Seriously now – you couldn’t make this up …
Rusters might remember eons ago (well from 1985 to 1992) on Saint and Greavsie – which, when I think of it, might have been heralded as the world’s first sporting podcast had it been mounted thirty years later – that former footballer Jimmy Greaves used to intone “It’s a funny old game …” after any latest example of weird happenings in the nation’s number one game had been featured.
Greaves’s catchphrase sprang to mind as quite by chance I found myself watching Sky News’ afternoon Kay Burley Show being broadcast live from the Labour Party autumn conference in Brighton yesterday.
Wacky stuff sometimes happens when – as in my case recently – you’ve been spending five days and counting staying with an ageing parent and his resident live-in carer far from civilisation in the countryside.
Let me explain.
By rule or convention such carers are normally entitled to two hours off per day, a reasonable enough stipulation but one that in our case cannot always be taken because of the remote location.
Which is why, whenever one of the family visits or comes to stay, the carer is told to ‘lose themselves for a couple of hours’ whilst the family member ‘minds the store’.
This was the situation yesterday. The carer had taken the car and driven into the local city on her break and I was sitting with my father in the drawing room. He doesn’t say too much these days but spends most of his time nursing a newspaper and watching the world go by. Or the television.
Towards the end of a typically uninspiring stint in front of the BBC’s afternoon fare of antique roadshows, quiz shows and crappy soap dramas I suggested that – just for the hell of it, since habitually we watch BBC1’s daily Six O’ Clock News – we nip across to Sky News for a bit of variety.
On it La Burley was quizzing political pundits and passing Labour delegates in the foyer at the aforementioned conference.
Inevitably the vexed issue at hand was the national political crisis over Brexit – specifically the Labour Party’s complex and tortuous standpoint upon it and the imminent conference votes upon what its policy was going to be going forward into the Supreme Court ruling on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, the forthcoming General Election and even (if one should occur) a Second Referendum.
Bizarre didn’t begin to describe the events that followed but it many respects they epitomised why we’re in the mess we are.
With the Prime Minister in a hell of a hole and apparently to all intents and purposes still digging – and the Lib-Dems under new leader Jo Swinson now going for broke by positioning themselves as the ‘out and out’ Remain party by promising to revoke Article 50 if they win an outright majority in the next General Election (a possibility over which we can all relax because it ain’t going to happen) – the Labour Party is pretty much split down the middle.
Its Establishment supports Jeremy Corbyn who wants to stick to facing both ways at once.
Against the Establishment are an uneasy coalition of vaguely-Blairites and extreme Lefties who together agree on only one thing, i.e. that if Labour goes into the next General Election with both (1) Jeremy Corbyn at the helm, and (2) a policy of facing both ways at once, they’ll get annihilated.
[For what it’s worth, I suspect the uneasy coalition is right].
And so yesterday’s events unfolded.
For a political party that claims to champion “the many, not the few” and purports to hold the fundamental principles of democracy close to its bosom … and in doing so delights in throwing accusations at Boris and his collaborators of being a bunch of right-wing, ‘look after yourself and bollocks the masses’, democracy-denying, privately-educated, fat cat capitalist-worshipping, frivolous dictators … Labour yesterday openly and nakedly exposed itself for what it has become, (or some might say, always has been), viz. a ‘convenient organisation’ that neatly allows a politburo-style Stalinist Establishment to pursue political power whilst paying no more regard to democratic principles than the alleged extreme fascist-leaning Tory Party clique that they criticise with such passion.
My father and I duly watched yesterday – one of us with slightly more appreciation of what was going on than the other, but only just – as the Labour Party conference conducted a series of votes upon various composite motions with the sort of terminally-inept organisational efficiency and lack of competence that would have been laughed off stage with derision if it had been exhibited by either a three-person local church parish council committee meeting or indeed the proverbial owner of a whelk stall.
One of the greatest satisfactions to be had in life is to watch a Grade A prat unknowingly condemning themselves simply by what they do or what they say.
Any group of senior Labour election strategists watching yesterday’s performance would have been holding their heads in their hands in despair. Or ought to have been.
Meanwhile, any Tory Party counterparts would have been rubbing their hands in glee because – I’d hazard an estimated guess – yesterday Labour was haemorrhaging potential votes in the coming General Election at the rate of 50,000 per minute of live broadcast.
Now I’m no Tory, but if I was a Number 10 strategist I’d be arriving at work this morning with a pronounced spring in my step.
Furthermore my first act to the day would be to propose that the imminent Tory Party conference should be cancelled immediately and replaced in the TV schedules with a repeat recording of yesterday’s coverage of the Labour conference played out on a endless loop.
Because if it was – my penny to a pounds says – Boris and his gang of Etonian outriders would soon be partying into the night, having won the General Election by a landslide!
If you don’t believe me, here are the reviews of yesterday’s events penned by two of my favourite political sketch writers:
John Crace – whose piece as appears upon the Labour-supporting website of – THE GUARDIAN
Tom Peck (no friend of the Tories) – whose article appears upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT