Healthy Revisionism

Few people now living know what a Stephen Dorrell is, and even fewer care. Nevertheless, as a minister for NHS-kicking under the whining interregnum that occupied Downing Street for seven years after the sainted Thatcher's resignation, the nobody's nobody was apparently the best the Conservatives could manage in the way of a denial delivery system against the continuing self-exculpation of the wretched Matt Hancock. The diaries of everybody's nobody are being administered in homeopathic doses via the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, and in the absence of a presence Dorrell and a Liberal Democrat were extruded to say they didn't believe a word of it. Dorrell even went so far as to speculate that Hancock, who served in a Boris Johnson cabinet and broke his marriage vows and his own government's rules by groping his bit on the side in full view of a video camera, might possibly encounter some sort of difficulty should it come to lying under oath. If nothing else, the Dorrell intervention demonstrates the superiority of terminal capitalism at the vital business of re-writing history. Under the totalitarian régimes against which Mr Churchill so valiantly memoired himself, those who failed to do their part in doctoring the past would often vanish without trace; whereas our own system enables history to be promptly and efficiently edited by pre-existing nonentities.