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Why the Tories love a clown show Footwear is now more important than ideas

Unchained (Hollie Adams/Getty Images)


July 29, 2022   7 mins

It was the summer of 1995. The Tory leadership struggle was in full swing, and after days of intense excitement Britain’s next Prime Minister — or so he hoped — was poised to emerge into the national spotlight.

The challenger was young, ambitious and burning with intensity. His credentials were impeccable. Brought up in a council house, of humble but aspirational stock, he was famously clever, with a doctorate from Oxford and an All Souls fellowship. He had become a Conservative councillor at the age of just 21; he had worked in the City; he had been Margaret Thatcher’s chief policy adviser. As a relative newcomer to the Cabinet, he was untainted by the disappointments of recent years. He had a rare clarity of ideological vision, a fiery sense of political direction. And while other potential assassins had ducked the Prime Minister’s challenge to face him in open combat, he had embraced it.

A man of courage, then, a warrior of truly puritanical fervour. Even the Sun had come out in his favour. This, surely, was his moment… Then out he came, flanked by his supporters. The cameras flashed, and everything went horribly wrong.

“Viewers were startled by the strange green-clad torso behind John Redwood as he spoke at his press conference yesterday,” began Matthew Parris’s sketch in the next day’s Times. “No head was visible in the frame. I can reveal that it belonged to Mrs [Teresa] Gorman. We would recognise that bust anywhere.”

It got worse. On Redwood’s other side stood the ferociously Right-wing MP Tony Marlow (“his mates call him ‘Von Marloff’”, noted Parris), dressed in a boating blazer so garish, so violent, it almost made Gorman’s lime-green jacket look tasteful. Another sketch-writer likened it to “a chair from the passenger deck of the Hindenburg”. That was being kind.

Further along the table lurked a gaggle of MPs who might have been hand-picked by Labour’s spin doctor Peter Mandelson to present the very worst, most outlandish, most off-putting image of the Tory Party. “From time to time,” wrote Parris, “this bizarre claque would interrupt their master’s flow with a raucous little chorus of ‘hya, hya’, ‘hearrr, hearr’ and ‘yeah! yeah!’ from Mrs Gorman. It sounded like The Goon Show, but which of us can choose his claque?”

Was Parris being unfair? One of those MPs, after all, was the former Chancellor Norman Lamont — not, perhaps, one of the titans of 20th-century politics, but a serious player in his day. Redwood himself, whatever his political flaws, was no fool. And there’s no doubt that as a passionate Eurosceptic, dismayed by his party’s course under John Major, Redwood stood for something; indeed, his defenders might argue that although he lost the battle, he won the war eventually.

Even so, it’s hard to see that press conference in June 1995 as anything other than a complete disaster for the Conservative Party. One of Major’s allies remarked that the insurgents looked like “Ward 8 from Broadmoor”. They did. And by the time the whole business was over, Major having seen off the rebellion by a margin of more than two to one, millions of ordinary voters had made up their minds. The taint of Broadmoor — the stench of indiscipline, decay, extremism, self-indulgence and freakery — had infected the entire Tory brand. Perhaps the only surprising thing about the general election debacle two years later was that the Conservatives won any seats at all.

Have today’s Tories reached their Redwood moment? Maybe not. Maybe, when the winner is crowned in September, striding confidently into Downing Street to take control of the economy, the weather will change in their favour. It’s just possible, if you really try, to imagine a future in which Ukraine wins the war in the east, world commodity prices begin to fall, energy and food bills drop, the threat of Covid fades, the NHS backlogs ease and work begins on tens of thousands of voter-friendly new houses. Squint hard enough, and perhaps you can glimpse Liz Truss waving triumphantly to her activists in two years’ time — dressed, presumably, as Margaret Thatcher in the summer of 1987.

But even as I write this stuff down, I find it very hard to believe. It’s often said that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, but today’s Tory Party seems an awful lot closer to Barnum & Bailey than to the glamour of Hollywood. Do die-hard Conservatives, I wonder, have any idea how they appear to the general public? When Nadine Dorries attacks Rishi Sunak for wearing an expensive suit and the wrong shoes; when Sunak himself talks of incarcerating asylum seekers on floating hulks; when Truss puts on her pantomime Thatcher act — do none of these characters have any dignity or shame?

