Monday
There was something endearingly old school about the Pentonville jailbreak that brought to mind the robber Alfie Hinds, who achieved notoriety in the 1950s by escaping from three high security prisons. Those of us who have watched too many episodes of America’s Toughest Jails have grown used to the idea of the modern prison as a hi-tech fortress where inmates go to rot until they die. Not so Pentonville, where two prisoners managed to recreate their own version of the Shawshank Redemption by sawing through their bars and escaping to the street via a series of sheets that had been knotted together. The men’s absence went unnoticed for many hours because they had placed mannequins in their beds to make it look as if they were still asleep. Quite where the prisoners got their files and mannequins from has not yet been made public. The most likely guess is that the files were hidden inside a cake brought in by a visitor and that the mannequins were borrowed from the fashion design rehabilitation course.
Tuesday
Spare a thought for Andrew Lloyd Webber who has been labouring under the impression that the reason he was made a Tory peer in 1996 was because John Major really enjoyed his musicals. Lloyd Webber has now declared his outrage at being expected to turn up in person from time to time to cast a vote in favour of the Conservatives and has said he is minded to become a cross-bencher so that he can hang on to his peerage and do nothing in return. In his first 18 years as a peer, Lloyd Webber voted a debilitating 30 times. Since 2015, he has voted a further four times, three of them on the same day, when he was asked to fly back from New York in a failed attempt to prevent the government’s tax credit cut bill being sent back to the Commons. I remember thinking the noble lord looked especially stony-faced on that day and now I know why: he was completely exhausted from being counted. Imagine the cheek of it: someone giving you a peerage and expecting something in return.
Wednesday
Just because Jo Moore got sacked for sending around an email on 9/11 saying it was a good day to bury bad news, it doesn’t mean that government departments and other agencies don’t still think it’s a legitimate tactic. So here’s just four of the stories that didn’t get the attention they would otherwise have done, had the British media not had their eyes on the US presidential election. First, the publication of the Henriques report into significant failings by the Metropolitan police into the VIP child sex abuse scandal got considerably less attention than it otherwise would. Then there was the announcement of further delays on the electrification of the Great Western railway line: four sections of the programme which is already years behind schedule and well over budget have now been indefinitely deferred. Next there was the extra £438m the Ministry of Defence has had to request from the Treasury after a publishing error in a departmental document. Finally it was revealed that of the 700 leads the government said it was following up on from the leaked Panama papers in April, only 22 people are being investigated. So much for cracking down on the tax dodgers.
Thursday
Twenty-one years ago today my son was being born in the same hospital, St George’s in south-west London, that last week took care of my kidney stones. Like his sister before him, he spent the first few hours of his life in intensive care after a difficult birth so I have never taken his survival for granted. I would like to have been able to say that the experience made me value every day I have had with my children even more, but I’m disappointed to admit that it just made me even more anxious and neurotic than I already was. While some fathers have grand thoughts about shaping the sort of world their children would go on to grow up in, my own were invariably more along the lines of “I really hope I don’t screw this parenting business up because I’m not at all sure if I know what the hell I’m doing”. I still don’t but somehow the baby has grown up to be a charming, self-confident man who now needs me far less than I need him. It’s probably much healthier for both of us that way round.
Friday
When I was listening to Anne-Sophie Mutter play the Beethoven violin concerto earlier in the week, it occurred to me that if anyone wanted to take out a huge swath of the liberal metropolitan elite the Royal Festival Hall would be a good place to start. I’d bet you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Brexit-supporting Trump admirers on London’s South Bank. As a fully paid-up member of the liberal metropolitan elite, I am beginning to feel more and more under threat, as for the life of me I cannot understand why white working-class voters should believe that an orange billionaire had their back. But there’s also another thing I don’t quite get about Donald Trump’s US election victory: how is it that so many of the right-wing press have been triumphalist about the political establishment getting a good kicking while openly joking about Trump being bonkers? Fair enough to hate the establishment but a narcissistic sociopath isn’t the answer to anything.
Digested week digested: If it be your will
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