There's Something About Gordon
More of a note to myself than anything else - remember to ask mother (whenever she comes back from Europe) if Dad went to the Labour Party Conference in 1978. I am sure I clocked him in the audience on Channel 4 News last night when they were showing footage of Jim Callahan addressing the conference.
Admittedly I could have been wrong because it was 1978 and there were a lot of bearded, bespectacled guys with long hair there, but it was a sort of split second moment of recognition and the picture moved on before I had time to double take. It was extremely weird, like seeing a ghost.
I can't remember if he went to the conference that year because I was about two years old. All I really remember of the Seventies is that the lights went out a lot. But knowing him he would have toddled off to the conference if he could. It wasn't so much the beard, the long black hair and the Buddy Holly glasses he'd been wearing since 1964 but the tilt of the chin, the way he was looking at Callahan - you know? That kind of from-a-distance flash of instant recognition of someone who's as familiar as breath to you. I could be going completely crazy and he didn't go to the conference at all but if it wasn't my dad then whoa - doppelgangland. Quite spooky really. I wonder what it must be like to be the child of someone dead and famous, someone whose image is everywhere and on the TV all the time. Must be strange.
Bumped into a friend in town, one whose obituary I was bracing myself to read any day soon, and was relieved to find him sober, lucid and with absolutely no recollection of the hideous lunch we'd had the last time we got together. He was completely pissed in a horrible self-destructive way, having recently lost his mother to cancer. So it was very good to see him only as drunk as he usually is in the mid-afternoon, rather than in the state he was before. I didn't remind him of the lunch from hell. He'd only be embarrassed.
We had a quick drink in the vastly insalubrious surroundings of our old local, now rendered depressingly unpublike by the absence of airborne carcinogens and agreed miserably that politics was now just a choice between Old Tory and New Tory. Old socialists like him and me, the kids of the old guard, have fuck all voice in politics any longer. Never really did anyway. I've been a tactical voter ever since I could vote. I have to vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out, although it didn't work last time round. My MP is a Tory and the local council is Tory controlled, mainly because people deemed the previous Liberal council useless, corrupt and moneywasting. Now they think the Tory council is useless, corrupt and profligate, but that's local government for you. They're all like that.
I do kind of hope there's an election soon, though. I base most of my politics these days on who I'd trust to run the NHS and out of all of them I'd trust Gordon Brown. Not to say I'd trust him much, but I'd trust him more than Cameron. I wouldn't trust Cameron with anything. He's basically a whore who'll say anything he thinks is a crowd-pleaser. And there's no use trusting Menzies Campbell because he hasn't got a cat's chance in hell of becoming Prime Minister - although I daresay he wouldn't do a bad job. I like 'Ming', although not as much as I liked Kennedy. He was doing well in the polls until he got the whistle blown on his drink problem.
I don't know what it is with Gordon Brown, but I can't help respecting him. I know that the economy is based on a fragile bubble of credit and it's all a bit oogy once you get past the veneer of prosperity. I know about the PFI cock ups and the identity card debate and European referendums and so on. And tea with Mussolini...beg pardon, Maggie...well, that was just a huge big Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment.
Okay, no - I do know what it is with Gordon Brown. He's not Tony Blair. That's kind of what the charm is right now, I think. Whereas Tony would have talked about 'anti-social behaviour' Brown calls it 'immorality'. The Bible quoting in his conference speech was also extraordinary. That would usually make me flee screaming from a politician, but he's a minister's son after all. And he doesn't fudge and flirm and practically simper like Blair did when put on the spot about his faith by Jeremy Paxman. Blair was distinctly high church - so High Anglican he was almost Catholic. And he always acted as though he was ashamed of it. Religion is just uncool and Blair had a horror of looking uncool. Brown on the other hand is low church - theology over bells and smells. And I think aesthetically that appeals to me more. I'm not religious but I know I'm temperamentally inclined to non-conformist protestantism - questioning rather than obedient.
He sounds and looks very authoritarian which is a worry, in a way. And could be a serious worry if he continues in that vein, but he's not sugaring pills, which I think is why he's doing so well in the polls. Again, he's not Blair, smiley bullshit Blair.
There needs to be conformation or denial of an election soon, to avoid a similar fuck up to the one Callahan made. The trouble with Labour is that all through the Eighties and Nineties nobody forgot how bad things got before Thatcher came in. And no matter how bad things got under Thatcher (and they did. Fucking awful, for the record.) everyone remembered the Winter of Discontent. The thing the Tories have to overcome if they want to get re-elected is the people's memory of their appalling record on the NHS. That's a kind of disgrace that shouldn't be forgotten. It's a grudge worth holding, in my opinion. That and the fact that for all Cameron's smiles they still basically hate poor people on general principles.
