Showing Them How It's Done

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, being a relative of the Royal Family, a millionaire by accident of birth and leader of his country by the grace of Lord Ashcroft and the Murdoch press, has been lecturing the Heathen Chinee on the virtues of democracy. Daveybloke informed some students - presumably genuine, hard-working students and not the nasty, disorderly kind of students who disapprove of the march of progress - that "the best guarantor of prosperity and stability is for economic and political progress to go in step together". In other words, when very rich people such as Daveybloke and his chums hold power (political progress), this empowers very rich people such as Daveybloke and his chums to make themselves and other very rich people very much richer (economic progress). It is to be hoped that the Chinese Communist Party is now sufficiently reconstructed to appreciate these subtleties.

Daveybloke noted that the government in Britain is subject to the rule of law, which explains why serial malefactors like Michael Howard, Jack Straw and Tony Blair are likely to spend their remaining years doing useful community work in orange jackets. Daveybloke said that it could be frustrating when courts and government differ in their views, because this can compel the government to ignore the courts and cause the uncharitable to gain an impression of inconsistency the next time the Home Secretary extols the wonders of law and order. Daveybloke paid tribute to the British media, whereby "the public get to hear from people who hold different views from the government", such as Rupert Murdoch, who doesn't think the government is right-wing enough, and Paul Dacre, who doesn't think the government is right-wing enough. It is not recorded whether Daveybloke graced this section of his speech with any remarks about his party's long and cordial relationship with the BBC.

In a calculated gesture of politeness to their hosts, Daveybloke and his minions insisted on ignoring Heathen Chinee sensitivities about the opium wars and wearing poppies at the reception last night, because the poppies "meant a great deal"; namely a convenient lack of headlines at home about bowing to the whims of foreign barbarians. It is not clear whether Daveybloke, whose party voted for the Iraq war with even less dissent than did the parliamentary Labour party, also chose to lecture the liberators of Tibet on the evils of occupying other people's countries against their will; possibly one or two of the forty-three business leaders whom he took along for company managed to put things in perspective for him.