Perhaps the only sensible thing a serious Tory politician has said in the last couple of weeks came from the Cabinet Office minister Johnny Mercer. “Worth remembering,” he tweeted a few days ago, “that on current trajectory we are out of power in two years’ time. The puerile nature of this leadership contest is embarrassing. Time to raise the standards.”

Does politics work that way, though? History suggests that when you’re spiralling into a clown show, it’s very hard — if not impossible — to raise the standards. No matter who wins the leadership election, at least a hundred Tory MPs will probably be deeply disappointed. And can you imagine the poison vanishing overnight? Can you really picture Jacob Rees-Mogg — adored by some activists, admittedly, but despised by many people not interested in politics, and positively loathed by anybody who bought his book — ever turning down an invitation to appear on Channel 4? Will Dorries ever stop talking? Will the own goals ever cease?

Why governing parties degenerate in this way is an intriguing question. It seems pretty obvious that all administrations eventually succumb to entropy. People grow old; they get tired; they make mistakes; they run out of ideas. Under the pressure of office, even the most dynamic tyro becomes exhausted. The diaries of Bernard Donoughue, who was Harold Wilson’s policy chief in the mid-Seventies, offer an object lesson in how a bright young thing soon turns into a dying star. “I have been round this course so often that I am too bored to face jumping any more hurdles,” Wilson tells his young adviser at one point. “The trouble with me now is that I only have the same old solutions for the same old problems.”

A few weeks later, working on a speech for the Durham Miners’ Gala, Wilson produces a draft that his aides find “stale, boastful, full of his old clichés, with whole paragraphs repeated from previous speeches”. His press chief, Joe Haines, points out that there’s nothing new in it. “I don’t have anything new to say, do I?” says Wilson wearily. “Well, you might put some of your old ideas in new words,” Haines snaps back. But he is, of course, wasting his time.

I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but today’s Conservatives strike me as a gigantic version of Harold Wilson circa 1975: tired, seedy, cynical, pointless, so bereft of ideas that they have been reduced to arguing about the cost of their own shoes. It speaks volumes, for example, that to get a sense of Liz Truss’s ideas, her critics had been forced to dig out Britannia Unchained, a volume she co-wrote in the dying days of the Brown premiership, full of policy prescriptions for a vanished era.

What’s even more revealing, though, is that Truss is currently leading the leadership race not as herself, but as an effigy of Margaret Thatcher. And if I, who managed to get more than 800 pages out of the first few years of the Thatcher premiership, find this utterly ridiculous, what on earth do normal people think? What sane person attends the most important job interview of their life dressed as somebody who won the same role almost half a century ago? Can you imagine Thatcher doing the same, dressing as, say, Stanley Baldwin or Winston Churchill when she stood against Edward Heath in 1975?

But entropy isn’t the only explanation for what has gone wrong. To look slightly further back, the Conservatives were in office for 13 years between 1951 and 1964, and by the end the game was clearly up. Even so, they weren’t a joke: Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s Cabinet included Rab Butler, Ted Heath, Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Peter Carrington, all of whom were pretty serious people. Or take another example of a government kicked out after 13 years, the Labour administration of Gordon Brown. Sure, it was tired and divided. But there were plenty of canny people around the Cabinet table: Peter Mandelson, Alastair Darling, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham. Maybe they weren’t the greatest ministers in the world, but they weren’t reduced to squabbling about the price of shoes.

So here are two thoughts. The first, which some may find very objectionable, is that as parties become more responsive to their activists, the further they descend into self-indulgent idiocy. This is the Tories’ third leadership election in seven years, and as we all know, it’s the activists who decide the winner. But it’s easier to talk about ideas sensibly, to admit doubt and contradiction, to acknowledge the necessary compromises of office, when you’re not pandering to a hard-core mob. In that sense, the parallel may be with the Labour Party after 1979 — or, indeed, during the Corbyn fiasco — when demagogues like Tony Benn relentlessly whipped up party members against their own representatives. That’s exactly what Rees-Mogg and Dorries are up to now, abetted by fellow-travelling journalists at the Daily Telegraph. But if you want politicians who play to their activists, then you won’t get good politicians. Governing well is messy; good government means disappointment. And that of course, is the one thing activists don’t like to hear.

