Three Tories on Question Time for the second week running. Ah, the rewards of being the Heirs to Blair. But remember, that is why you get these things. Forget that at your peril. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, seem to have been banished altogether.
On relations between Britain and America, the whole thing resembled that episode of Father Ted which was in fact an excuse to use the Alternative Bottom Word as many times as possible. Leading this was one of the Three Tories, Toby Young, who decided to indulge in cringe-making references to some football match.
BBC News has been in a similar mood today, reporting that upcoming non-event as the main item, and stating in all seriousness that the telephone call between Obama and Cameron over BP (and, one hopes, over Afghanistan, extradition, and much else besides) paled into insignificance when compared to it.
But how many of the England football team would have been allowed into any of Toby Young's proposed schools? Do not most of them, in marked contrast to anyone who can still afford to go and watch them, come from homes the products of which those schools are specifically designed to avoid? And are not rather a lot of them - how shall we put this? - a touch on the swarthy side?
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Did you watch the highlights of the Trooping of the Colour instead?
ReplyDeleteOf course.
ReplyDeleteToby Young, a classic hereditary London media type of the kind that made the SDP unviable from the start.
ReplyDeleteNo real roots in the Movement, so no understanding of why unions and local government are important. Sees them as in the way of him getting what he thinks he is entitled to just because he wants it.
But thinks that he is a man of the people because he says a moderate swear word on television and goes on about football.
No wonder he is now a Cameron Tory. Many of the SDP seem to be.
Indeed. The SDP is one of the three toxic streams running into our present Political Class.
ReplyDeleteWhile its poison is a great deal less virulent than that of the 1970s sectarian Left or the 1980s sectarian Right, it nevertheless includes the betrayal of Gaitskellism over Europe. The betrayal both of Gaitskellism and of Christian Socialism over nuclear weapons.
The decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins. The comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams. Her regret at not having resigned in protest against past Labour measures to restrict immigration. And, related to all of those but especially to the last, a fanatical hatred of trade unions.
A couple of weeks ago, all four panellists on Any Questions were former members of the SDP: Daniel Finkelstein, Polly Toynbee, Andrew Adonis and Toby Young.