Monday
I’ve long since grown used to being sidelined during conversations about Game of Thrones – me and programmes or films with dragons have never seen eye to eye – but I have faithfully watched Line of Duty ever since the beginning and loved every minute.
I can’t for the life of me remember all the plot twists from previous series and could only give a rough guesstimate of the body count inside the police. But now the penultimate episode of series five has been broadcast and we have just 84 minutes left to discover who is the bent copper mastermind, codenamed H.
For a while, it seemed as if the sole recruitment criterion for the police was having a surname beginning with H, but now that Hilton, Huntley and Hargreaves (and possibly others whom I have forgotten) have croaked, the last one standing and the man firmly in the frame is Supt “Come Along Now Fella” Hastings, the head of AC-12. Only it can’t possibly be him.
For one thing, only a congenital idiot would give themselves a codename that was the first letter of their surname. For another, Hastings would have to be a piss-poor Mr Big of the OCG (keep up) to have made so little cash he was living in a Premier Inn with a broken toilet. Plus Line of Duty likes to keep you guessing.
So for a long shot, my money is on the head of AC-3, whose most noticeable quality so far is to be dull. But a far better bet is either Kate Fleming or Steve Arnott (who might have changed his name from Harnott), purely on the grounds of improbability. There again, perhaps we still won’t know and we’ll still be having this conversation next year in series six.
Tuesday
I’m now into my second week of my Fitbit and the relationship is not altogether a happy one. Don’t get me wrong: I’m thoroughly addicted to monitoring my daily stats and have already accumulated far more useless data about myself than I could possibly need.
The problem is more that I have started to suspect my Fitbit is actually trying to kill me. Not so much while I am working, when it sends me irritating reminders to move – it clearly doesn’t understand the nature of deadlines – or counts how many flights of stairs I have climbed. The trouble comes when I go to the gym, because the Fitbit’s sole raison d’etre is to urge me on to ever greater acts of physical stupidity.
Every 15 minutes or so, it sends me a message congratulating me on something or other and encouraging me to carry on to the next level. No matter how hard I exercise it never seems to be entirely satisfied. Just to check if it had my best interests at heart, I recently did 90 minutes on the cross trainer at level 15 and the Fitbit still wasn’t remotely impressed. I was a total mess but it would have been happy to see me carry on until I collapsed.
It’s also extremely emotionally withholding with its stats. After what I thought was a mega effort, it reported that I had a VO2 max level of 36 and the fitness levels of an average 59-year-old sedentary man. Hell, I haven’t been going to the gym obsessively four or five times a week for the last 30 years just to be told I’m three years better off than if I had done nothing.
The next day I went back to the gym and made a point of doing an hour at level 20. The Fitbit just shrugged and said: “Your VO2 max still 36, lardo.” Next time …
Wednesday
It was over a week ago that I formally identified Gavin Williamson as the man behind the Huawei leak from the National Security Council in a political sketch in this paper.
My reasoning was quite straightforward. There were five cabinet ministers present at the NSC who were known not to share Theresa May’s enthusiasm for sharing the UK’s secrets with the Chinese via a 5G network, and of them only Gavin was stupid enough to imagine he could brief the story to a journalist without getting found out. Today the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, reached the same conclusion and now Private Pike joins a distinguished list of disgraced former defence secretaries that includes Liam Fox and Michael Fallon.
After being sacked, Gavin first wrote an “I done nuffink” letter to Theresa May – his signature could be a dead ringer for Adrian Mole’s – then gave an in-depth interview to the Telegraph in which he said he had never leaked anything to the Telegraph and then swore on his children’s lives that he was innocent. Perhaps he doesn’t love them very much.
But Williamson’s loss has been others’ gain. Rory Stewart has been got out of his promise to resign as prisons minister if conditions didn’t improve within a year – they haven’t – by getting promoted to international development secretary, a job he should do well.
The biggest beneficiary though was Chris Grayling, whose most recent catastrophe was completely overshadowed and largely ignored by the media. In a nearly empty Commons chamber, Failing Grayling’s explanation for why he had wasted another £40m on ferry services that weren’t needed was that he could easily have wasted even more money. So far Chris has cost the country £3bn during his time in office. Gavin must be mortified not to have the confidence of the prime minister, when someone so transparently useless as Failing Grayling still does.
Thursday
Tuesday was officially the biggest night in Spurs’ history for the best part of 60 years so I should have been excited by the Champions League semi-final against Ajax. Instead I only felt anxiety that turned to dread the closer it got to kick-off.
My friends who were going to the game first expressed bewilderment, and then irritation, that I was actually more focused on Saturday’s Premier League game against Bournemouth. My ability to ruin what should be big occasions for myself never ceases to amaze me. Though I guess that’s one of the things that qualifies me to be a Spurs fan, as the team played as if it was feeling much the same as me.
Our star players were either injured, suspended or so invisible they were missing in action, and the rest struggled to cope with a younger, more talented and less fatigued Ajax side. Under the circumstances, a 1-0 defeat was a reasonable result as it could have been so much worse. So I was right to be more more focused on the Bournemouth game. Only saying.
I’ve reached the point in the season where I just want it all to end. Every game has just become too stressful, a 95-minute endurance test that leaves my nerves shredded. I need a break. After much thought, I’ve decided not to put myself through the expense and mental ordeal of going to the away leg in Amsterdam next Wednesday.
So it’s written in the stars that Spurs will play the game of their lives and reach the final. You read it here first.
Friday
Boris Johnson appears to have been the only person who thought there were local elections in London, as he tweeted how he had been to cast his vote and urged others to go and put a cross against the Conservative candidate.
His tweet was subsequently deleted when one of his advisers pointed out that he had hallucinated his visit to the polling station. But I can understand Boris’s sense of wish fulfilment.
As a bit of a political nerd, I love a good election and felt rather cheated that I hadn’t had a chance to vote when so many other people did. It would seem to make more sense and be more cost-effective to regularise the local election dates and have them all on the same day. Perhaps I’m missing something.
But I still tuned in to watch the election coverage on TV and soon got a sense it was going to be a tricky night for the two main parties. Not because of any early results, but because the Tories had sent out James Cleverly and Labour had put up Barry Gardiner to try to spin the night’s action for the BBC. A classic C-list of MPs. Cleverly is living proof of the unreliability of nominative determinism, while Gardiner has never knowingly uttered a coherent sentence.
As so often, though, I was filled with admiration for my broadcast colleagues who had to fill eight hours of live TV in which not much happened as less than half the results had come in by 7am. It was clear, though, that the big winners were the Lib Dems, the Greens and independents, but whether Labour and the Tories were being punished for being too Brexity or too remainy was anyone’s guess. Possibly both.
The best news is that we can go through it all again later in the month with the European elections. Bring them on.
Digested week: “He did it Huawei”
