Some Fairly Survivable Losses

Rodentine maritime evacuation manoeuvres are set to lose our Mother of Parliaments some nine hundred and eighty-seven years' experience of blathering, braying and claiming expenses. Fortunately for the Commons' institutional memory, most of the years composing this near-millennium are concurrent rather than consecutive; and most of the fleeing rodents are Conservatives, few of whom will know more than when they started and none of whom will know better. While most of the retiring Labour MPs are older and longer-serving, almost a third of the evacuations from the bowels of modern Conservatism will be dropping out after less than a decade, despite their doubtless profound flush of privilege in representing their constituents. Hence, in terms of accumulated intelligence and ability the loss to British public life may not be quite so profound as it appears, and perhaps may not appear so even when most of the vacancies are filled by the moderate and sensible apparatchiki of Team Starmer.