Sick

Honestly, I go away for a week and look what happens.

The first time that I have ever dialled 999 for my own benefit. My first ride in an ambulance. Taken out of my house in a wheelchair with a blanket around me and an oxygen mask strapped to my face. Longer in hospital than when I had major surgery earlier in the month.

No Incapacity Benefit, because a very bad former employer not only didn’t pay my wages, but didn’t pay my stamp either (if I’d been signed on then I’d be fine, but I was working so I’m not – there really is no answer to that). No more than two units of alcohol per day until the end of January, while they thin my blood.

But as right as rain by the turn of the year, I’m told. By then, I will doubtless have been punished enough for eating properly, taking regular exercise, drinking in moderation, smoking no more than two or three cigars per year, and never taking an illegal drug.

Anyway, I digress. I go away for a week and look what happens. David Miliband happens. Yes, David Miliband.

He bought a baby on the Internet. But nobody is mentioning that. He only got into Oxford because his super-posh school was nominally part of ILEA, which had a special access scheme effectively controlled by his father. But nobody is mentioning that. His father then got him into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, clearly at the beck and call of a pro-Soviet fanatic. But nobody is mentioning that.

He has never worked outside politics. But nobody is mentioning that. His predecessor at South Shields was ennobled at the last minute in order that he could be imposed on that safe seat without reference to the Constituency Labour Party. But nobody is mentioning that. Local council candidates there are now chosen by his London office, with no local input at all. But nobody is mentioning that.

He was a staggeringly bad Schools Minister (I repeatedly heard the heavy gasps from Labour and Fabian audiences full of teachers as he displayed just how spectacularly ignorant and incompetent he was, all the while assuming that he was uttering axioms and truisms), mirroring David Cameron’s baleful record as Shadow Education Secretary, during which period the Tories literally had no education policy whatever. But nobody is mentioning that.

His Guardian article is drivel, as everything that he has ever published has been, with an attempt to set out his stall in the last days of Blair eventually accepted by the Daily Telegraph as a joke after the Guardian refused to soil itself by printing it. But nobody is mentioning that. Even his weirdo brother is better. But nobody is mentioning that.

And so one could go on, and on, and on.

Let there be no doubt why the media, and above all the BBC (which tried even after the last minute to draft Miliband last year), are so determined to enthrone him. If they succeed in this, or indeed if Cameron ever becomes Prime Minister (bringing in a Cabinet of at least 19 millionaires, mostly too young to have made it themselves), then no one whose parents had not both the cash and the clout to get them into one of the 50 Oxbridge feeder schools, and who did not proceed seamlessly through Oxbridge to Westminster Village non-jobs for the independently wealthy, will ever again be allowed to become Prime Minister.

The BBC, above all, simply ignored the many perfectly good reasons not to vote Tory in 2001, and instead presupposed that William Hague’s Yorkshire accent was in itself a disqualification from high office. It tore him to pieces accordingly. Its coverage of David Davis’s leadership bid amounted to nothing more than playing over and over again the same footage of a lady falling asleep while he spoke. There have been many other such crimes, not least just after John Smith died.

To Auntie, it is a personal affront that 10 Downing Street is occupied by someone state-schooled and with a non-Oxbridge degree (more than one, in fact), whose Scottishness is decidedly not of the David Cameron variety. So she will stop at nothing to put things right. She will even install David Miliband in his place. Yes, David Miliband.

Don’t let it happen.