Lessons Learned

After the bloody nose at Crewe and Nantwich and the kick in the groin at Henley, the Glorious Successor has responded to the amputation at Glasgow East in his usual glorious manner. He feels our pain, but other countries in the world are suffering too. We are invited to bask in his sympathy while thinking of the poor children in Africa and resolving, perhaps, not to be quite so nasty next time. "Coming from ordinary families as we do and have done, we know what it is like when people go to the supermarket and find that the price of milk, and the price of bread, and the price of eggs have gone up dramatically in recent months," Gordon said, adding a Bushian touch of grammatical inanity ("as we do and have done"?) to his usual rhetorical trademarks of irrelevance, pomposity and disingenuity. With equal fluency and, no doubt, equal candour, he promised that "we will see in housing and in gas and electricity bills and in energy, us doing more to help the hard-working families of this country". Gordon approves of hard-working families, especially the ones in this country. "We know that our role when facing global economic challenges is to be on the side of hard-working families, on the side of the people of Britain." The real people of Britain, that is; none of whom are single, childless, or lacking in employment opportunification. "We will do whatever is necessary over the next few months to help hard-working families through these difficult times"; but if you live alone or are unemployed or are studying or are struggling on a pension or are employed in the public sector and hence, by definition, not working hard enough, then help will probably be found to be unnecessary after all. Gordon also warned, accurately enough, that Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives would rule on behalf of "the fewest and the richest and the wealthiest people of this country at the expense of cutting the public services of this country". The difference, apparently, is that when Gordon does it it's cute.