And here’s the second thought. It really is all the media’s fault, but not for the reason many people seem to think. The Tories aren’t in a mess because the media are biased against them, but because the media are biased against complexity and in favour of lunacy. On every channel — the BBC, Sky, GB News, the lot — producers look for loudmouths and ideologues, the kind of people who will generate “must-watch” social media clips. Even supposedly serious formats, such as the BBC’s Sunak-Truss leadership debate, have degenerated into embarrassing knockabouts.

If you doubt that things were different a generation ago, just watch a clip of the equivalent Cameron-Davis debate in 2005, in which the two contenders look like Pericles and Demosthenes by comparison with their modern-day successors. Or if you want to feel really wretched, go to YouTube and watch the BBC’s Panorama interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1977 or Thames’s This Week interview with her rival Jim Callaghan a year later. The contrast is painful to behold.

So here we are, trapped, perhaps forever, in Ward 8 at Broadmoor. Still, there is one consolation. It could be worse. The Conservative Party may be a clown show, but at least it’s not the Republican Party. Well, not yet, anyway.


Dominic Sandbrook is an author, historian and UnHerd columnist. His latest book is: Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982

dcsandbrook

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Ian McKinney
Ian McKinney
2 years ago

Another wonderfully depressing excoriation from Mr Sandbrook – and as usual, absolutely correct.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian McKinney

‘And if I, who managed to get more than 800 pages out of the first few years of the Thatcher premiership, find this utterly ridiculous, what on earth do normal people think?’
Funnily enough I have just read Who Dares Wins, Dominic’s 800-page account of the years 1979-82. It is marvellously detailed and displays a genuine understanding of everything from economics to pop music.

Last edited 2 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Tom Watson
Tom Watson
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian McKinney

Particularly the point about the media. It wasn’t Tory activists who chose to spend time arguing about earrings and shoes, it was the BBC’s producers.

Neil Stanworth
Neil Stanworth
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Watson

Lot of truth in that. The Today programme’s interview with Dorries on 28 July (in which she was asked about her own shoes, and whether she owned earrings costing £6k) reduced me to impotent rage.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian McKinney

My nickname for Rishi Sunak is ‘Ricky Screwcap’ because most of that money he’s been giving away for the last few years has been spent on cheap wine. I have no doubt that the money he gives people to help them with their energy bills will be spent in much the same way.

Last edited 2 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Karen Mosley
Karen Mosley
2 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

And what, other than bigotry and elitism, is this statement based on?

Dominic A
Dominic A
2 years ago
Reply to  Karen Mosley

I think Dominic S covered that in the article…. something to do with clownishness?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
Reply to  Karen Mosley

The fact that the pubs, bars and restaurants are full, and the supermarket shelves are empty come the evening. All I see is people spending wildly and happily.

Last edited 2 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Iris C
Iris C
2 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Energy bills are not just for heating and lighting but to charge everyone’s mobile phone in a household (from the child to the granny) the laptop computers, entertainment recorders and games consoles.

Mike Michaels
Mike Michaels
2 years ago
Reply to  Iris C

Those devices draw minimal amounts of power compared to your fridge, cooker or iron etc.

Delia Barkley-Delieu
Delia Barkley-Delieu
2 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Oh dear. Get with the programme dear boy.
Wine snobbery. Corks have their place but some very fine wines now come in screwcap bottles. I remember the outrage amongst wine snobs when the screw topped bottles hit the shelves (or cellars) many, many years ago.
Strange how Sunak was feted by the media when times were hard during the pandemic. He eased the suffering of many who couldn’t work at the time. The money he gives out this year to help with energy bills might well be spent on ‘cheap wine’ as people tighten belts in order to make ends meet. I would point them in the direction of Aldi or Lidl; there’s many a good bottle to be found on their wine shelves. Some of them even have cork stoppers.
Cheers! I hope a glass or two of ‘cheap’ wine helps warm their cockles, given the gas central heating will have been made redundant. .

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
2 years ago

Better a screwcap than a plastic ‘cork’.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago

“…This is the Tories’ third leadership election in seven years, and as we all know, it’s the activists who decide the winner…”

But in the Tories case it absolutely is not – the activists can only pick from the final two offered up by the MPs, who can choose to offer up a brace the activists are not remotely interested in – and what the activists want will be very low in the priorities of the MPs. Indeed, the activists could have a choice of one, which might easily happen here, because notwithstanding his other shortcomings, Sunak can certainly count, and may well withdraw (after the customary horse trading for a senior cabinet post) – and the activists, denied a choice and a vote, can go hang.