Admittedly I could have been wrong because it was 1978 and there were a lot of bearded, bespectacled guys with long hair there, but it was a sort of split second moment of recognition and the picture moved on before I had time to double take. It was extremely weird, like seeing a ghost.
I can't remember if he went to the conference that year because I was about two years old. All I really remember of the Seventies is that the lights went out a lot. But knowing him he would have toddled off to the conference if he could. It wasn't so much the beard, the long black hair and the Buddy Holly glasses he'd been wearing since 1964 but the tilt of the chin, the way he was looking at Callahan - you know? That kind of from-a-distance flash of instant recognition of someone who's as familiar as breath to you. I could be going completely crazy and he didn't go to the conference at all but if it wasn't my dad then whoa - doppelgangland. Quite spooky really. I wonder what it must be like to be the child of someone dead and famous, someone whose image is everywhere and on the TV all the time. Must be strange.
Bumped into a friend in town, one whose obituary I was bracing myself to read any day soon, and was relieved to find him sober, lucid and with absolutely no recollection of the hideous lunch we'd had the last time we got together. He was completely pissed in a horrible self-destructive way, having recently lost his mother to cancer. So it was very good to see him only as drunk as he usually is in the mid-afternoon, rather than in the state he was before. I didn't remind him of the lunch from hell. He'd only be embarrassed.
We had a quick drink in the vastly insalubrious surroundings of our old local, now rendered depressingly unpublike by the absence of airborne carcinogens and agreed miserably that politics was now just a choice between Old Tory and New Tory. Old socialists like him and me, the kids of the old guard, have fuck all voice in politics any longer. Never really did anyway. I've been a tactical voter ever since I could vote. I have to vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out, although it didn't work last time round. My MP is a Tory and the local council is Tory controlled, mainly because people deemed the previous Liberal council useless, corrupt and moneywasting. Now they think the Tory council is useless, corrupt and profligate, but that's local government for you. They're all like that.
I do kind of hope there's an election soon, though. I base most of my politics these days on who I'd trust to run the NHS and out of all of them I'd trust Gordon Brown. Not to say I'd trust him much, but I'd trust him more than Cameron. I wouldn't trust Cameron with anything. He's basically a whore who'll say anything he thinks is a crowd-pleaser. And there's no use trusting Menzies Campbell because he hasn't got a cat's chance in hell of becoming Prime Minister - although I daresay he wouldn't do a bad job. I like 'Ming', although not as much as I liked Kennedy. He was doing well in the polls until he got the whistle blown on his drink problem.
I don't know what it is with Gordon Brown, but I can't help respecting him. I know that the economy is based on a fragile bubble of credit and it's all a bit oogy once you get past the veneer of prosperity. I know about the PFI cock ups and the identity card debate and European referendums and so on. And tea with Mussolini...beg pardon, Maggie...well, that was just a huge big Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment.
Okay, no - I do know what it is with Gordon Brown. He's not Tony Blair. That's kind of what the charm is right now, I think. Whereas Tony would have talked about 'anti-social behaviour' Brown calls it 'immorality'. The Bible quoting in his conference speech was also extraordinary. That would usually make me flee screaming from a politician, but he's a minister's son after all. And he doesn't fudge and flirm and practically simper like Blair did when put on the spot about his faith by Jeremy Paxman. Blair was distinctly high church - so High Anglican he was almost Catholic. And he always acted as though he was ashamed of it. Religion is just uncool and Blair had a horror of looking uncool. Brown on the other hand is low church - theology over bells and smells. And I think aesthetically that appeals to me more. I'm not religious but I know I'm temperamentally inclined to non-conformist protestantism - questioning rather than obedient.
He sounds and looks very authoritarian which is a worry, in a way. And could be a serious worry if he continues in that vein, but he's not sugaring pills, which I think is why he's doing so well in the polls. Again, he's not Blair, smiley bullshit Blair.
There needs to be conformation or denial of an election soon, to avoid a similar fuck up to the one Callahan made. The trouble with Labour is that all through the Eighties and Nineties nobody forgot how bad things got before Thatcher came in. And no matter how bad things got under Thatcher (and they did. Fucking awful, for the record.) everyone remembered the Winter of Discontent. The thing the Tories have to overcome if they want to get re-elected is the people's memory of their appalling record on the NHS. That's a kind of disgrace that shouldn't be forgotten. It's a grudge worth holding, in my opinion. That and the fact that for all Cameron's smiles they still basically hate poor people on general principles.