I first came across the concept of love as a phenomenon that reached beyond mere families, when my parents came home one day, rather daringly I now know, with a 45 rpm record of the Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together‘ (which famously had to be re-phrased as ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together‘ in order to be allowed on the gloriously prude Ed Sullivan Show.).
‘Why do they want to spend the night together?’ I asked my mother when I heard it.
‘Because they love each other,’ she replied enigmatically.
‘Like we do?’ I asked. ‘I mean, we spend the night together, don’t we?’, and on it went until she said, as she often did, that I should ask my father when he got back from work. It was as a good a way as any of closing off any awkwardness because, in the highly unlikely event that I actually remembered to ask him, he would suddenly remember that he had to walk the dog, or do something in the shed.
It was a different sort of love that persuaded me to write to my MP a couple of nights ago, to try to persuade him that, among the things he might put on his to-do list for this weekend was to write, and post, a letter to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee saying that he had lost confidence in the Prime Minister. It was sort of ‘for the love of God’ kind of love.
I admit, it was a long shot. He (my MP) rather famously lent his Westminster house to Boris Johnson from which to run his leadership campaign a few years ago, so there is presumably some affection there. And he (my MP) and I rather famously had words last year when he sent an email to someone saying that I was ‘on a list’ as an Extinction Rebellion activist. (The extent of my activism was that I had volunteered to go and give a talk on bees to their Godalming Chapter). I don’t like being on anyone’s lists and I may have been slightly intemperate. But he has a constituency into which you could parachute a silky anteater which, so long as it was dyed blue, would become the duly elected member, so he is probably not going to be too worried by a disappointed beekeeper.
His email in response, yesterday, was surprisingly moving and carefully crafted, and said that he wanted to wait until the outcome of the Metropolitan Police Report (and the conclusion of the Gray Report) into Downing Street party-time before making up his mind about sending in a letter. What it omitted to say was that he had just, an hour before, entered the revolving door inwards that was ejecting Munira Mirza outwards, having replaced her as BoJo’s policy guru. I might not like it, but I like to think that, if my salary had just gone up by around £70,000, I would also be a bit non-committal if someone sent me a letter asking me to dob in my boss. I think I would have sent me a one-liner telling me in so many words to go fry an egg. Good governance has its limits, and I quite understand that I was skipping around in their borderlands.
So here we all are. The immediate future of the fifth or sixth biggest economy on earth, one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the home of Shakespeare, now rests in the hands of a) just 359 MPs, one of whom, let’s not forget, is Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will decide if we need to ditch Boris, and then b) slightly less than 0.2% of its population and their collection of funny hats and coats, who will choose between the two names the MPs give them, if it comes to that. On the brink of a possible European war, a nation that leads the world in biosciences, tech start-ups and decent rock music, has entrusted its future to a tiny group of people, many of whom probably only joined the party because that nice man with the sports jacket was a member, or the beer was cheaper than it was next door. Which I suppose means that the remaining 65 million of us, freed from the agony of choice, can sit back, relax and watch a couple more episodes of The Responder.
When I did politics for A Level, our robustly right-wing South African teacher (at a time when a robustly right wing South Africans really were magnificently right wing) told us that we were lucky in the UK to live in a democracy that ensured strong government, and it was better than being Italian or, God help us, German.
Suddenly, I long for life to be very funny again.
Where is Barry Cryer when you need him?
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