A date that will go down in history?

If the opinion polls are right, and I hope they aren’t, the 70th anniversary of VE Day on Friday will also be Deadlock in Britain Day.

All round the country bleary-eyed candidates and would-be Prime Ministers will be surveying the wreckage of their hopes.

Just as Churchill did a mere two months after he was ecstatically cheered on the Buckingham Palace balcony on May 8th, 1945.

Spectacularly losing an election you entered with a personal approval rating of 83% is an achievement few can ever hope to emulate.

When Churchill’s wife Clementine tried to console him that his defeat might be a blessing in disguise, he retorted: “At the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.”

So where did he go so wrong? In popular memory Labour’s pledges of social reform overwhelmingly carried the day. Yet the Conservative manifesto of 1945 also promised “a nation-wide and compulsory scheme of National Insurance” and the creation of “a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist”. This should not be altogether surprising.

The Beveridge Report of 1942, to which the post-war settlement owed so much, had been commissioned by the all-party wartime coalition Churchill led.

Personally, I put the Tory crash down to lousy PR. If only Max Beaverbrook or Brendan Bracken had said, “Winston, the thing to do is to carve your National Insurance and health service pledges on an 8 foot limestone obelisk and cart it around the country with you”, how very different the result might have been.

It is altogether more plausible that a post-war Tory government would have set up a National Health Service than that Labour would have instituted a “right to buy” for council tenants in 1959 – another counter-intuitive notion that has recently received an airing on the letters pages.

The unsuccessful Labour manifesto of that year does indeed contain a promise that “Every tenant … will have a chance first to buy from the Council the house he lives in”, but it was referring to privately rented homes that it proposed councils should take over.

Incidentally, imagine the furore that would ensue today if any party put out literature implying that all tenants were necessarily male. Well, maybe not in the case of UKIP.

The greatest counter-intuitive idea of all is that Margaret Thatcher was a Green pioneer because she closed so many coal mines (albeit not as many as Labour’s Harold Wilson) thereby anticipating the current left wing fetish for leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

If you rake through old manifestos you find Labour, now the staunchest opponent of giving the people a say on membership of the European Union, standing on a platform of withdrawal from the EEC in 1983.

Ideas pass back and forth between parties, and memories of past promises, successes and failures are selective. It is worth recalling that the revered socialist government of 1945 continued to award hereditary peerages, and pressed ahead with the creation of a British atomic bomb.

And, while independence was swiftly granted to India, there were ambitious plans for the continuing empire in Africa, including the once infamous scheme to improve British diets through the extensive cultivation of groundnuts in Tanganyika. It failed disastrously because the climate and soil were both completely unsuitable for growing peanuts.

A lesser known disaster of the time was a parallel scheme to boost chicken and egg production in The Gambia, West Africa … with the aim not just of feeding Britain but of reducing the colony’s dependence on the successful cultivation of groundnuts.

No doubt we can anticipate more expensive cock-ups of this sort, whoever finally comes to the surface clutching a lifebelt after tomorrow’s election.

I shan’t attempt a prediction, even though my family are still reeling from the fact that I accurately foresaw the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to a daughter called Charlotte Elizabeth Diana – and then failed to place a bet on it.

Sadly for us David Cameron is no Churchill, Ed Miliband no Attlee. In a world of politicians no one much likes or respects, deadlock may be inevitable. But it is not to be desired, as anyone who remembers the 1970s will vouch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Let's not get depressed about depressives

Are you old enough to remember the Moorgate tube crash of 1975?

Driver Leslie Newson killed himself and 42 passengers on a packed morning rush hour train when he drove it into a wall at the end of the tunnel, having made no attempt to brake.

Witnesses on the platform testified that he was conscious and looking ahead of him with his hands on the controls as he shot past them.

There was intense speculation that he had done it deliberately, but everyone who knew him said it was simply impossible. He was a happy family man who had everything to live for.

Indeed, he had just withdrawn a large amount of money to buy his daughter a car. The cash was still in his pocket when they finally extricated his body from the compacted wreckage several days later.

