As imagined by Brian Beacom
LISTEN, it’s very nice of you to point out I’ve had a pretty good week, but you’ve got to keep things in perspective.
Yes, I made Robert Jenrick look like a complete twit on Peston but, as I said to my mate Ron in the pub last night, that’s hardly a great victory.
Ron agreed that this rent-a-gob Tory was like 12-year-old who’d copied his homework from the class clown who’d spent half the term on his X-Box.
Still, I can’t quite believe how easy it’s been taking on the government lackeys. On Newsnight, when I told Chris Philp, the parliamentary under-secretary of state that the RMT had come to the talks he said we’d abandoned he continually denied it – but looked as bleak as a recession.
Now, should I have called him a liar 15 times? In retrospect, I think 15 was about right. Had it been 16 I felt he could have burst into tears.
But look, you guys in the media have been guilty of talking bollo**s as well. Ron said he had a right good laugh during my interview on ITV’s Good Morning Britain when Richard Madeley asked me if I was a Marxist who was “into revolution and bringing down capitalism”.
When I told the former supermarket wine trolley shopper that he does come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes, and all I’m really into is enjoying Netflix and an episode of The Crown, he didn’t have a comeback at all.
It was the same with Piers Morgan who compared me to The Hood, a Thunderbird puppet who’s an evil, criminal mastermind who wrecked carnage upon the world.
Gawd. I’m a decent working-class bloke from a Paddington slum. I’m not The Hood. I’m Virgil Tracey. If you want to know what evil looks like, check out the pay checks of our train guards after tax.
Now, it’s been said by the likes of Danny Baker and Alastair Campbell that I’ve got a clever style that I bring to interviews. I listen to the nonsense and lies and then pick the holes in the statement.
Well, as Ron says, that’s not that all that clever. But I guess TV viewers are so used to interviewers letting politicians away with so much flim-flam that they find it refreshing to hear me ask the right question, such as why the government is so keen to sell off the railways to private equity firms.
Will we get a result? Ron thinks so. He said I’m winning over public opinion, like great union leaders of the 1970s such as your own dear Jimmy Reid.
He said to me: "That new Jurassic film came out last week, Mick. And Paul McCartney is playing Glastonbury. The dinosaurs are back."
And yes, maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s time for trades unionists with a little bit of common sense to make a comeback, give these people a bit of a slap, verbally, like.
But will I go into politics? Unlikely. I’d have to stop telling the truth.
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