Monday 7th September
It’s a case of off the beach and
into the fire for David Cameron as Parliament returns from the Summer Recess.
He has to face Parliament and
provide a response to the Migrant Crisis which, as everyone in Westminster knows,
started last Tuesday 1st September when newspaper photo editors
returned from their holidays.
He announces, in line with a
recent U-turn, that 20,000 extra Syrian refugees will be settled in Britain
before May 2020, whilst talking of the need to use “both head and heart” in
this matter. The Government’s heart was taken from the same organ suppliers
that the Daily Mail used for its new
ticker last week.
Tuesday 8th September
Of course, this week is mainly
the hush before the storm that will be Saturday’s result in the Labour
Leadership Contest. Those soothsayers in the bookies have Jeremy Corbyn as the
odds-on favourite. To that end, last night’s Panorama, was almost exclusively devoted to Red Jez.
There was more dwelling on his
worldview and choice of protest companions, leading to more clarion calls from
supporters and opponents alike. Chiefly, however, there was a spurious
examination of the secret of Corbyn’s apparent success.
The answer might actually lie in
the closing part of the film, when he sings Bandiera
Rossa and does a little bit of light, avuncular jigging. Now, he doesn’t
set the floor alight, nor stir the heart with his soaring baritone, but he
looks very… well, genuine.
Let me put it this way: Corbyn
does dad-dancing better than Ed Miliband ate a sandwich or Cameron eats a
pasty, and he didn’t ask the cameras to watch him do it.
Wednesday 9th September
Today sees the final PMQs before
Labour gets a new leader, which means it is Harriet Harman’s last day as
Professor McGonagall. This is overshadowed by the Queen, as she becomes the
UK’s longest reigning monarch.
This leads to plenty of tributes
to HMQ (Gawd bless you ma’am, and all that), which seems a little odd when what
they are paying tribute to is her not dying. On this occasion, David Cameron,
Harriet Harman and countless others have stood up and said “Well done to Her
Majesty on not snuffing it for longer than her great-great grandma could
manage”; or describing her as “record-breaking” which, whilst true, makes her
sound like some sort of geriatric Usain Bolt.
Thursday 10th September
And the polls are closed. The
next Labour leader has been chosen.
But by whom? A very pertinent
question in what has been nothing short of a catastrophically mismanaged
election. First, there was “entryism”. One mischievous Tory registered four
times, once under the name of John Major. Then came attempts to weed out
interlopers who “did not share Labour values”, which led to leading trade
unionist Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the Public and Commerical Services
Union, being denied a vote.
Yesterday, a helpline designed to
assist people in casting their vote was shut 24-hours before the polls were
and, last of all, it appears that thousands haven’t received their ballots.
All of this is the last echo of
Ed Miliband’s glorious reign. He set the rules for this campaign, and in doing
so set the scene for the most compelling farce since Noises Off. It’s hard to imagine even UKIP achieving these levels
of incompetence, though to be fair that is partly because they would skip the
leadership election and just ask Nigel back.
Friday 11th September
Meanwhile, in the working world, a
fresh sexism row is brewing, bringing back memories of the row which engulfed
Professor Tim Hunt. You know, the older man who made an inappropriate joke
which, it later transpired, might have been taken wildly out of context, but a
whole bunch of people on Twitter ruined his life anyway. Such larks.
Well, this time an older male
lawyer has made an inappropriate comment to a young female lawyer on LinkedIn,
describing her picture as “stunning”, which we can all agree is just
irredeemably awful.
Yes, he shouldn’t have made that
comment. It is just not professional, but it’s hardly an assault on another
human being. It was misjudged, but now his life is being torn apart. This
morning, a report in The Times is
quoting a comment he made under his daughter’s Facebook photo where he
described her as “hot”, which is a little odd but almost certainly harmless in the context. But no: the undeniable suggestion is that he is an incestuous
paedophile.
You see, in the digital age, there’s no evidence
if there’s no innuendo, and there’s no justice unless it’s Twitter-lynch-mob
justice.
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