Last edited 2 years ago by Prashant Kotak
polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Why anyone would wish to be a Tory Party activist is beyond me. You are indeed the turnip taliban

Andrew Horsman
Andrew Horsman
2 years ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Oi, leave them alone! Maybe they believe in principles of personal responsibility, limited government, protection of family values (or whatever) and want to see a Conservative government in power, and so give freely of their time and energy to help people who share their worldview get elected. You might reasonably disagree with them, or activists of any other party, but there is no need to bandy silly labels around. This perhaps helps explain why we have the dispiriting politics that Dominic Sandbrook describes in his piece.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Horsman

 Maybe they believe in principles of personal responsibility, limited government, protection of family values (or whatever) and want to see a Conservative government in power, 

And that is why they voted overwhelmingly for Boris.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jeremy Smith
Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

If only Boris had lived up to their expectations.

David Whiteway
David Whiteway
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Boris certainly believes in family values; that’s why he has so many families.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Horsman

I think that you have missed my point. If they believe in such things then why are they members of the Tory Party – A party that believes in nothing of the sort: A party that holds its members in contempt. Or hadn’t you noticed?

Peter Lloyd
Peter Lloyd
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Horsman

I see the appeal of this ethic, it just seems to have rather little to do with either the Tories present ethic, or to be any sort of answer to the issues of today where we see corporate failure and social decay. Forty years of electing people who believe in reducing the power of the state (if not its size and cost) has brought us here.

To use an analogy they like, if you ran a business by appointing managers who fundamentally wanted to ruin the business, would you get efficiency and success?

C J
C J
2 years ago

I have a vote in the Tory leadership election and I am so utterly dispirited. I can’t see how I can vote for either, but leaning to Rishi as the worst of two evils. Dominic’s analysis is spot on, and why I’m so dispirited. It’s easier to say everything was better in the past, but this feels incomparable.

I joined the party after being surprised how pleased I was when Cameron won in 2015. I’d always been borderline Lib Dem / Tory but Cameron’s win made me reflect on my values and think, yes, I’m a Conservative and proud. That pride lasted barely a year. I’ll be giving up my membership after the election. I suspect the Party will also be relinquishing large swathes if the south to Lib Dems, and most of the red wall and towns and suburbs across the country to Labour. I’m not sad about this – I’m actively willing it. The Party needs a good long spell in opposition.

Tangentially, I think the whole process should be reversed – have the membership vote (STV ideally) to choose the last two, and let the MPs choose between them. That might help the activist problem.

D Glover
D Glover
2 years ago
Reply to  C J

The Party needs a good long spell in opposition.

This supposes that the pendulum always swings back eventually. Any possible permutation of Labour, LibDem and SNP, or just Labour alone, gives you votes for 16 year-olds.
Once those non-tax paying, teacher led, school-age youngsters get votes I don’t see how the pendulum would ever recover.
It would be woke radical all the way down.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  D Glover

A very good idea
1) Most young people simply don’t vote so making 16yo voting is not going to radically change elections.
2) UK (demographically a fact) is dominated by old people with very different interest/needs compared to young people. So balancing the system out is not just a bad idea.
3) Labor (if they are smart) should change the electoral system. Nigel Farage used bang on how FPP was unfair to UKIP.
P.S. Prado has a fantastic painting of Goya: Saturn/Zeus eating his children. That is today’s UK political economy. Old people are eating the state. Balancing that out is a good thing.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jeremy Smith
CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Is this JS formerly of Clapton Pond, but now Luxembourg, by any chance?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
Reply to  D Glover

Exactly. Once you give 16 year olds the vote you’re well on your way to becoming some combination of Venezuela, Iraq, Somalia and Scotland.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Particularly the latter.

Vibhaker Baxi
Vibhaker Baxi
2 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

That presupposes that in 2 years time they will be totally matured to conservatism!!

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
2 years ago
Reply to  C J

I have a vote in the election too, and like you, I couldn’t vote for either of them.
I intend to simply scrawl Kemi on my ballot and return it.

Iris C
Iris C
2 years ago
Reply to  Philip Stott

Parliament has been in limbo since the parliamentary election. That is a sorry state of affairs.
There is no need to give Conservative members a vote – the membership is only a tiny proportion of those who vote Tory.
It is the MPs who have to work with the Prime Minister and it is also they who have witnessed the candidates in action both in the chamber and in their ministries.. They can judge who would make the better Prime Minister, uninfluenced by any personal prejudices which may be present in some constituencies..

