Monday
After the crossword, the first thing my father would turn to in the paper was the death announcements. It must have been a legacy from the war when that was one of the more reliable ways of finding out if someone you knew had been killed. It’s a habit he passed on to me, and for as long as I can remember I’ve ploughed my way through the demise of people I’ve never heard of. Mostly to be reassured they were a lot older than me, something that gets trickier by the day, and died of an illness for which I have no symptoms. I can’t stand those coy notices that don’t give the deceased’s age or cause of death. My family are under instructions to give as many details as possible. “John died of an extremely rare form of cancer, something he never stopped complaining about to the very end.”
Today was rather more disconcerting though, because every media outlet broadcast the deaths of two people – the actor Luke Perry and musician Keith Flint – who were clearly much loved and well known by everyone except me. I had no idea who either man was. The closest I could get was vaguely remembering having once heard of a band called The Prodigy. If not the music. When cultural icons who are too young to have entered my consciousness start dying then it’s definitely time to start worrying. It’s not being left out of the conversation that I care about. It’s the sense that someone is pulling up the ladder behind me.
Tuesday
Imagine having to open a three-hour Commons debate for which the subject is essentially: “Why are you so useless?” That was how Chris Grayling spent his afternoon. In a rare success for the transport secretary, the motion was passed unanimously. Not even Grayling abstained. I’ve long thought that the only reason Failing Grayling is still in a job is because he makes everyone else around him look a little less rubbish. A theory that appears to be backed up by the latest net satisfaction ratings of the cabinet by party members published by ConservativeHome.
Grayling comes out comfortably ahead in last place with a rating of -60. Other placings are more surprising. Theresa May is only fourth bottom. Surely Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd can’t be doing a worse job than the prime minister. And the only explanation for Andrea Leadsom topping the poll with +54 can be that she hasn’t actually done anything. Another outlier is that, despite declaring war on China, paintballing Spanish trawlers and sending in the tanks to deal with knife crime, Gavin Williamson only has a rating of -4.
But the biggest surprise is that Liam Fox has a rating of +22. Type “disgraced former” into Google and the first result you get is Fox in his former role as defence secretary. A minister who has achieved almost nothing during his time in office. His latest appearance before a Commons select committee was a car crash. Firstly, he tried to claim that spending £100,000 on a podcast heard by 8,000 people was good value because some of them might have been leading exporters. He then insisted that even if he knew which tariffs were due to be set in the event of a no-deal Brexit, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell anyone because business needed the uncertainty, before committing the entire imagined Brexit dividend on subsidies for farmers. Tory party members must be a forgiving lot.
Wednesday
A packed reception at Speaker’s House – one of the finest private residences in London, so you can see why John Bercow is so reluctant to move on – for the launch of Women of Westminster, a very readable history of the 491 women elected to parliament in the past 100 years written by the Labour MP Rachel Reeves.
The first speech was by Theresa May, who had hotfooted it from a prime minister’s questions in which she had made the unusual claim that the rise in knife crime was the result of increased affluence under a Conservative government. During her research for the book, Reeves had interviewed the prime minister and May paid tribute to her, saying journalists could take lessons from her. All the hacks present were amazed the prime minister had actually said something interesting enough to go in the book. It must have been a first. Still, at least she knows her limitations and can keep things brief when required.
The launch was just beginning to thin out after May and Harriet Harman had spoken and the guests were all enjoying themselves when the Speaker spotted that the microphone was still switched on. A temptation he is never able to resist. Bercow called for order and delivered an impromptu speech that would have been fine at three minutes but at 15 left most of his audience scrambling for the exits. A man hijacking an event to celebrate women isn’t the best of looks. “He’d be perfect on Just a Minute,” one MP said to me. “No deviation or hesitation … ” What about the repetition? I replied. “Ah yes,” he said. “I’d forgotten that bit.”
Thursday
A card arrives from America inviting us to our daughter’s wedding in May. As regular readers will know, Anna has already been married to Robert twice. The first wedding, for which my wife and I got about 10 days notice, took place in the kitchen of her husband’s parents in Minneapolis. It was a very small affair - so much so that at the time it was scheduled to start my wife and I were the only people present as everyone else, the bride and groom included, was still asleep – but very moving. I cried a lot.
The second wedding was a rather bigger do, a ceremony conducted by our son under a wooden pergola he and his friends had constructed in our back garden, followed by a party in a south London bar. I cried a lot at that one too. The third wedding is a return to Minneapolis for all those who for some reason weren’t able to make it to the first two. After some thought, my wife and I have decided not to go to this one. Partly because she and Robert are coming to the UK in June, but mainly because we’re concerned that if we do go then it will only encourage her to have a fourth wedding.
When Anna first told us she was getting married, she assured us that she wanted her wedding to be extremely low key. God knows what would have happened if she had made a fuss. I doubt even the Kardashians have dared to get married to the same person three times in a year. Talking of which, I was surprised to see that Forbes Magazine has named Kylie Jenner as the youngest ever self-made billionaire. “Self-made” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and reminds me of the old joke. How do you make a small fortune? Start off with a large fortune. AKA The Donald trump playbook.
Friday
I’m beginning to wonder if I might not have been a little unfair in labelling Chris Grayling as the most hopeless person in the cabinet, as this week many of his colleagues have appeared keen to wrestle the title from his grasp. Liam Fox simply by being Liam Fox and Andrea Leadsom by declaring that all British Muslims aren’t really British and fall under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Office.
After a promising start in which she announced that pensioners who had been disabled for most of their life would not now be expected to have made a miracle cure, we also had Amber Rudd proving her natural habitat was the 1970s by referring to Diane Abbott as a coloured woman. Then we had Karen Bradley. Not content with parading her ignorance that Protestants tended to vote for unionist parties and Catholics for republican parties, the Northern Ireland secretary insisted that the killings committed by the security forces were not crimes. That should go down well in Ireland. “I don’t believe in what I said,” Bradley explained later. Just as well, as no one believes in her either.
Still the idiocy bar gets lower. On the Today programme, Jeremy Hunt pronounced that history would judge the EU if it did not break its red lines because the UK was unwilling to break its own. To round off the week, the prime minister went off to Grimsby to tell a small troop of hacks that there are two sides involved in the EU negotiations. With just three weeks to go till 29 March, she has finally noticed. It feels like the end of days. Thank God there’s nothing serious going on like rising knife crime, increased homelessness, an NHS near breaking point and schools in Birmingham forced to close for half a day a week. Otherwise we’d be really screwed.
Digested week, digested: 21 days and counting