The cause of the disaster was never determined.

You can perhaps understand why this event came back to mind when news broke of last week’s Germanwings crash. Initially at least, shocked friends of the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz were also telling the media of their disbelief.

But there was one key difference between the two stories: Lubitz had “a history of depression”. Cue an immediate rash of lurid headlines asking why he was ever allowed to fly.

No need to wait until tomorrow for your manure

As a depressive myself for more than 40 years, I naturally take a keen interest in the subject. Where, exactly, should we draw the line?

Clearly if depressives can’t fly planes they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to lead countries. Which would have left a potentially disastrous vacancy in Britain during the Second World War, given Churchill’s lifelong struggle with his “black dog”.

A depressive and a heavy drinker: what could possibly go wrong?

Maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to drive, either. After all, a depressed chef killed himself, a train driver and five passengers by deliberately stopping his car on a level crossing in Berkshire in 2004.

How about restricting access to high buildings while we are about it?

The fact is that many of our greatest statesmen, thinkers and writers have been depressives. Probably more than we know of, given the past tendency to hush such things up.

We should welcome the fact that people have become more open and honest about their mental health issues in recent years. Unfortunately Lubitz was not. The worst possible response to the resulting catastrophe would be to act in a way that might encourage others to conceal their problems. 

Personally, I am a desperately dull depressive. Not being bipolar, I don’t have compensating bouts of mania and euphoria. Just bad days and less bad days. I might well have had more energy, drive and ambition if I had been more consistently happy, but I have held down a job and generally managed to function reasonably normally up to now.

Once in a blue moon I even smile

Suicide has crossed my mind from time to time, but I’ve never felt the urge to take anyone else with me.

It would be no fairer to stigmatise all sufferers from depression as potential murderers than to blame all Muslims for the actions of their lunatic fringe in ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda.

The number of depressives who do think that way is on a par with the number of those with a terminal cancer diagnosis who decide not to go alone. In other words, vanishingly rare.

In the horses and stable bolts department, the Moorgate crash led to the installation of automatic braking equipment at all tube dead ends. A development that at least had no conceivable downside.

Unlike the increased faffing around the cockpit door that will result from the “two people on the flight deck at all times” rule now being applied across the airline industry, which can only heighten the risk of terrorists gaining access to the controls.

Preventing which was, you may recall, the reason for installing armoured doors in the first place, with the chilling unintended consequence we now see. In the end, whatever we do, the sad truth is that Death will win. Because Death always does.

As my late next door neighbour was fond of saying, “No beggar gets out of this alive.” Although the word he used was not actually “beggar”.

As they say on Crimewatch, don’t have nightmares.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Don't call me fat, it's a mental condition

When Churchill died 50 years ago, I don’t believe any of his obituaries included the word “fat”.

No one lamented that he had been snatched from us at a mere 90 years of age because of his cavalier disregard for healthy eating.

Instead his gargantuan appetite for food, whisky, Champagne, brandy and cigars was celebrated as a matter of national pride.

It remains so when any distinguished “person of size” hands in his or her XXL dinner pail. We learn that they were gourmets, never gluttons. People who “appreciated the finer things” and were always “larger than life.”

The "larger than life" Clarissa Dickson-Wright

Contrast this with our treatment of the obese working class, characterised as weak-willed, feckless chavs who need to have their benefits withdrawn to get them off their grotesquely oversized backsides, and be cajoled into gastric band surgery to stop them being “a drain on the NHS”.

I deduce from these inconsistent attitudes that it is not so much obesity we don’t like, as the native lower orders. But it is strictly non-PC to say as much, so we pick on certain characteristics – the dreadful names they pick for their children, say, or the sort of fast foods and ready meals they like to eat – and deride those instead.

As a fat person myself I thought I had a certain licence in the use of the word, in the same way as black and gay people are allowed to self-describe in terms that are strictly verboten for everyone else.
Nevertheless I received a stern ticking-off when I casually enquired of my wife “Who’s the fat kid?” when we were picking our son up from primary school the other day. There was only one of them in the playground, and it seemed the most natural way of describing him.