..

Victoria Cooper
Victoria Cooper
2 years ago
Reply to  Iris C

That is a valid point. If only we could be sure the MPs want what would work best for the country and not play their power games.

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Iris C

That would reduce the numbers of members even more.

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
2 years ago
Reply to  Iris C

I would argue that Conservative members should be more represented than we are now.
Every member that I have spoken to about this ballot agrees that we should have had the chance to vote for Kemi, yet we haven’t!

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
2 years ago
Reply to  C J

Agree about giving membership more options. Ideal number of candidates would be 4-5, so they could have started the process after nominations. I’ve no idea what was the point of that quickfire process over a few days.
With a decent number of candidates there would have been a chance for serious debate and fresh ideas, especially if you had had one or more not tainted by association with Boris (yes, I voted for him too!).
Having 2 candidates just allows interviewers to play one off against the other in a he said/she said contest.

Arkadian X
Arkadian X
2 years ago

I must be watching a different contest. Everything seems rather civilized to me.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
2 years ago
Reply to  Arkadian X

I agree. The only thing that’s ACTUALLY changed is the quality of the commentariat, this piece being a typical example of clever-clever look-what-i-think-i-know nonsense. It follows on from the inanity of the questioning at the lockdown press conferences, when this phenomenon came out in it’s full awfulness.
He finishes with: “It could be worse. The Conservative Party may be a clown show, but at least it’s not the Republican Party.”
If instead of the Republican Party he’d written the Labour Party, it’d have been much nearer the mark, and also why he might well be left with a great deal of egg on his face in a couple of years time. If so, this article will be quietly forgotten whilst he still bangs on about Thatcher. And he accuses Truss of hanging on her coat-tails!

Last edited 2 years ago by Steve Murray
Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
2 years ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Read Audrey Mir’s article ‘How the media polarised us’ in the City Journal. It explains pretty well why journalism has been going down the tubes for the last 20 years.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
2 years ago
Reply to  Gordon Arta

Yes, i found that to be really informative, thanks!
The sad thing is that Sandbook, who straddles both the old and the new journalistic worldviews, should know better.

bo mosrs
bo mosrs
2 years ago

Weird dig at the Republican party. The Democrat president is a drugged semi-corpse, his VP is a giant meme generator, his shadowy puppetmasters have turned the most prosperous country in the history of the world into a banana republic, and the creatures being floated as his replacement have miserably failed
at their current jobs. I’m no fan of the GOP, but it’s clearly stocked with competent men and women who might just save this country from the malevolent clowns running it now.

Riccardo Tomlinson
Riccardo Tomlinson
2 years ago

I’ve got a vote and I’m not your hardcore activist. How do you think a one nation Tory like Boris got chosen? You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

I don’t buy the idea that you’ve got to be smooth and slick like Cameron. In fact Cameron himself disproves this. He looked and sounded great but he and Osborne were a disaster.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
2 years ago

I am very disappointed Mark Francois is not running.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jeremy Smith
Philip Burrell
Philip Burrell
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

I am giving you an uptick on the assumption that was not meant to be taken seriously.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

see a shrink… NOW?!

Peter Lloyd
Peter Lloyd
2 years ago

All the time reading this I was shouting inside my head “It’s the MEDIA!”. Then, it was all put together in the last three paragraphs. Murdoch backs conservatives and, because they govern for people who bank in the Caymans, degenerating the standard is inevitable and beneficial.

Keeping away from anything serious is vital, or government in the public interest will surely follow, a disaster for the parasites who’ve made tax free billions off post-Thatcher policies.

He, and social media, have dragged most other mass media into that same gutter. The only difference right now is it is Tory vs Tory. At no time in history would Truss be a serious candidate for anything. Rupert’s gift to democracy.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter Lloyd

“Consummatum est!”

Peter Mott
Peter Mott
2 years ago

“pandering to a hard-core mob”. I have read that Tory MPs are much more hard-core than the membership of the party.

Charlie Corn
Charlie Corn
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter Mott

More hardcore economically, more centrist liberally. Tory members are very much ‘hang the paedos, fund the NHS’.

