WEEKEND WIDDY
Random Musings
As regular readers will know, Weekend Widdy consists of a series of short pieces of the sort that used to go around my main piece in my former Daily Express column and may be political, social, whimsical etc. It is published anytime over the weekend but usually on Sunday. and is free to all.
I shall soon be on Cameo as well and will let you know when that is up and running.
Most MPs will have moments in their “surgeries” when their jaws drop in disbelief at what they are hearing. These days I occasionally have the same reaction when I read the papers. Only very occasionally, because inured by a daily dose of stupidity, injustice and wastefulness, I am rarely too distracted from my egg and soldiers but last Thursday I gasped, nearly choked and let a spoonful of yolk fall back to my plate. The cat stared in alarm as I simmered with fury.
While thousands of illegal migrants swan about in hotels at our expense, a granny who fled Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe together with her husband and set up a shop here is facing deportation simply because, if the reported facts are accurate, the Home Office has tied itself up in knots of red tape. She has been married for 24 years to Mike Robins, a British citizen. She came here lawfully on a spousal visa and has an adult son. She and her husband are running a farm shop and butcher’s in Dorset.
The rulebook says that any applicant for a visa must have either £88,500 in savings or be earning a salary of £29K a year. However, as does many a small businessman, the couple put all their money into the shop which is profitable but not yet paying those sorts of sums. The investment does not count and so the visa will not be renewed.
Mr and Mrs Robins are now selling the shop and looking for jobs in order to meet the new criteria. So a useful little business is ruined, a marriage of 24 years is disregarded and a granny is about to be deported to a country where she has nothing and could well end up on the streets. Her MP should be jumping up and down in parliament. Meanwhile she might do better to go to France and come back here on a small boat. That way she would be made very welcome.
I have written before about the hopeless quality of our MPs but anybody reading Simon Hart’s memoirs must wonder if the lunatics really have taken over the asylum as he, Rishi Sunak’s Chief Whip, details the appallingly decadent conduct of the backbenchers he was supposed to keep in line. Nevertheless the mere fact that a Chief Whip should have produced such memoirs is itself indicative of the decline of our once great Mother of Parliaments.
I remember the Tory whips’ office in its heyday, when it combined great power with great discretion. It was, of course, hopelessly old-fashioned, had never had a woman in its ranks and fiercely closed those ranks against all and sundry. It was also as silent as the tomb when it came to betraying what it knew and it knew a lot: who was having an affair with whom, who was in financial difficulty, who made the secretaries cry etc etc and then still more etc.
The whips’ office was also hugely protective. The legendary David Lightbown used to say that the parliamentary party was a family and its members looked after each other. Yet in the last few years no fewer than four Conservative MPs ( interestingly all on the right of the Party) have been falsely accused of sex related crimes and the whips just hung them out to dry, instead of actively intervening, in two cases for years on end. Even when there was found no case to answer, the whips dragged their feet about restoring party membership and giving public vindication. What MP would think of them as friends, let alone mighty protectors?
And now the Chief Whip, of all people, spills the beans. OK, he hasn’t identified the worst malefactors but he has undeniably given the dirty diggers of Fleet Street plenty of dirt to try digging. Who would confide in such a whip and if MPs will not confide then how is the high command to anticipate and preferably avoid scandal and chaos?
Simon Hart is a courteous and decent chap. At opposite ends of the battle on hunting, I never had occasion to complain about his tactics and , in later years when I rang him in his capacity as Chief Whip about one of the accused MPS who had been exonerated but was still waiting for the Party to make that known, he did not tell me to buzz off back to the Brexit Party but referred me to his deputy, whose ear I regularly bent.
Yet he should not have written this book. It undermines Parliament, undermines the whips’ office and sadly confirms what we all think of those who , having prevailed in the ballot box, hold our destiny in their hands.
President Zelensky is not a dictator, he has not fallen to 4% in public approval rates and he did not start the war in Ukraine. He is a very brave man who, at the start of the conflict, told the West which had offered him a safe conduct out of the hellhole that he wanted “ammunition, not a ride”. President Putin is a nasty piece of work who probably thought he could get a quick legacy by taking over Ukraine before finding out that people like liberty better than invasion. President Trump, impressive in many ways, is a loudmouth who too often lets his rhetoric run away with his brain. Elon Musk is the classic example of a clever man who does not recognise the limits of his own knowledge and who therefore spouts rot.
It is not a happy combination in an uncertain world but one thing is very certain. If the US allows Russia to benefit from her invasion of a sovereign state then, as I observed on Wednesday, that same US cannot complain if China invades Taiwan.
My camellia is in full bloom, the snowdrops have weathered the winds and rain and the rabbits are tearing through the garden, full of the joys of fast-approaching Spring. Next month the clocks go forward, the month after that brings Easter and then the garden will be full of birdsong. It would all be such a cheering prospect if only Lent wasn’t looming!!
I do not like Angela Rayner and I do not think Britain benefits from having a Deputy Prime Minister who can be tawdry and coarse, but what on earth is all this fuss about her CV and how long she was a home help? To claim to have been an economist when you were not is serious and vastly more serious is any claim to have been a solicitor when you are not but what does it matter how long somebody was a home help for? There is no doubt Ms Rayner did that job, she has not pretended to qualifications she does not have, has not lied about the nature of her work, so what does it matter what she was doing, when and for whom ? Am I missing something?
There are 2 things i abhor, liars and thieves. And somehow this Government has plenty.