However, I was swiftly re-educated as to why this was as unacceptable as it would have been to highlight his skin colour or a disability.

Our elder son is already conscious of the importance of not getting fat, even though he is as slim as the fan mail folder in Lord Green’s inbox and has no interest in food whatsoever, regarding mealtimes as an inconvenient interruption to his busy schedule.

And, as already noted, he is entirely typical of his peer group.

Nevertheless we must apparently plough on with the crusade to remove sweets from supermarket checkouts, downsize chocolate bars and make drinking a can of fizzy pop as socially unacceptable as lighting up a Capstan Full Strength would be if they were still allowed to make such things.

I can tell you now what will stop this in its tracks, and it will be someone demonstrating a clear linkage between obesity and mental illness: “I eat because I’m depressed.”

I know this to be a fact of life because I’ve been a depressive and a bit on the large size for the last 40-odd years. I also know that I can alleviate my depression by cutting my calorie intake, sleeping less and exercising more, which also tends to reduce my avoirdupois.

But since every time I write on this subject at least one angry reader writes in to complain that you can no more cure yourself of depression than of cancer, I feel sure that my fellow fatties are aiming at an open goal if they can lumber far enough to get a foot on the ball.

As a child, I was always told not to mock the one monumentally fat girl on our street because it was not her fault: “It’s her glands.” And not, as I strongly suspected, too much time in Maynards and not enough on a skipping rope.

Now it will be the state of her mind.

As for the “saving the NHS money” argument, it’s cobblers. Because if the morbidly obese don’t die young of that, they will surely die old of something equally costly to treat.

Ultimately the only way to save real money on the NHS will be for us all to live in good health until we expire suddenly in our sleep. Perhaps helped on our way by a beneficent National Euthanasia Service.

Now there is a truly sinister thought to ponder. Meat pie, anyone?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whingeing in Northumberland's noble cause is no conspiracy

This column believes that variety is the spice of life, and was hoping to move on from wind energy to opera (not least because I have a book coming out on the subject).

However, it is hard to resist the appeal for enlightenment from Mr Ian Kerr of Chapel House, who enquired last week why wind farm “whingers” like me never seem to “name and shame” the “wealthy landowners” who are “really gaining the most from these developments”.

As one who loathes balls and has never been invited to Christmas drinks at any “big house” in his life, I can assure Mr Kerr that no sinister conspiracy is involved.

If I have not swung my sword of truth and justice at greedy and selfish landowners in the last couple of weeks, it has mainly been down to shortage of space.

Plus the fact that most take care to keep their identities well out of public view when turbine planning applications are made, preferring to shelter behind the energy companies or their agents.

I have seen three names so far attached to the Follions application about which I have written lately, and a fourth person turned up to speak in favour of the plans to a stonily silent council meeting. None was the farmer whose land is involved.

Given the level of anger aroused among his immediate neighbours, so evident in their objections to the planning application, it would be fascinating to know what degree of financial need drives anyone to pursue a course so likely to make him a pariah in his own community.

But I believe that Mr Kerr is wrong about the division of the spoils. Wind farms rob money from all of us, through the huge subsidies that are ultimately added to our electricity bills. They particularly steal cash from those who have invested in businesses like holiday cottages and other tourist attractions whose entire appeal is based on being located in unspoilt and peaceful countryside.

They then transfer this money chiefly into the pockets of the largely foreign-owned “green energy” companies and turbine manufacturers, who have latched onto Northumberland as a county too sparsely populated to mount an effective resistance to their cynical and calculating efforts.

In which category one must undoubtedly place Energiekontor’s recent submission of their planning application for the Belford Burn wind farm at a time when so many potential opponents may miss the two week window to file objections, because they will be enjoying their summer holidays.

Yes, landowners are beneficiaries, too, and the sums involved can be very substantial. If you own a chunk of Northumberland moorland but live in Mayfair or Monaco, the temptation to cash in is obvious.

But those “wealthy landowners” who actually live on and care for their estates seem, on the whole, worthy custodians of our shared heritage. The Duke of Northumberland’s views on wind farms are well known, while among the most cogent arguments against the Follions application were those filed by the trustees of the late Lord Armstrong.

In our still semi-feudal county society, there may well be eager “greens” who feel browbeaten into silence about the wonderfulness of wind turbines because the local squire is against them. Just as there are certainly others who feel they cannot speak out against applications on their landlords’ farms for fear of eviction.

Personally, I would be happy to give the responsible great landowners a more formal role in the political process, perhaps by offering them seats in a second chamber of Parliament. Why has no one thought of that before?

But anyone who loves and defends the beauty of Northumberland is on my side, very much including the 14 county councillors who last week voted unanimously to overturn the advice of their own planners on Follions.

When Churchill visited Cambridge during the war, it is said that he was bearded by a woman angry because the college grounds had not been turned over to vegetable production.

“Madam,” the great man replied. “Those lawns are what we are fighting for.”

Take a drive out of Chapel House, Mr Kerr, and admire the sheer glory of unindustrialised rural Northumberland while you still can. That is what we “whingers” are fighting for.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The decline and fall of the BBC: from Richard Dimbleby to Alan Partridge

I remember when the BBC could move me to tears with its coverage of great national events. Yet so far this Jubilee it has provoked only derisive laughter and occasional spluttering rage.

I was born a year and a day after the Coronation, so the first state occasion that really gripped me was the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965. The impeccably researched and perfectly delivered commentary by Richard Dimbleby sticks in my mind to this day.

For me, the most poignant moment was when all the cranes in the Pool of London dipped in salute as the barge carrying the great man’s coffin passed by.

That very barge reappeared in the spotlight on Sunday, as one of the thousand or so vessels taking part in the Thames pageant. I could imagine no happier way to spend my birthday afternoon than watching coverage of this once in several lifetimes event, but reckoned without the utter uselessness to which our national broadcaster has been reduced.

Never in the field of outside broadcasting can so many inanities and inaccuracies have been spouted by so many to so little purpose.

One should have known how it would develop when they referred to the Queen, early on, as “HRH” rather than “Her Majesty”. The principal commentator, who sounded like Alan Partridge on an off day, burbled on with a constant stream of cringe-making clichés, interspersed with such insights as that a view embraced “so many iconic landmarks that litter London”. I am not making that up.

An “expert” informed us that the Duchess of Cambridge’s headgear came from Lock’s, who also made “the hat that Nelson wore at the battle of Waterloo”. As he might have done, had he been a soldier rather than a sailor, and not died at Trafalgar ten years earlier.

The depth of research into matters maritime was further underlined by the introduction of HMS Belfast as a “90,000 ton” cruiser, an overestimate of approximately 800%.

Perhaps it was consciousness of this almost unbelievable ignorance that prevented anyone from the BBC attempting to tell us a single useful thing about any of the vessels in the pageant, or the people aboard them, except when a camera lighted upon some minor celebrity and they could point out that it was Pippa Middleton or Boris Johnson. As we could see for ourselves anyway.

They informed us that each section of ships in the pageant was preceded by a group of musicians, but could they let us listen to any of them? No. Far better to keep up an endless stream of mind-numbing prattle, losing no opportunity to cut away from the Thames for irrelevant interviews with the parents of “Jubilee babies” or random observers by the riverside.

Note to producers: anyone who has stood in the pouring rain for several hours to watch the Queen pass by is going to tell you that she is absolutely marvellous, so there is no need to ask them the question.

As the afternoon wore on, I noted that many people on Twitter shared my anger and frustration at the BBC’s unremitting drivel. Most felt that Sky was making a vastly better job of it, which seemed ironic given that it is owned by one of the world’s most committed republicans and staunch enemies of hereditary privilege, except when it comes to the management of his own media empire.

When I was small, people still talked about the BBC’s coverage of the Spithead naval review of 1937, when the commentator was so spectacularly drunk that he could only repeatedly slur “The fleet’s lit up!”