Maureen Finucane
Maureen Finucane
2 years ago

The problem with pitching a leadership election to a handful of very elderly and right wing activists is that this won’t have any broader appeal to the country as a whole. The imminent election of Ms Maybot Mark 2 probably (deservedly) means 10 years in the electoral wilderness. Rishi at least has a kind of Blairite charisma.

John Sullivan
John Sullivan
2 years ago

Anyone who believes Sunak has charisma really needs to get out more.

Andrew Langridge
Andrew Langridge
2 years ago

Spot on. “Maybot mark 2”. Truss has no principles – just goes whichever the way the wind is blowing.

Pat Rowles
Pat Rowles
2 years ago

But even as I write this stuff down, I find it very hard to believe.

That makes at least two of us, then.

John Sullivan
John Sullivan
2 years ago
Reply to  Pat Rowles

Unherd started with such promise, but it’s quickly descended into banal nonsense.

“It’s just possible, if you really try, to imagine a future in which … the threat of Covid fades”

When a “conservative” writer comes out with such tosh, you can ignore everything else they say. The “threat of Covid” – such as it ever was – faded to nothing 18 months ago.

David Bennet
David Bennet
2 years ago

Spot on, apart from the reference to the ‘Daily Telegraph’; ‘Daily Mail’, shurely 😉

Last edited 2 years ago by David Bennet
Karen Mosley
Karen Mosley
2 years ago
Reply to  David Bennet

He can’t write that as a regular Mail article writer.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

To the majority of leounge settee Toylitories pointy corfam lace ups and trainers are ” de rigeur” … asked as to whether he even had a pair of trainers, one of my friends at his children’s prep school replied… ” Yes actually three…Stoutie on the flat Henderson over jumps, and one of our tenants daughters trains a couple of pointers for us”…

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

Are you by any chance the NS-T who had a “run in” with Blunkett’s Bobbies a few years ago over a 1” penknife?

Last edited 2 years ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

could there be another?!

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago

Not that I’ve heard of!

John Tyler
John Tyler
2 years ago

Well, the nature of your footwear does often tell you something about your social status. Whether that is of any use or importance is another matter!

Mike Michaels
Mike Michaels
2 years ago
Reply to  John Tyler

Ask the Kaiser!

Pete Rogers
Pete Rogers
2 years ago

I think the point is missed here if you will forgive me for saying such a thing.
We think we have a democracy because we are told by everyone of any worth that we do indeed and we are famous for swallowing what we are told by authority and it is a proud component of our national DNA that we have the Mother of Parliaments to prove it!
For good propaganda reasons we are able to look at the flaws, pathos and skulduggery of our Elected representatives attempting to scale the slippery pole and making fools or Machiavellian devils of themselves which undermines our respect for the visible democratic part of our government, that’s the point.
All the buffoonery leads to the benefit of the Crown, which obtains our respect and admiration by contrast, partly directly through the visible Monarchy and otherwise because we see them as the reliable and honourable part of government protecting us from the evils of the world.
They are so grown up aren’t they -oh and James Bond works for them doesn’t he?
Some banana skin that for us to have alighted upon!
It has to be remembered that the Tories are the Party of State, whose job it is to manage the people to the satisfaction of the Crown, so it is part of their job to seem morally and intellectually inferior to the Grandees, who we neither know nor see.
Thirty years ago Labour gave up the pretence of offering an alternative in opposition to the Crown, because it was too easy for a united elite to destroy them in the eyes of the Public when they tried it and the elite was always united on that front.
New Labour was – and remains – a reformed opposition party that is essentially tendering for the job of governing us on behalf of the State, because that is the only way they can get the Tories grubby hands off the slippery pole to make room for theirs.
The way voting works is that the cynical spook the gullible who run to them for cover (this is the ancient game of “Flocks and Shepherds” which also embraces religion as one of its manifestations) so that the sensible and truly worthy stand no chance of removing the boot of authority from our thrapples, which is of course what is needed as a precursor to democracy ever arising.
This leadership sideshow will make no difference. We will be voting to be told what to do and cheering “Great British Democracy” with a lump in our throats which will give the rulers the infusion of schadenfreude they so deeply appreciate.
We can’t grow up, so here we are stuck – although the principles are simple if we had the will to change this foolishness.
We have “Government of the people!” like we always have had, and always will if the State has its way. It is their purpose to ensure that we never get Government “for the people” and certainly not “by the people” – I mean Imagine that!