Monday
In the normal course of events, the prime minister would come to the House of Commons on the Monday following an EU summit to update MPs on progress. This week Theresa May took the unusual step of giving a pre-summit statement to tell everyone she had nothing to say, that no progress had been made to resolving the Northern Ireland backstop, and that she did not expect to make any progress any time soon. It was politics at its most meta: an occasion to make up for the absence of occasion. Sometimes when you haven’t got anything to say, it’s best to say nothing. My friend John Sutherland has just written a book, The Good Brexiteer’s Guide to English Lit, that goes some way to explaining why Brexit can make fools of the cleverest people – as well as making fools of fools. He argues that Brexit is essentially hollow: an idea without political apparatus, without sustaining history and without field-tested ideology. Rather, it was an atavistic set of competing interests. Some wanted to get rid of immigrants; some wanted to restore British sovereignty; some just wanted to give the political elites a kicking. A diehard remainer, Sutherland has performed the ultimate sacrifice. He has given the Brexiters something they were never able to give themselves: a cultural and literary hinterland around which they can unite, and against which Brexit can be better understood.
Tuesday
I spent much of my early life feeling like I didn’t really fit in anywhere– not at school, nor at home in the Wiltshire village where my parents lived. No one seemed to really want to be friends with an awkward vicar’s son: not surprising, really, as I showed no signs of even wanting to be friends with myself. The vicarage managed to somehow simultaneously feel like both a safe place and a prison. One thing that kept me vaguely sane was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I was 13 when it was first broadcast and it was the novelty of a late-night comedy show – BBC2 used to close down at 10pm in the early days – rather than anything else that drew me to it. But almost from the first minute, I was hooked. Here was a programme that spoke to me, that had my sense of humour, that made me laugh about things I didn’t even know were funny and made me feel more human. So it was a total treat to travel up to Manchester to interview Eric Idle at a live event to promote his new autobiography. Meeting your heroes can be a mixed blessing, but Eric was charm itself. Friendly, chatty, he wowed the audience with stories of the Pythons and beyond, and I had to pinch myself that I had the best seat in the house for his performance of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Which, incidentally, is now the most requested song at funerals.
Wednesday
The crack team of ex-police and spooks who use tradecraft and technology to track down contestants on the Channel 4 TV show, Celebrity Hunted, may have missed a trick. It now turns out that Johnny “Blaaady Good Bloke” Mercer, the Tory MP who recently admitted he wouldn’t vote Tory if he wasn’t a Tory MP, was given a three-line whip to vote for the government’s Brexit trade bill while he was meant to be on the run. Yet despite the hunters knowing he was in Westminster for one of the most important votes of the current parliament, they still somehow ended up raiding an empty car outside a pub in Berkshire. In the meantime, the Sky News presenter Kay Burley, Mercer’s partner on the run, holed up in a neighbour’s house next to her holiday home in the Cotswolds. Hiding in plain sight. Incidentally, if Mercer had chosen to remain in the Commons, he could have won the competition at a canter as the hunters would not be allowed access to the parliamentary estate.
Thursday
A welcome innovation was road-tested at Politico’s Women Rule event, when audience members were invited to rate the speakers’ contributions out of five, with one being unsatisfactory and five being excellent. This caused a certain amount of confusion for many of those attending, as one of the contributions they were being required to mark came from Liz Truss, the chief secretary to the Treasury. With Truss, you’re never too sure whether you’re watching a tragedy or a farce, as her self-image as the independent outsider who is never afraid to speak her mind is totally at odds with the reality of her being a former accountant who joined the Tory party and astonished everyone – including herself – by being asked to join the cabinet. Sure enough, Truss’s speech was the usual mix of contradictory high comedy. Having begun by admitting that single mothers had been the worst hit by the government’s austerity measures, she quickly breezed on to say that women had never had it so good because most flats on Airbnb were owned by women. As a general rule, politics would probably be much improved by audience ratings, though the scoring requires a little more nuance of separate categories for presentation, content and stupidity.
Friday
One of my many regrets is that I am unable to play a musical instrument. My mother, who was a very good pianist, forced me to learn the piano from the age of seven up until she – and my music teacher – gave up in despair when I was 12. By then I had somehow reached grade three, but though I was sometimes able to more or less play the right notes in the required order, I did so without any hint of musicianship and I killed every piece stone dead. I live in envy and admiration of those, like my sister, who can produce sounds from their instrument that transcend the notes on the stave. I also had a brief period in my teens when I attempted to learn the guitar in the hope of unleashing my inner rock god, but my fingers were too clumsy, I had little sense of rhythm and I only ever mastered three chords. Back then in the early 70s, the guitar – especially the electric guitar – was dominated by men, but a new survey by Fender has found that 50% of new guitars are bought by women. At last the guitar has become an equal opportunities instrument. Others, though, according to my utterly unscientific survey of the orchestras I have heard over the past 40 years, have a way to go. Obviously there are exceptions, but nearly always the double bass, the brass and the percussion sections seem to be almost exclusively men. As many orchestras now have blind auditions so that no one knows the sex of the person playing, there must be something more than just sexism at work. But I have no idea what.
Digested week digested: the extension that both is and isn’t an extension.
