Monday
Another new year comes and goes without me getting a gong in the honours list. Not even a place on the board of the Office for Students for my troubles. It’s all very dispiriting. While most people were fixated on whether Nick Clegg did or did not deserve a knighthood and why Ringo Starr only got his two decades after Paul McCartney, my attention was drawn to the honours given to three of the six board members of the influential Conservative 1922 committee of backbench MPs. Graham Brady and Geoffrey Clifton-Brown were both knighted, while Cheryl Gillan was made a dame. When she first became the prime minister, Theresa May was clear that she wanted to put an end to David Cameron’s croneyism. By choosing to reward three of the people who are likely to play a key role in determining whether she remains leader of the Tory party in the coming year, she has not only demonstrated that her principles come second to self-interest but also just how weak she perceives herself to be.
Tuesday
At first glance, nothing really appears to make sense. Most people wouldn’t trust the 50-something-going-on-12-year-old Toby Young to feed their pets, let alone appoint him to a quango. Likewise, the prime minister trying to explain to the country that there isn’t an ongoing crisis in the NHS because the NHS has implemented a crisis plan is the sort of excuse not even the dimmest child would bother with, especially when the health secretary inadvertently admitted the following day that there was a crisis after all. Then we had the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, making himself scarce in Qatar, on the day he was bound to be questioned about the increase in rail fares. Not to mention, international the trade secretary Liam Fox’s enthusiasm for leaving the EU only to join another trading bloc on the other side of the world. But if you think laterally, everything begins to fall into place. The government has decided to give up running the country for the first week of the new year and has chosen to troll it instead.
Wednesday
There are good times and bad times to have a row. And 36,000 feet above ground on the flight deck of a passenger jet is probably a bad one. The Times of India reported that the pilot and co-pilot of a recent Jet Airways flight from London to Mumbai had such a bad row that they both stormed out the cockpit, leaving the plane to fly itself for a while. Not quite the level of service most of the 324 passengers on board would have been expecting. It makes some of my rows look tame in comparison. One of the worst my wife and I had took place about 20 years ago. It was in one of the many periods when my mental health was fragile and I woke my wife at 6am on Xmas morning to tell her that I thought I had mad cow disease. My wife took a while to get fully conscious before screaming: “Is there nothing you can’t fucking ruin?” For some reason, my reply: “That’s no way to talk to someone with a fatal illness”, only seemed to make things worse. Our Christmas never really recovered after that.
Thursday
One of the most telling revelations from Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, was that Donald Trump had never intended or expected to win the presidency. When he was told by his son on election night that he was on course to win, Wolff writes, Trump looked as if he had seen a ghost while Melania was in tears – not of joy. I was left with a similar impression on the morning after the EU referendum in June 2016, when I went to the Vote Leave headquarters to hear Boris Johnson and Michael Gove give their victory speeches. Boris appeared shell-shocked – even paler than usual – and for the first time in his political career was barely able to string a sentence together. It was as if the whole thing had been a game for him and he had never expected to be left in charge of dealing with the consequences. If anything, Gove was in an even worse state. Far from being a scene of celebration, the Vote Leave HQ felt like a morgue.
Friday
Nigel Farage, who recently declared himself to be skint despite earning £103K as an MEP, living in a £4m house and standing to collect a £73K EU pension, is concerned that Michel Barnier is spending far too much of his time hanging out with British remoaners. Presumably, he doesn’t count the weeks, going on months, that the EU’s chief negotiator has had to sit face to face with David Davis. So the former Ukip leader has arranged his own meeting with Barnier for next Monday and has sent out an appeal for members of the public to submit three questions they would like asked. Pleasingly, this has all rather backfired, with dozens of people writing in with questions ranging from “Has Barnier been surprised at how poor the UK negotiators have been?” to Farage’s poor attendance rate in Brussels. My own question would be rather more existential. Why is Barnier wasting an hour of his time on someone who is now best known as a pub bore and part-time radio presenter?
Digested week digested: Toby or not Toby
Picture of the week
