Monday
While Theresa May is suffering from a full-blown delusional episode, insisting – despite all the evidence to the contrary – she’s going to remain prime minister for ever and ever, that she’s the only person who can possibly deliver Brexit and no one is going to take her alive, the rest of the Tory party is openly campaigning to replace her. In the Sunday Times, Dominic Raab did a sepia-tinted, Hello!-style photoshoot of him and his wife at home in the kitchen. Not to be outdone, the following day Jeremy Hunt appeared in the Times gambolling through a garden, hand in hand with his wife. And in the accompanying text he even managed to remember she was Chinese rather than Japanese. We need more of these sorts of interviews. When selecting a new Conservative leader, nothing is more important than finding out that the person is happily married with shiny chrome kitchen appliances. But in a time of national crisis, I thought the papers should have probed a lot deeper. I want to see pictures of their parents, grandparents and domestic staff. You can tell a lot about someone by the look of their gardener. I mentioned all this on Twitter and thousands of others felt the same way. In fact, many demanded even more. Some wanted pets, but most wanted ex-wives, ex-husbands, current girlfriends and boyfriends, former girlfriends and boyfriends, disastrous one-night stands and anyone who thinks there is a chance the MP might be their parent. That way, Boris Johnson would not be excluded.
Tuesday
For someone who likes to portray himself as the opposite of a career politician, despite having led two political parties – one of them several times – and served as an MEP for the past 20 years, Nigel Farage now runs the Brexit party as a tight ship with him in sole charge. More of a totalitarian state than a democracy. But he is undeniably successful and his party is polling at about 30% for the European elections. Thanks largely to the failure of the main parties to come up with a credible Brexit policy, all he needs to do is shout “betrayal” to scoop up huge numbers of disenchanted leavers who are willing to overlook both the fact he has no credible plan for his no-deal Brexit and his toxic past. I was talking about Farage with my friend Ianthe, the demon genealogist, who managed to track me back to William the Conqueror, and she decided to get to work on Nigel. Who turns out to be as European as they come. Within a matter of hours, she had managed to discover Farage’s great-great-grandfather Nikolaus Schrod married a Bina Göring, who was born just outside Frankfurt in about 1837. The spelling of Göring is the same as that of Hermann Göring, the leading Nazi and commander of the Luftwaffe during the second world war, who was born about 80 miles away in Rosenheim some 55 years later. Ianthe has not yet been able to establish if the two are related, but she’s working on it and has requested documentation from Germany. It could go some way to explaining why Farage was so happy to be photographed in front of racist posters during the referendum campaign.
Wednesday
I may need to rethink my whole identity after Spurs’ breathtaking comeback from 3-0 down against Ajax in Amsterdam to reach the Champions League final. The whole point of Tottenham is that they don’t win those types of games. And they certainly don’t do so twice in a row having knocked out one of the tournament favourites, Manchester City, in the previous round in a similarly nail-biting finish. The purpose of Spurs is to win the odd game to give you the torment of hope, but to let you down on the big occasions. It’s part of the psyche that unites the fans. Last Saturday’s game against Bournemouth was a case in point. Needing a win to ensure Champions League qualification, we started well but failed to score. Then we got two men sent off (one within two minutes of coming on as substitute) and held on heroically with nine men only to lose in the 91st minute. The complete Spurs performance. I had to sell my tickets for the semi-final – needless to say the big anticipated Brexit showdown that led me to think I couldn’t take two days off never materialised – and watched alone at home. At half-time I felt quite relaxed. We were going out with a half-arsed display, just as I had expected, and all was well with the world. Then came the second half and my stress levels went through the roof. My wife even joined me for the last 15 minutes, declaring the game to be moderately exciting. The winner came just at the right time in the 96th minute. Any earlier and we might have found a way to concede. So on to the next biggest game in the history of the club, which – sod’s law again – I can’t go to as I had never dreamed we might reach the final and had already accepted an invitation to do three events at the Hay festival. A personal tragedy which means it’s written in the stars that we are nailed on to win. Sorry, Liverpool.
Thursday
My heart went out to Nicholas Witchell when he had a complete brain freeze during the BBC’s News at Ten. Doing live pieces to camera must be nerve-racking at the best of times and especially so for royal correspondents who are expected to sound knowledgeable for minutes or sometimes hours on end when there is literally nothing to say. My idea of a nightmare job, where the only possible upside is that you don’t look like a complete twat in front of an audience of millions who already have exactly the same, limited information as you. Usually Witchell is an old pro, but this time even he couldn’t find a new take on the fact that he didn’t have a clue what was going on – other than that Meghan had had a baby, the boy didn’t yet have a name, he was a long-shot seventh in line to the throne and Harry was happy – and twice dried up before handing back to the studio. After two more days of intense speculation about possible names – thankfully John was never an option as the last King John had rather screwed things up – the royal couple announced the baby was to be called Archie. A name no one had predicted over the previous 48 hours. Then the royal correspondents had to fill dead airtime with why the royal couple had chosen the name and what it signified, when the answer was staring them in the face all along. Meghan and Harry happened to quite like it. Throughout all this there was still one person in the country, the now ex-BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Danny Baker, who didn’t know either that Meghan had had a baby and that her mother is black. At least that was the explanation he used for his racist tweet of a chimp. A simple apology would have been a lot more dignified.
Friday
There had been a small upside to our daughter getting married and going to live and work in Minneapolis, and our son leaving university, moving in with his girlfriend and picking up a number of freelance jobs along with an Arts Council grant. For the last six months or so, my wife and I have noticed we are considerably better off as we are no longer being regularly tapped up for cash. But what the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Even without the help of our children, we find new ways of separating ourselves from our money. If there is a way of doing something that sounds cheap but ends up costing top dollar, then we unerringly find it. The latest example is the boiler, which we replaced at considerable expense about four years ago, when the plumber came round to declare the previous plumber had done a bodge job and the old boiler was now extinct. This week the newish boiler failed so, having obviously forgotten who had installed it, I got in a different plumber. Only to be told that the previous plumber had done such a bad job – the flue was a death trap and was sucking carbon monoxide into the boiler, the electrics were a fire hazard and that the right filters had never been fitted – that the boiler was already knackered and would not be covered by the 10-year guarantee as it had not been properly fitted. So several grand later we have another new boiler. I reckon I will be able to die happy when I finally come across a plumber who comes round and says: “Your last plumber has done a brilliant job.”
Digested week, digested: The second greatest football comeback followed a day later by the greatest ever football comeback.