But compared with most of the stuff I heard on Sunday, the man was a towering genius. I don’t own a Sky dish, and I do want to see the rest of the Jubilee events, but in the interests of my blood pressure I shall be doing so with my finger poised over a “mute” button at all times.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The European earthquake that could change our lives forever

How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and found that Britain had ceased to exist, and become part of another country?

You would be a touch surprised, I imagine. Yet within living memory, on 16 June 1940, just such a development was announced by no less a patriot than Churchill himself: “France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations but one Franco-British Union”.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and this was Britain’s last throw to keep France fighting Germany. It did not work. The French capitulated and the “indissoluble” union was consigned to the footnotes of history.

Why bring this up now? Because we are similarly balanced on the edge of a precipice and might find ourselves rudely shocked by the speed and radicalism of the proposed solutions.

We watch the unfolding catastrophe in Greece in much the same detached way as most people in Britain observed the Czech crisis of 1938, memorably described by Prime Minister Chamberlain as “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

Yet what is going on in southern Europe now has the potential to cost us far more financially than the Second World War ever did, and it is not just money that is at stake. If governments default, banks collapse, wages cannot be paid and cash machines stop working, it does not take a particular pessimist to see the potential for civil unrest on a scale that will make last summer’s riots look like a nursery school sports day.

It is particularly galling that all this was deliberately set up by the euro enthusiasts who realised that their dream of a single European state could never be realised through democratic consent. So they decided to build it by creating a monetary union that they knew full well would be inherently unstable, but could advance the cause of political union through “beneficial crises”.

As crazy Bond villain master plans goes, this one has worked an absolute treat – to the extent that we even have traditionally Eurosceptic politicians in the UK urging closer union on the members of the Eurozone as the only way to resolve their problems.

But why should even that work? The smart money at the time of writing seems to be on Greece being ejected from the euro and unimaginably large sums of money being splurged to keep Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy within the club. Though it is hard to see what ultimate purpose this will serve, other than saving the faces of the shining-eyed true believers in the European project.

Should they succeed, we would end up with the German-dominated Continent that two world wars were fought to avoid – with the difference that the Germans would not be an all-conquering master race, but the hard-working suckers paying to keep their southern neighbours in the comfortable style to which they have become accustomed. Given the resentments that would be generated on both sides, it is hard to see that as a durable arrangement.

There is absolutely no good outcome to this almighty mess. If you were planning on getting richer any time soon, I would forget it. But the least bad denouement is surely one through which we can see emerging from the dust of the earthquake not more Europe, but less - particularly for those of us in Britain, who are blessed by our geography and history with the ability to explore wider horizons than just looking longingly over the garden fence.

But standing on your own is tough. Even Churchill was tempted to gamble his country’s independence to keep an ally on side. As the crisis across the Channel deepens, we must maintain a hawk-like watch on our current leaders. Otherwise, who knows what we might find ourselves signed up for in a doomed attempt to mitigate the short term pain of change?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Surely there must be some room at the top for a mere lad of 57?

Nick Clegg excited some predictable mockery when he recently referred to rich people living “literally in a different galaxy” when it came to paying tax.

Deputy Prime Minister and Lord President of the Council. No, honestly.

Sadly it is not so. They are very much on this planet, and many undoubtedly share the late Leona Helmsley’s view that “only the little people pay taxes”. And have, as Mr Clegg correctly pointed out, armies of lawyers and accountants dedicated to making this a reality.

Leona: sentenced to 16 years for tax evasion, served 18 months

But those at the top are different in other ways, too: notably in what they contribute in time as well as money. And time, I can say with confidence, is ultimately far more precious.

For example, the other day Tesco led the private sector in raising its normal pension age to 67. Yet its last boss Sir Terry Leahy conveniently retired, shortly before the business began to be described as “troubled”, at the ripe old age of 55.

Leahy: before the wheels fell off

The excuse, I keep being told, is that the job of Chief Executive, Prime Minister or even Headmaster is so impossibly demanding nowadays that no one can stick at it for more than a decade. This would at least make my age of 57 the ideal time to apply for a senior position if the same rules applied at the top as everywhere else.

