Born: September 26, 1948;
WHEN, in 1919, the useful idiot Lincoln Steffens declared of the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future; and it works” (a line he came up with before he had actually gone there), he was wrong. But that’s Marxist determination for you.
YOU’VE probably noticed the increase in trains recently. Where there used to be the odd one running, they’re now almost constant, all day, every day. I don’t mean rail services, of course – you’ll be lucky to find any running, given that around 300 were cancelled on Sunday alone. I mean television programmes about rail. There are now whole channels dedicated to them.
I CAN’T remember when I first got fed up with the suffix “-gate” being applied to every scandal, real or fabricated, that came along, but it must have been much closer to the original Watergate affair than to the present day. Perhaps it was “Gategate”, the row in 1993 over the hideous memorial gates unveiled for the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday, but whatever it was, there’s been a lot of water under the gates, and far too many gates, since.
AN unfortunate and, if you’re of a charitable disposition, you might even say unfair, aspect of being in government is that you get the blame when things go wrong. It would be nice (for the politicians) to be able to say that the reverse was also true, and that you got the credit when things go well, but alas, we live in a fallen and imperfect world, into which some rain must fall, slings and arrows, vale of tears, crooked timber of humanity and all that.
THERE are plenty of reasons to disapprove of the Home Secretary’s plans to process the applications of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel “offshore” in Rwanda. But the dozens that I could supply – which are, naturally, the sensible and considered ones – are not those that immediately occurred to the opposition parties, liberal commentators, the whole of Twitter and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
HOW quickly political fortunes shift. A few months ago it was Dishy Rishi, as the Chancellor paid (with the taxpayers’ money, of course) the wages of half the country in order for them to stay at home, and then produced cash for them to have a slap-up meal.
TOMORROW will be the 40th anniversary of the dispatch of the Naval Task Force charged with, and ultimately successful in, liberating the Falkland Islands. Yet there are still plenty of people who will complain about “liberating” in that sentence, and for that matter, Falklands, insisting that they are instead the Islas Malvinas.
NOBODY now reads the great 19th-century Scottish liberal and Chartist Samuel Smiles (he was fond of citing “Nobody” as a villain in his attacks on laissez-faire policies). That is a shame, but you can guess why from the titles of his books: Thrift; Duty; Character; and Self-Help. Nowadays, there’s little appetite for any of these things, so popular with the Victorians, and so crucial to the advancements in prosperity and well-being during their era.
