We’ve been having a series of events at home to celebrate the accession of Priti Patel, our Home Secretary, to the status of life member of the MCC.
If, as is reported in the Times this week, she has been able to avail herself of the £45,000 life membership package dreamed up to squeeze that august body through the current crisis, it seems that it is good for her, and good for them. So long as she has remembered to pay, it is rather wonderful that she has been able to short-cut her way to ‘citizenship’ by bunging them a large wad of readies. I suspect that the MCC model is her perfect idea for a national one: wait for 100 years to get in unless your wealth and generosity conspire to propel you in quicker. From being marooned in the Calais-like camp of non-membership, she has gracefully scaled the walls, and can now presumably vote on whether Stuart Broad opens from the Pavilion End, or whether they shove a skyscraper up into the uncomplaining London air at the other.
‘We are inclusive, act with humility and value diverse ideas’, says the MCC’s website if you ask it about its own values. ‘We listen to each other and foster strong working relationships with our colleagues at MCC, in our partner countries and in the development community.’ I’m not quite sure where the bold letters came from (theirs, not mine), but I am quite satisfied that all of these apply to our Secretary of State for Home Affairs. After all, if you ask her website what her values are, it will chirp back: ‘empowering people, families and businesses to flourish and be in control of their own destiny.’ It would take a curmudgeon to disagree with all that.
Years ago, when I was young, impressionable and trying to forge a career in being asked out for long and agreeable lunches for the simple reason that people could be deceived into thinking that I amounted to something, I went onto the MCC waiting list. I think a godfather kindly paid for the initial deposit on my behalf. Too many bottles of Lagavullin have gone down the hatch since for me to remember what the hell happened next, other than occasional letters telling me that the waiting list was still about 189 years, and would I mind chucking a few more fivers in their direction. If I was any good at cricket, they also implied, I could possibly shortcut to being a playing member. I’m not, clearly, and so I couldn’t. I have a feeling that you also had to be slightly overweight and called ‘Giles’ for this entry route to be open to you. 50% then.
Eventually, I went into one of my short Marxist phases, got cross and told them where they could shove the whole thing. Their grief was commendably short-lived, even to the extent of not answering my letter. So it is nice to see that they have now got Ms Patel instead, an eminent politician who I suppose has a more solid forward defensive push than me.
My no longer being on tenterhooks, and no longer running to the post-box each morning to see if the MCC have sent me another communication, has afforded me extra time to do other things with my life, which I why I know that right now, bang in the middle of the best apple season for decades, we are importing around 70% of our apples, a large percentage of them from the country (New Zealand) at exactly the opposite side of the world from us. As king-of-the-pollinators, Dave Goulson says, ‘we must be mad’. Just think of the extra C02 emissions, for God’s sake, and the fact that they (the apples) will probably have been stored over there for 6 months before shipping, having been picked in the Southern autumn, last March. And then wrapped in non-recyclable packaging. Lots of people much cleverer than me will probably come up with arguments as to why it makes sense to ship an apple 13,000 miles to a country that could grow all it needed, but spare me them, please. The way we buy things has made us corporately bonkers.
So please, next time you are in your greengrocer or supermarket, just make the point that it is a British apple or nothing, thank you, and walk out. And then go into the next shop, and make the same point again, even if it is a hardware store, or a bicycle shop, for all I care. And keep making it over and over again until some buying director actually follows the sustainable future, rather than the current money. Especially as, right now, they are pulping apples in Somerset because the cider makers don’t want them.
At some time in the next year or so, we are going to need to start taking this stuff seriously.
Probably even the supermarkets.
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