No One Loves A Fairy When She's Forty

Although in the case of Councillor Neil Fleming MP, who is 40 today, no one ever loved her in the first place.

Famously, when asked her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher replied, "New Labour."

If anyone were to ask my greatest achievement, then my reply would be, "Councillor Neil Fleming MP."

Or, rather, the fact that she is no such thing, that she has never been elected above Parish level any more than I have, and that she is most unlikely ever again to attain even that dizzy height.

In 2009, the Labour Party went to the length of imposing an all-women shortlist in order to scupper even the remote possibility that Fleming might become a parliamentary candidate, although many of us did wonder how that excluded her, as it certainly would not do today.

In view of recent developments in these parts, developments that have tellingly received little local and no national attention despite the best efforts of certain politically beleaguered self-publicists, mention of Fleming and her family explains why I remain dry-eyed.

Something through the post? Come back to me when you have had an actual attempt on your life, complete with hands around your throat. Come back to me when, although no one disputes that it has happened, absolutely nothing is ever done about it.

I go back a very long with the right-wing-if-anything Labour Establishment in County Durham, and I do not even bother to pretend to have any sympathy.

Although I am sorry that the names of the other signatories have been omitted, this letter of mine appears in today's Northern Echo: 

There are five groups on Durham County Council, plus two completely independent independents.

But only Labour members voted against the teaching assistants.

None voted in support of the campaign that has electrified the trade union movement and the Left throughout the country, thereby earning international attention.

Yet that campaign has been endorsed by the Leader of the Labour Party, at the largest working-class and left-wing event in Europe, the Durham Miners’ Gala, in front of at least 150,000 people and the television cameras. Only the Conservatives abstained, although that does make the Labour Group objectively “worse than the Tories”.

It is therefore not only reasonable, but morally and politically obligatory, to call for the election of no Labour candidate whatever to that Council on May 4.

And then, what? A Cabinet position for every non-Labour Group and for those of no group, with the numbers made up based on their relative size. The same for scrutiny chairs, obviously never mirroring the portfolios of their respective partisans. And representation on each committee and subcommittee in proportion to their numbers on the authority as a whole.

Such is the support that has been attracted by the Durham teaching assistants, the Lions of Durham as once there were Lions of Grunwick, that Labour’s loss of overall control, and indeed its loss of every seat, will be heard from the souks to the favelas, from the Dalit colonies to the Rohingya camps, and from Crimea, to Kashmir, to the scattered outposts of Diego Garcia.

A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully.

Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

And no one loves a fairy when she's 40.

If anyone ever loved her in the first place.