Brooking Her No Further

Heather Brooke was on Radio Four's Off The Page (incidentally, the hour filled by this morning's In Our Time and A History Of The Word In One Hundred Objects was pure bliss), doing what she does best, demanding the abolition of everything that distinguishes Britain from America, this time including the monarchy, and being fawned over for it.

I know that her parents were from here and that she has held joint nationality, a concept which I struggle to understand, from birth. But she is in no sense culturally British, nor has she the slightest desire to be. On the contrary, she is a trainee Janet Daley, and like her should be told that if she dislikes this country so much, then she should go back to America.

It is not even as if the campaign that made Brooke's name ever came to anything. The whole business is best remembered for a moat and a duck house, for neither of which was a penny ever paid, but the first of which caused a valiantly anti-war MP spitefully to be denied a peerage even though he was a former Cabinet Minister retiring from the Commons. Effective parliamentarians such as Anthony Steen, a splendid campaigner against the trafficking of children, were hounded from public life. A soundly anti-war Labour MP felt compelled to resign merely for having been a dutiful father and, in the process, sparing a local authority a housing cost.

Charges were brought against precisely three MPs, all of them retiring anyway, and all of them from the party correctly expected to lose the then-forthcoming General Election; they have since been joined by a sitting MP, also from that party. None has been convicted, and it remains perfectly possible that no trial will ever take place. Hazel Blears was re-elected. Esther Rantzen, despite (or because of?) an outrageous campaign on her behalf by the BBC, lost her deposit.

So, now may we talk about politics, please?