Monday
General elections are increasingly stage-managed affairs with party leaders seldom allowed out in public with anyone other than their most loyal party activists. So thank God for Ukip, which can be relied on to rustle up events at which almost everything is guaranteed not to go to plan.
If the launch of its integration agenda at a London hotel hadn’t gone badly enough, with even the rightwing press wondering if Ukip hadn’t gone a bit far on the racist front – a reporter from the Daily Telegraph had asked if beekeepers would be affected by the burqa ban – it was nothing to what happened next when the party’s leader, Paul Nuttall, barricaded himself in a room after refusing to answer questions about whether he would be a candidate in the election. With no one volunteering their services as a hostage negotiator, he remained holed up for 20 minutes before making a bid for freedom, closely pursued by dozens of reporters and several film crews. Days like this make the election bearable.
Tuesday
Many of those MPs who are standing down at the election can safely be filed away under “those who won’t be missed”, but one who will be is the Conservative Andrew Tyrie. Under his chairmanship, the Treasury select committee became guaranteed box office success as George Osborne, Philip Hammond and Mark Carney were given a hard time. My favourite committee session, though, was during the EU referendum campaign when Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave’s campaign manager, was quizzed on its financial data.
“I don’t think it’s Vote Leave’s job to provide figures,” Cummings had announced triumphantly to the committee. “But Vote Leave quotes numerous figures on its website,” replied Tyrie. “most of them misleading or inaccurate. You make the same mistake as Boris Johnson. You don’t read carefully enough. Wouldn’t it have been useful to have done some of the maths?”
“It’s just a matter of a few decimal points,” Cummings replied. Tyrie finished him off with a single look. It’s rumoured Tyrie might be off to a top job at the Bank of England, so it’s entirely possible he will be back in Westminster before long to appear before his former committee. My ticket is already booked.
Wednesday
A report from the Royal Horticultural Society suggests global warming is carving a north-south divide across Britain, with the south becoming a semi-tropical desert. The RHS could have been writing about my own garden. My wife and I found it impossible to agree on what kind of garden we wanted, so to resolve the situation we split it in two.
My wife got the back garden, which she filled with a lawn, cottage flowers and shrubs. I got the south-facing front garden, which I planted with bananas, ferns, palms and other exotics that can survive a British winter providing they are kept warm. Every November I spend a day wrapping up plants for the winter and this weekend, when the fleeces come off, will be one of the highlights of the year. My wife thinks that my garden is yet another symptom of my mental illness, but I am ridiculously proud of it. A few years ago I met someone on the pavement by the house who said he had just come up on the bus from Croydon to take a picture of it.
Thursday
United Airlines could hardly have picked a worse animal to kill than a giant bunny. A dead lion or giraffe and no one would have batted an eyelid, but the death of Simon, who was predicted to grow longer than 130cm (4ft 4in) and become the world’s largest rabbit, is almost as bad PR as dragging a passenger off a flight. But what will happen to Simon’s earthly remains?
When our cat died, we thought it was important for our children to have some sort of ceremony to mark her demise, so we forked out £70 to have her cremated so we could bury her in the garden. By the time we got the ashes back, both of the kids had lost interest in the cat so we never got round to the funeral. For the past 12 years, what’s left of the cat has been on top of the fridge. With the accumulated dust, she’s put on weight.
Friday
I regret that I never ran a marathon. Not that I would have wanted to do it like the policeman who is completing the London Marathon on Friday after doing the whole thing on his hands and feet in support of the Gorilla Organisation. During my 30s and 40s, I ran obsessively. I found it a great way of self-medicating with endorphins, but whenever I tried to push myself to run further my right knee would give up on me.
Now it’s too late. After eight minor operations I was told I needed a knee replacement, though not by the surgeon who had performed many of the earlier ops. It turned out that he had died after being struck off for performing unnecessary surgery under the influence of drugs. You live and learn.
Digested week digested: We need strong and stable mugwumps
