrivelled little limbs, and floats around in a sort of levitating coracle. He reminds me of the former cabinet office minister, now ennobled: Francis Maude.
Nobody ever said of the Mekon “Does he take sugar?” I doubt he can walk but he’s the very antithesis of the forever-grateful, forever-patronised wheelchair-user. Challenging such stereotypes, the Mekon is thus an important role-model for the disabled.
My Week
“One of the nicest things about Charles Kennedy,” I wrote in The Times as the late Mr Kennedy was being sneered at and finally sacked as his party’s leader in 2006, “is his lack of pomposity. I cannot but believe that in some secret corner of his heart he too was smiling at the fun he could have had on Have I Got News for You with footage of these scenes, were it not that the head on the block was his.”
Kennedy could always see a scene, even when he was at its centre, from the outside. He would be chuckling now as old foes on auto-tribute feign shock at his passing. It’s raining treacle in a kind of Twitter-downpour, and all feel obliged to add their dollop. Fellow-parliamentarian Liz Kendall tweets that she “met him on Question Time”.
Well, I met him in the Commons more than 30 years ago, and now he’s dead will stick to saying what I said when he was alive: that he was a clever, good-natured man who never quite created a hard-edged political creed — perhaps because, in the words of one of Dr Johnson’s friends, “cheerfulness was always breaking in”.
The humour kept surfacing. In 2000 he had even (I reported) made Ffion Hague smile when he said of her husband (who had appeared in St Albans market with a “Keep the £” battle-truck alongside Michael Portillo) that it was a rare occurrence “of dodgy goods falling on to the back of a lorry”.
As, though, we wade through the sanctimony (from Tony Blair, for instance, whose Iraq follies Kennedy excoriated, and from Nicola Sturgeon whose party had just ended his career) I do wonder whether on those pro-forma wills you can complete, alongside “No hymns”, “No flowers” and “No gravestone”, there might be a box you could tick: “No tributes.”
Dose of clapping
Speaking of sanctimony, all power to John Bercow’s elbow in holding back the tide of applause threatening the Commons chamber. When did this infernal clapping business start? Party conferences, children’s birthday parties, even funerals these days, are punctuated by dreary bouts of dutiful applause: once a way of expressing genuine approval, now mere ritual. Now the SNP are bidding to applaud each other in the chamber, like the ghastly European parliament. Stick to your guns, Mr Speaker!
Beastly behaviour
Dennis Skinner: an apology. Having never shared the admiration for the Beast of Bolsover, having declined to buy all that “salt of the earth” nonsense, having seen a sour troublemaker where others saw a noble class-warrior, having noted his attachment to everything that has eaten away the Labour party from the inside, knowing his bullying reputation in his Derbyshire constituency, deploring the less-than-brave waste of his own considerable intelligence in a career of playing the joker, and aware of this self-styled, self-righteous funny-man’s complete sense of humour failure in regard to his own misadventures . . . I must now with reluctance spring to Mr Skinner’s defence.
I’m ready to man the English barricades against the Celtic hordes trying to push him off his accustomed perch on the Commons benches. Avaunt, you Scottish nationalists. Tribe trumps party. Dennis, I’m with you all the way.
Green icon
Last Friday some of our Times writers nominated their comic-book superheroes. Our literary editor chose Conan the Barbarian because he was hairy, Helen Rumbelow championed Bionic Woman. Sadly I was not invited to this symposium — sadly because since childhood days I’ve so admired the Mekon: villain of the Dan Dare comic strip in the Eagle boys’ magazine. The Mekon is small, green, super-brainy and infinitely resourceful. Ruler of the Treens, he has a huge cranium and shrivelled little limbs, and floats around in a sort of levitating coracle. He reminds me of the former cabinet office minister, now ennobled: Francis Maude.
Nobody ever said of the Mekon “Does he take sugar?” I doubt he can walk but he’s the very antithesis of the forever-grateful, forever-patronised wheelchair-user. Challenging such stereotypes, the Mekon is thus an important role-model for the disabled.
