Archive for November 2009
Truss loses support
If New Labour is finding the re-emergence of its Union paymasters uncomfortable to live with, David Cameron’s Tory-lite party has problems of its own past. The report in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph of the goings-on (possibly, given the story, the wrong expression) in Norfolk takes us back to the wonderful alternative world of Tory backwoodsmen and Sir Tufton Bufton (although in this case Sir Jeremy Bagge).
This, if Melissa Kite who interviewed him for the Telegraph heard him correctly, is his take on the role of women in the modern world:
Sorry, no, I have never said I’m anti-women. I have got absolutely nothing against women.
Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner? How did my wonderful three children appear? Women, you can’t do without them. My god, take my wife.
What does she do for a living?
What does she do? She looks after me. Looks after the children. Runs the house.
Well, thank goodness we’ve got that straight: keep her in the house and not the House.
Apparently Sir Jeremy is to speak tomorrow at an emergency meeting of the Swaffham Conservative Club, supporting a motion to remove Elizabeth Truss as the candidate for true blue South West Norfolk. In his own words, “I might make a complete bloody idiot of myself but I will have done my bit and not done a u-turn.”
I have news for you, Sir Jeremy, you have already succeeded with the first bit. NFN springs to mind.
“I have let you down” – and in more ways than one
On a day when the BBC showed Into the Storm, and the Economist came through the letter box – and I got to read the obituary of Richard Sonnenfeldt, the chief interpreter at Nuremberg – the report in the Daily Telegraph of David Wilshire’s email reply to one of his constituents beggars belief. It included the following,
“Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler’s gas chambers,”
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the MPs’ expenses story, comparing the treatment of MPs to that of Jews in Nazi Germany is a quite astonishing thing to say. One of Mr Wilshire’s constituents has suggested that he should go now, rather than stay on until the election. He cannot be the only one.
