The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Let Not Poor Davey Starve

David Blunkett, the former Secretary for Human Resource Expendability, has once more disappointed those who look to New New Labour for examples of straight dealing, financial probity and hard-working families. There can't be many such people by now, of course; but we all know how important it is for the irrational beliefs of fanatical minorities to be coddled as much as possible.

Blunkett has just remembered to change his entry in the House of Commons register of interests to include a trip to South Africa courtesy of A4e, a human resource redistribution company which is hoping to profit from the Glorious Successor's flexible (or, in Standard English, privatised) welfare programme. The Commons public administration select committee recently said that, for the sake of appearances, ex-ministers should at least wait until they stopped drawing an MP's salary before starting to profiteer by the contacts they made while in government; Blunkett responded with a "forthright attack", criticising the rules for failing to measure up to his exacting standards of elasticity. He claimed that his failure to register the South Africa visit was "an honest mistake" - a line the minions of James "We're Closing In" Purnell have heard so many millions of times before - and noted that the price of compelling ministers to work for the taxpayer rather than themselves would be to "get people thinking very hard indeed as to whether they take ministerial office because they would be dead in the water afterwards". This would be a great pity, obviously.

Blunkett also noted that his present youthful vigour and alpha-male breeding capacity meant that he would have to continue "earning" (or, in Standard English, grafting) for at least the next ten or fifteen years. Here Blunkett briefly extricates his finger from the cookie jar and places it on one of the root causes of our present political difficulties; namely the dire psychological consequences of becoming a minister too early. Many, if not most, of our major political figures have spent their whole lives in politics without gaining any experience of the real world. Attlee worked with slum children and, like Macmillan, fought in the First World War; Wilson was an academic and statistician; Thatcher was a research chemist. Even Churchill, who had no particular interests in life beyond the aggrandisement of Winston Churchill, felt obliged to serve in India for a bit before allowing his mother to start his political career. Even Thatcher's universally undistinguished successor, whose name escapes me for the moment, managed to attain some brief real-world glory in insurance and garden ornaments.

By contrast, much like the deified Churchill, the Vicar of Downing Street made a perfunctory effort at contributing to society (as a rock music promoter and lawyer) before getting his father-in-law to inveigle him into the Labour party. Similarly, Daveybloke the Cuddly Conservative went straight from Eton to the exalted position of parliamentary gofer for his parliamentary godfather, Tim Rathbone MP, with three months' youth opportunity training in Hong Kong; and thence to Oxford and the Conservative Research Department. This, plus a couple of decades maturing in the Westminster hothouse, will probably qualify Daveybloke for the post of prime minister before he is fifty, whereupon his most pressing wish will probably be to win more elections than the Vicar of Downing Street did, and the race for the Historic Fourth Term will shape the country's destiny thenceforward. Even if Daveybloke manages to cling on as Prime Minister for twenty years (which Beelzebub in his infinite mercy forfend), he will still only be in his mid-sixties when he is thrown out; while the age for compulsory retirement is likely to be somewhere in the mid-eighties if it still exists at all. Daveybloke will have much time, and possibly a mistress or two, on his hands. How else, other than by trading on contacts made in government, will poor little Davey survive? After all, despite thirteen years of New Labour and two decades of Cuddly Conservatism, it is entirely possible that by 2030 there may still be no effective re-training schemes.

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