Monday, 13 November 2023

Tents and Houses

Let's have a whip round to buy Suella Braverman a tent.

Rather more seriously, the Prime Minister of the war in Libya is now Foreign Secretary. Everyone will be telling David Cameron how nice it must be to able to visit all of those exotic places. As Alan Clark confided to his diary when he was a Trade Minister, "It would only have been that nice if one could not have afforded it anyway."

Such are both Saint Helena and Lowland Scotland that I must have an English ancestor somewhere along the line, but I can say no more than that. Yet one of Jeremy Corbyn's keenest supporters once told me that, "When I'm Prime Minister, I want you as Foreign Secretary, because you're the international idea of an Englishman." "You would have to find me a seat," I played along. In deadly earnest, the reply came back that, "There are two Houses of Parliament."

4 comments:

  1. I rather like the idea of you as a peer. The House does have a tradition of genius combined with dottiness.

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    1. It has been vaguely suggested at least three times since I cannot have been much more than 30, but this particular interlocutor was absolutely serious. The Early Corbyn Years were days to remember and nights to forget.

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  2. Yet another MP for North West Durham in the Cabinet.

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    1. Since the creation of this seat in its present form in 1987, we have had Hilary Armstrong in the Cabinet, Pat Glass in the Shadow Cabinet, Laura Pidcock in the Shadow Cabinet, and now Richard, the constituency's last MP, in the Cabinet. That is a remarkable run.

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