But, strangely enough, they don’t. Although we are all living longer, and retirement dates for most of us keep receding, those in the most senior roles just go on getting younger. Aspiration is confined to a 20-year window between leaving university full of promise (for which read inexperienced and unemployable) to being considered pathetically over the hill.

We see the results all around us. Most of the present Cabinet, with the right honourable exception of Kenneth Clarke, look like children to me.

Clarke: I may not care much for his politics, but I applaud his dress sense

Yet Palmerston was appointed Prime Minister for the first time at 71, Gladstone for the last time at 82. Churchill was 65 when he succeeded Chamberlain in 1940, and 80 when he finally left Downing Street in 1955. We may debate the merits of all these men, and question whether they were on top form towards the end of their careers, but surely few would deny that the political class of 2012 look like pygmies beside them.

What a British Prime Minister should look like

Similarly, the list of possible successors to Rowan Williams has several men marked down by the bookies as “too old” because they are over 60.

There was a time when one could at least rely on bishops and judges bringing the wisdom of age to their vocations, with the added bonus of some easy laughs when they found themselves baffled by the more outlandish aspects of modern life.

Today it seems that only the British monarchy and the Papacy have room for someone seriously old to play the lead – even though it is so obviously good for the individual filling the role.

In the days when cardinals really were walled up in the Sistine Chapel until they elected a new Pope, there was a strong temptation to vote for the oldest and feeblest of their number to give themselves a break. Time and again this granted a spectacular new lease of life to some poor old chap who had been at death’s door until the Pope’s triple crown landed on his head.

Pope Leo XIII: crowned at 68, died at 93

I am under no Blair-like illusions that my best years are ahead of me, but I do feel that it is time for those of us born in the mid-1950s to launch a crusade to make 57 something fuller of promise than simply a number on the side of Heinz tins.

In short, I am still eager to get to the top of something: indeed anything. All suggestions will be most gratefully received. I promise to apply myself conscientiously for at least the next ten years, and not to spend a penny of my very reasonable salary on employing sharp tax accountants.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Apart from the kid with the nuclear bomb, what could go wrong?

Every vaguely intelligent person accepts that you cannot believe everything you see in the media.

Generalist reporters irritate us as they trample heedlessly over our specialist subjects. Train nerds like me seethe at every reference to “a steam train” that actually means a locomotive, or the notion that freight is conveyed in carriages rather than wagons.

If Radio 4’s Today programme foolishly pronounces Alnwick as it is spelt, how many more of its “facts” may be similarly flawed?

Then there are those endless surveys suggesting that the great British public is bestially stupid, and recognises the name of Churchill only as a nodding insurance mascot.

Spot the difference: 1

I console myself with the belief that resentment of intrusive market researchers must tempt people to offer ludicrously wrong answers. At least until the next time I chance upon a TV or radio quiz show.

Then there are reports of the latest research proving that eating meat or drinking tea will give you cancer, or cure it. Usually both, on successive days.

Plus the news of fresh EU directives and European Court judgements, usually calculated to cause something to be thrown across the sitting room with a shout of “Haven’t they got anything better to do?”

At the highest level is live news footage of events that one can’t quite believe are actually happening. The fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and last year’s Japanese tsunami both fell into this category of a reality so dreadful that it seemed more likely to have been invented by a Hollywood studio with all the resources of computer-generated imagery at its disposal.

And then there is North Korea. Can any of us quite grasp the utter weirdness of that closed society: a hereditary monarchy that claims to be communist and whose leaders apparently enjoy lives of almost unbelievable self-indulgence while its people starve? Yet who stage epic displays of public grief when one Kim drops of the perch to be replaced by another, looking even stranger than the last. We have seen nothing like that in Europe outside Enver Hoxha’s Albania and the Miliband family.

Watching film of the elder Kim’s state funeral, I could not help thinking that the whole thing seemed far too much like a spoof conceived as a Christmas entertainment by the CIA. But then the catchphrase of another columnist kept echoing in my head: “You could not make it up.”

