Dear Gavin
Unusually, for me, I found myself watching Breakfast TV this morning whilst you were on it, and I found myself wondering idly if your boss ever watched any of his ministers being interviewed, you in particular. And, if he did, what he might have thought. Or your wife. Or my late granny. Or someone. Anyone.
Or was it just me feeling that the whole experience of watching you is like being trapped in one of Franz Kafka’s novels, in the Oxford English Dictionary sense of ‘having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical quality.’
Granted, it wouldn’t make much difference whether Boris had watched you or not. After all, a man who fails to sack a senior adviser for breaking a legal lockdown that he himself had helped to invent on the magnificently improbable basis that he is testing his eyesight, isn’t going to discipline an uncomfortable looking bloke in a blue suit for failing to take responsibility for a balls-up he and his department has just helped to engineer. The Times said that it was because he knew that you were ‘vindictive’, which kind of made me wish that I’d behaved worse in my life.
Up until this point, I hadn’t really given you much thought. I knew that you were comically ambitious, rather like I was when I first joined the army, and that you had a whip on your desk (presumably for subtle messaging purposes) and that you kept a pet tarantula.
I never owned a whip, but when I was in Belize in 1983, one of our medics, Corporal Tainty, sent me a live tarantula in a large match box as a joke when I was out in the jungle, whilst he was sending me some personal medical supplies. (‘Medical in Confidence for Captain Morgan-Grenville’ screamed the little parcel, ‘For his piles.’). We kept the tarantula for about a week, and called him Dave, until someone put a hot mess tin on top of him one evening, and that was that. It was a shame, as we had grown quite fond of him, even if he was a nippy, poisonous menace.
You probably have many admirers, too. In fact, you must have at least 36,520 of them, as they voted for you in Staffordshire last December (actually, 36,521, as Boris has given you the job of Education Secretary that, until recently, was supposed to be quite an important one.) I don’t even know if you are any good at your job- I guess the evidence suggests that you aren’t exactly a stellar incumbent- but what I do know is that you are magnificent at dodging the personal blame. I guess that your civil servants must adore you.
You may or may not have heard of the name Sir Thomas Dugdale. No? Maybe you have heard of Crichel Down, then? It was a patch of land that was compulsorily purchased as an RAF bombing range in 1938 and then, despite promises by the Prime Minister that these requisitions would be able to be bought back by their owners, at the same rate, after the war, it turned out that the RAF had flogged it to someone else for a much higher price, one that the family could no longer afford. It didn’t help that the previous owner had died on active service with the very organisation that was now shafting his family. You might ask why this is relevant, let alone important, in a world of A Levels and mask-wearing in schools? Well, what happened was that Sir Thomas, who had genuinely had nothing to do with any of the cock-ups that led to the cluster bomb of incompetence and misery, decided to walk the plank anyway. In a polite letter to the Prime Minister, he simply resigned as the Minister of Agriculture.
Can you imagine that, Gavin? He just wrote to the Prime Minister and said that he would take full responsibility.
You can’t help some people, can you?
Yours, in wide-eyed amazement
Roger
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