Charon QC, my brother – we share the same Father and little else – has invited me for the duration of the election campaign (#GE10) to comment on events from the perspective of a Tory.
By way of background I must disclose that I too have spent a life in the law; the rather more refined world of academe. It matters not, for regular readers of my brothers blog will know that while he pays lip service to the law with his little ‘vignettes’ which he is pleased to call ‘Law Reviews’ – he does not over exert his mind on legal matters in those lucid periods between visits to his vintner. Be that as it may… for many years we, by which I mean the people we ‘know’, have been surprised by Charon QC’s Damascene conversion to the left many years ago and until he started ‘blawging’ it was not a matter of great concern to ‘us’ in Notting Hill and the Shires. It was our dark family secret.
I am, however, grateful to him for being afforded the opportunity to take a different line, by which I mean approach… not something one would take at ‘modern middle class dinner parties’. I would have preferred my smoking hat to be of a blue hue, but one cannot have everything in life and my hatter offered only purple as an alternative…which is just a bit too ‘Non-UKIP’ for me… if you forgive the pun which CCHQ gave me earlier today as a rather neat little ‘sound byte’ should I happen to find myself on Newsnight being interviewed as one of the ‘Great Ignored’.
From the Playing fields of Eton to the playing fields of Parliament
Much has been made of David Cameron’s patrician background (In fact Gideon Osborne may probably lay better claim to a place in the nobility, but give it time and I am sure great honours will follow for David) and his schooling at Eton. I went to a rather more sophisticated public school modelled on a bit of rum, sodomy and the lash as Churchill once described the Navy – although only rum was actually ‘out of bounds’ at my old school in my day.
It may interest you to know – although those on the left will find this ironic – that Eton was founded by Henry VI originally for the children of the poor as a charity school to provide free education to seventy poor boys who would then go on to King’s College, Cambridge, which he also founded in 1441. As the school grew, more students were allowed to attend provided that they paid their own fees and lived in the town, outside the college’s original buildings. These students became known as Oppidans, from the Latin word oppidum, meaning town.
Today, of course, Dave lives in Notting Hill – but, to his credit, he shares this wonderful part of London with investment bankers and tourists; the original inhabitants having long de-camped to Hoxton or banished to the Wormwood Scrubs side of the Notting Hill area…and, indeed, some of them are actually in Wormwood Scrubs with, they say, some MPs and insider dealers soon to join them.
I digress. Parliament is soon to be prorogued… such a wonderful word... a time when the country runs better than at any other time. MPs and ministers will be deprived of their offices, their blackberries and even their official websites. Some of them have been clever enough to come up with the device on Twitter ‘Buggins4MP’... others like @WilliamJHague..who had to use the ‘J’ because he wasn’t quite savvy enough to set up a twitter account before other ‘William Hagues’, so they can communicate with their subjects. It has to be said that my favourite Tory, apart from Ken Clarke, was rather busy attending to Lord Ashcroft’s repatriation to the United Kingdom as a fully fledged and domiciled member of the House of Lords.
For the next four weeks we will be given the opportunity to hear educated men and women slagging each other off… a sort of Rah Boo Sucks… in the case of my own favoured party… and given dire warnings by Gavin Esler on Newsnight that they must sit quietly with their hands behind their backs like visitors to a lap dancing club – lest we have a repeat of the wonderfully disgraceful episode on Newsnight the other evening covered well by Guido Fawkes on his post Clash of the Pie-Tans.
For those of you new to ELECTION FEVER, may I suggest that you make it your duty to consult Iain Dale, Conservative Home and Tory Bear… for therein lies a lot of what you need to keep up to speed on the events of our Tory future. Of course, The Sun, if you can tear yourself away from the coverage of football and tits, has a most amusing political columnist called Tony Newton Dunn, Kelvin Mackenzie and of course probably the most important political leader writer in the country… in terms of ‘REACH’. .. I am talking KAVANAGH.
A little taste of the genre… first, from Trevor Kavanagh…When it’s no fun being well hung
And this wonderful statement from Kelvin “Gotcha” (Remember the Falklands war) Mackenzie…
@Frasernels “One more term of Brown and we’ll be twinned with North Korea” – Kelvin MacKenzie at tonight’s Spectator debate. Brilliant line. While you are it… I suppose you may find The Spectator useful as well.
Well… on that note… if you want a future fair for us and not Gordon Brown… It’s TIME FOR CHANGE. I shall return on the morrow.
OUR LEADER…In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti
And… you MUST keep up to speed with GuyNEWS… essential viewing 🙂
I hope that Mr Cameron has his final rally in Sheffield!
Geoffrey Woollard (aka notoharecoursing).
Geoffrey… I do hope so! How is your campaign going… podcast time yet?
Very well, thanks, and I’m ready when you are, but mornings are better for me!
Geoffrey.
I wonder, Professor, if you might have a window of opportunity between now and May 6th to point your brother towards redemption; not by abandoning Rioja, but by turning towards the Tories. 😉
Pam Nash – It is with regret that I have to inform you that one of the last acts to be performed by the Home Secretary before the prorogation of Parliament – a great public service – was to deport my Brother Prof RD Charon….and he didn’t even need a rushed though bill / statutory instrument….. he just did it!
Shame on the Home Secretary. We need all of the brothers Charon here, right now!