I Had To Have This Talk With You

Your beauty is beyond compare,

With flaming locks of auburn hair,

With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.

Whatever happened to Jolene? Most recently, she has married Kemi Badenoch. This is their charming wedding photograph, and while who knew that butch-femme was still a thing, congratulations to the happy couple on subverting the racial stereotype attached to it.

LinkedIn today wants me to add Giorgia Meloni as a friend or whatever they are called on there. The algorithmic fairies must see me as an asset to the cause of dissuading Badenoch from doing a deal with Nigel Farage. Farage’s last deal with the Conservatives gave a huge majority to Boris Johnson. Based on his time as Mayor of London, Johnson was always going to become the Prime Minister of Stonewall, of Net Zero, of the Boriswave, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, of the war in Ukraine, of the absolute conviction that the restrictions that he had imposed on everyone else did not apply to his own circle, and of the “legal but harmful” clause of his and Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill. If you had projected something else onto him, then that was your problem. For many of you, it still is. However, there has never been any suggestion that Farage laboured under any such delusion. He knew what he was doing, and he would know what he was doing again.

Farage modelled Reform UK on the Reform Party of Canada, and he introduced Preston Manning at last year’s Birmingham conference as his “inspiration” and “the Godfather of Reform”. While there is a lot wrong with Canada in general and with Mark Carney in particular, has Farage said anything about Donald Trump’s belligerence? Meanwhile, Carney’s British fan club should consider that he was making a stand for No Deal and for total sovereignty over trade agreements. Yet on one point, a confluence events has furnished an obvious compromise. Lake Ontario? Lake America? No, it should be Lake Dolly. Who could object to that? Far more intractable would be the dispute between the people who wanted their city to be known as “Dolly” and those who instead insisted on “Londondolly”. But one thing at a time.