Monday
It’s the same every New Year’s Eve. That momentary surge of disappointment that I’ve yet again been overlooked in the honours list. Not even a measly MBE to mark the futility of my existence. Given how little some others who have been recognised with a bauble have achieved, it doesn’t seem too much to ask. Take John Redwood, who has just been knighted. Nobody quite seems to know why. Not even Redwood. He was the Welsh secretary for a couple of years between 1993 and 1995, and a knighthood to mark the 25th anniversary of him miming badly to the Welsh national anthem seems a little far-fetched.
Some believed his elevation to Sir John was a bribe to get the outspoken Eurosceptic to vote for Theresa May’s Brexit deal, but Redwood has subsequently insisted he hasn’t been bought and will vote against the deal regardless. Which leaves only one possible reason for Redwood’s preferment: that he has been the backbench Conservative MP for Wokingham, one of the safest of safe seats, for more than 30 years. In other words, he has become a knight simply because he has managed both to stay alive and avoid being implicated in any sex or financial scandals. It’s not the highest of bars for an honour that is meant to recognise an important contribution to public life. It also paves the way for Sir Chris Grayling and Sir Gavin Williamson at a later date. Imagine that.
Tuesday
I have a problem with going to the movies. Every time I go, no matter how good or how bad the film, I invariably fall asleep. There’s something about a comfortable seat and the lights going down that catches me out every time. It happened again today when we went to see Olivia Colman in The Favourite. I haven’t drunk alcohol for nearly 32 years so I can’t have been hungover from staying up to watch the fireworks on the TV the night before – I really live the dream – but after about 10 minutes I was getting nudged in the ribs by my wife and ticked off for snoring.
I must have managed to get the snoring under control because – after a short, losing battle to stay awake – I was left undisturbed as I dozed off again for my regulation half-hour. Having eventually regained consciousness, I was then left to try to work out who was who and what was going on, which always makes any movie rather more challenging than the director intended. Just as I reckoned I was about on top of the situation, I nodded off again and missed the ending. But I am assured by the three people I went with that it is a film well worth seeing, and certainly the bits I did see were great.
On the plus side, I did manage to stay awake throughout the whole of Sarah Phelps’ wonderful adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders on TV in the evening. Though I was disturbed to find I appeared to be in a minority of one for liking both John Malkovich’s and David Suchet’s portrayals of Poirot. According to Twitter, you were only allowed to like one or the other.
Wednesday
The prime minister may have been regretting her decision to give parliament two weeks off for Christmas at a time of constitutional and political crisis. If only because it’s given so many members of her cabinet the chance to prove not just how hopeless they really are but also how anxious they are to replace her.
Sajid Javid cut short his South African safari to personally deal with the “national emergency” of a few dozen refugees getting washed up on Kent beaches by talking tough on immigration to any passing TV camera. Long after his leadership bid has bitten the dust, Sajid will be getting grief from his family for ruining their holiday. Good.
Not to be outdone, Gavin Williamson, the fireplace salesman also known as the defence secretary, used the break to announce he would establish new military outposts in the far east. Because the empire worked out so well last time. He then hastily diverted some warships to the Channel to crack down on rubber dinghies and was last heard of planning a pointless raid on Dieppe.
For the pièce de résistance, we had Chris Grayling – who else? – awarding a ferry company that had no boats and seemed to specialise in pizza deliveries a £13m contract on the grounds that it was British. The stupidity bar has never been lower. Make no mistake, Javid, Williamson and Grayling will all be in the Lords soon.
Thursday
With parliament in recess, I was able to sneak off to a preview screening of James Graham’s excellent Channel 4 drama, Brexit: The Uncivil War. So much about the film was well-researched and spot-on (the look of horror on Boris Johnson’s face when the referendum result is declared was pitch perfect), but it is Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the Vote Leave architect Dominic Cummings that really took centre stage.
For most of the campaign, Cummings operated in the shadows, using Johnson and Michael Gove as figureheads for his £350m bus stunts, and he only showed his head above the parapet when he was summoned to explain his actions before the Treasury select committee. I was privileged to have a ringside seat. He began by picking a fight with the chair, Andrew Tyrie. Instead of taking his seat, Cummings strode across the room to eyeball Tyrie face to face, insisting that he had to be away by 4pm and that if proceedings overran then he would walk out. Thereafter, he appeared hellbent on proving descriptions of him as a political psychopath to be entirely accurate. It was the most memorable committee appearance since the ex-Mrs Murdoch assaulted a member for the public for throwing flour over Rupert. He refused to confirm anything, saying it was not up to Vote Leave to provide accurate information, and made a point of insulting each member of the committee in turn.
It was hard to know if he was an idiot savant or an idiot complete and by the end it was impossible to tell if Cummings actually believed in the objectives of the Vote Leave campaign or was merely fuelled by contempt and disdain for the political establishment. Two years and James Graham’s film later, I’m still none the wiser.
Friday
I can sense the beginnings of an old obsession being rekindled. As a 12-year-old boy I read everything I could get my hands on about Nasa’s Apollo programme and kept a detailed scrapbook of every lunar mission. I even persuaded my parents to allow me to stay up half the night watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first men to walk on the moon. The ambition, the adventure, the solitude and the sense of otherness – I’d never even been on an aeroplane – totally captivated me and I felt a huge sense of loss when the US pulled the plug on Apollo in 1972.
The Americans might have got a bit bored with seeing people landing on the moon and decided the money could be better spent elsewhere, but I was still up for plenty more. By the time exploration restarted with the shuttle and the International Space Station, I had rather lost interest and only followed the missions half-heartedly. I didn’t understand the science, and orbiting the Earth for months on end seemed rather too familiar. So much so that even Richard Branson felt like he could have a go.
But this week has felt like a game-changer. First we’ve had Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft taking photos of the snowman-shaped Ultima Thule 4bn miles away, and then the Chinese Chang’e 4 making the first landing on the far side of the moon. At a time when so much of the news is depressing and nationalistic, both missions feel like landmark steps into the unknown. My fingers are already twitching over a new scrapbook.
Digested week, digested: the roll-on, roll-off pizza delivery service.
