Comical stuff among those who know what they did, but who are of course untroubled by it, since that is the nature of their condition as psychopaths.
For one thing, apparently they still talk about the fact that, to pay my deposit of five hundred pounds for last year's General Election, I simply produced it in cash from my breast pocket. The association of my name with that particular sum of money is fixed in their minds. Like my suits, they cannot account for how I had come by it. That's right. They can't.
But more to the point, they think that, being "older, better read and more articulate than anyone else there including the staff," I am going to be "collecting voters for next time". And not only voters, but activists. Seriously. They really do think this. They are quite beside themselves. Notice that they take it as a given that I shall be eligible in 2024, or even in 2021, and fortified by my status as a martyr. Perhaps, after all, they are indeed beginning to wonder what they have done?
Please allow me to put their minds at rest. I am simply too ill ever to contest another election to anything; in normal times, I would be in hospital right now. My concern is with influencing the process. From yesterday's announcement by Boris Johnson of what was essentially Jeremy Corbyn's policy on broadband, to today's acceptance by Robert Buckland that Richard Burgon had been right all along about the privatisation of the Probation Service, it is clear that the minds at the top are open. The Labour frontbench is a problem, but who cares?
My new think tank, which will be a registered educational charity, is coming along, as is the editorially independent news magazine by which that charity will partially fund itself by co-owning. Those two, and the publication in the United States of my next collection of essays, also for charity and including a very long piece on the theology of John Milton, could all be done in about 10 weeks at about 30 hours per week, if my health held up by its own low standards. At worst, they would take about 30 hours at about 10 hours per week. But we shall see.
So no more raw politics for me. If I have any remaining ambition in that direction, then it is twofold. To ensure that no constituency containing Lanchester, or bearing the name of North West Durham, ever again returned a Labour MP. And to ensure that the Labour Party first lost, and then never regained, any share in the control of Durham County Council.
For either of those, I would be prepared to die in the last ditch. But not by killing myself with an election campaign.
For one thing, apparently they still talk about the fact that, to pay my deposit of five hundred pounds for last year's General Election, I simply produced it in cash from my breast pocket. The association of my name with that particular sum of money is fixed in their minds. Like my suits, they cannot account for how I had come by it. That's right. They can't.
But more to the point, they think that, being "older, better read and more articulate than anyone else there including the staff," I am going to be "collecting voters for next time". And not only voters, but activists. Seriously. They really do think this. They are quite beside themselves. Notice that they take it as a given that I shall be eligible in 2024, or even in 2021, and fortified by my status as a martyr. Perhaps, after all, they are indeed beginning to wonder what they have done?
Please allow me to put their minds at rest. I am simply too ill ever to contest another election to anything; in normal times, I would be in hospital right now. My concern is with influencing the process. From yesterday's announcement by Boris Johnson of what was essentially Jeremy Corbyn's policy on broadband, to today's acceptance by Robert Buckland that Richard Burgon had been right all along about the privatisation of the Probation Service, it is clear that the minds at the top are open. The Labour frontbench is a problem, but who cares?
My new think tank, which will be a registered educational charity, is coming along, as is the editorially independent news magazine by which that charity will partially fund itself by co-owning. Those two, and the publication in the United States of my next collection of essays, also for charity and including a very long piece on the theology of John Milton, could all be done in about 10 weeks at about 30 hours per week, if my health held up by its own low standards. At worst, they would take about 30 hours at about 10 hours per week. But we shall see.
So no more raw politics for me. If I have any remaining ambition in that direction, then it is twofold. To ensure that no constituency containing Lanchester, or bearing the name of North West Durham, ever again returned a Labour MP. And to ensure that the Labour Party first lost, and then never regained, any share in the control of Durham County Council.
For either of those, I would be prepared to die in the last ditch. But not by killing myself with an election campaign.
The bad lads with hearts of gold will love you, the teacher they wish they'd had. The bad lads with hearts of toxic waste are wondering what they've done, frightened you're already using all this to plot a political comeback. Cut you down and you become more powerful than they can possibly imagine. But you're not Obi-Wan, you're Yoda, guru of the Rebel Alliance. The bad lads will love you and want to be your Jedi Knights.
ReplyDeleteI have form for this one. Considering that I am still only 42, I have a remarkably long history of collecting protégés. I cannot deny that I enjoy it, the intellectual admiration of clever younger men. Saint John Henry Newman also revelled in that, so I could not be in better company.
DeleteNot that those clever younger men have always been well-served by an education system that had been designed, either without them in mind, or actively in order to keep them down. There is nothing more horrific to a certain sort than the intellectual relationships between older and younger men, relationships that are entirely beyond that kind's control and which are in fact the basis of civilisation itself. And some of us just happen to have the gift for them.