The Lunatics (Have Taken over the Asylum)

In truth the lunatics have been in charge for some time.

It is a big flaw in modern politics that so many members of government have not had a proper job (not always even a school holiday job) before becoming an MP. They often left university (PPE or similar) having been student activists and immediately got jobs as researchers or SPADs (special advisers). Even men like Keir Starmur who qualified as lawyers worked in an activist political field and slid naturally from activism and a legal role into a political role.

The big exception is former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. There is much about her to admire. She had a genuinely terrible childhood. Her mother never learnt to read or write and suffered from bi-polar disorder. Her grandmother managed to keep her and her brother out of council care but home life was unsatisfactory and Mrs Rayner left school pregnant at 16 with no qualifications. She reared her child, married and then had two more, one of whom is sadly disabled after a premature birth, which can happen to anybody.

She took a job with Stockport Council as a care worker. She did the Care NVQ and became active in her union. I won’t knock care work; it doesn’t require high academic intellect but it is hard responsible work, and done properly it is enormously beneficial to the elderly or vulnerable people who need help in their own homes.  From the union work she got involved in local Labour party politics and eventually she was elected the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. Again to her credit she wasn’t parachuted into a safe seat where she had no history.  Ashton and Stockport are both industrial districts within Greater Manchester, so local. 

But it’s not all good. Her home and romantic life is ‘lively’ – she was a grandmother at age 37. She can take her good qualities of being down to earth and unpretentious onto a level of being undignified and uncouth.  And, like many in power, she has proved greedy and grasping. The recent business with the avoided stamp duty on the purchase of her THIRD home may be legal, but it was unethical and she lied about the advice she followed. Hence from last night she is no longer Deputy Prime Minister.

If Keir Starmur is abducted by aliens while walking across St James Park tonight she will not be our new leader.

David Lammy will.

Frankly I have more time for a woman who (as someone rather cattily said) left school with more children than GCSE exams but did her best with the hand she was dealt, than a man educated at SOAS and Harvard who thinks that Marie Anoinette discovered radium, that King Henry VII followed King Henry VIII  and that the blue cheese which traditionally accompanies port is Red Leicester.

There were other cabinet re-shuffles today. Shabana Mahmood is no longer the first woman and first Muslim to be Lady Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; she is now the first Muslim to be Home Secretary.

As a comment in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph says,

She has repeatedly proclaimed that Islam is ‘central to who she is and what she believes.’

Unless she’s a cynical liar Starmer has placed a pious Mipuri Pakistani Muslim in charge of the Home Office, police, MI5 and immigration, at a time when there are deep concerns about a Muslim ‘network’ within the Home Office, and the issues which infuriate the British people most are the mass rape gangs, domestic terrorism and turning swathes of our cities and towns into the third world – all of which have a disproportionate Mirpuri Pakistan element at their heart.

It’s the Cold War equivalent of putting a self-proclaimed Communist in charge of the Foreign Office at a time when the main concern was communist infiltration of the Foreign Office

Former Home Secretary Yvette Copper is now the Foreign Secretary.  And so on, rearranging the deck chairs on HMS UK (iceberg? what iceberg?)

David Lammy must be licking a saucer of cream tonight. In 2003, when I was still an official in the that department (which had been the Lord Chancellors Department and became the Ministry of Justice) Tony Blair appointed him a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Constitutional Affairs. 

Yvette Cooper had been Parliamentary Secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department from 29 May 2002 – 13 June 2003.  I understand she was difficult to work for (a cow) having no regard for any home committments of her staff.

David Lammy was difficult in a different way, cases and actions needing a lot of tactful explaining. My work didn’t go to him, but sometimes my bosses’ cases did. I’m saying no more. I do hope he enjoys his time in the top job until the music stops again.

Lord Chancellor is an ancient Office of State, maybe 800 years old. It used to be a position of gravitas, beyond party politics. I find it sad to see it as a football, a mere notch on the greasy pole that is the climb and fight to No 10.

Meanwhile, here is the Fun Boy Three.