Dreaming up the sheer barminess of North Korea would have been beyond the satirical powers of Swift or Orwell, never mind the sort of American civil servants whose most original idea of the last century was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.

I have only made one New Year resolution for 2012, in response to strong representations from my wife, and that is to spend more time counting my blessings. I shall begin by giving thanks that I do not live anywhere near the Korean peninsula, and in a free and open society.

Those of us of a Eurosceptic cast of mind are sometimes dismissed as “little Englanders” but I, for one, am anything but. I am delighted to live in a country that punches far above its weight in so many areas of art and science, and which has given the great gift of its language to the world. As communications improve, why on earth do some people insist that we must narrow our horizons and hop into bed with the girl next door, particularly when it is Frau Merkel?

Spot the difference: 2

There is only one thing that slightly dents my unusual sense of optimism at this time, and that is the fact that a chubby kid who appears a dead ringer for Timmy Timpson, the legendary spoilt brat from Viz comic, is currently sitting in Pyongyang nursing a nuclear trigger. That and those predictions that the world will end on 21 December, when the Mayan calendar runs out.

But, apart from that, what could possibly go wrong? Happy new year, everyone.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

If only I could vote for the ash cloud

My battle with pneumonia last week had a decidedly Franco-Italian flavour: lying down, conceding defeat and waiting for outside intervention. Mercifully it arrived in the form of powerful antibiotics, normally reserved for elephants with rampant septicaemia. These have so far taken me to the Battle of the Bulge phase of the campaign, with the cough of doom currently staging an improbable but determined fight back.

Still, at least it gave me time to think, for a change, and to reach one important conclusion. If the cough wins, the perfect epitaph for my gravestone will be “If only”. This should prove less controversial with the authorities than my previous choice, “Not sleeping, only dead”.

If only I could have predicted that the Elfin Safety worriers would prohibit all air travel for the best part of a week (with more to come) and that Nick Clegg would become the most popular British political leader since Winston Churchill, and if only I’d had the wit to place an accumulator bet on it, I could now be looking forward to a very comfortable retirement.

Marred a little, if the polls do not move, by having another five years of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister even if Labour comes third in the number of votes cast. Though at least such monstrous unfairness might finally provoke the supine taxpayers of Britain into meaningful revolt against their political system.

The trouble with the Clegg surge is that it is a meaningless revolt; an anti-politics gesture provoked by that televised non-debate which reduced the election to another episode of “Britain Lacks Talent”. It serves David Cameron right for pressing for these events in the belief that they would show up Gordon Brown for a fool, without pondering long and hard on the other possibilities.

My first problem with Mr Clegg is that I cannot hear his name without thinking of Last of the Summer Wine, and that nice old boy whose national treasure status has been consolidated by providing the voice of Wallace and Gromit. It would greatly increase my engagement with the electoral process if the next Prime Ministerial debate could be filmed in Holmfirth, with Clegg, Foggy Cameron and Compo Brown careering down a hillside on a souped-up DFS sofa, then being chased by a brush-wielding Harriet Harman in the role of Nora Batty.

Next, he unfortunately shares his name with those large horse flies that inflict such painful bites and are the best argument, apart from the climate, for avoiding the exposure of flesh while walking the Northumbrian moors.

Apparently no-one minds that he went to precisely the same “posh” school as that unbearable toff George Osborne, though admittedly he had the wit not to join the Cambridge equivalent of the Bullingdon Club, or at least not to get photographed in its uniform. But then going to the Eton of Scotland never did Tony Blair any electoral harm, did it? Different rules apply to Tories.

Finally, at the heart of Mr Clegg’s political philosophy lies enthusiasm for the project of European integration. I am sure the vast majority of the British people are not of the same view; so perhaps, as the focus turns to policies rather than personalities, this clegg may yet be swatted. One can but hope, remembering that Churchill reached his peak of personal popularity just weeks before he was ejected from office in favour of the anti-charismatic Clement Attlee.

Ask yourself this. If Mr Clegg really is the new Churchill, why has he not already commandeered a flotilla of small ships to sail to Dunkirk and bring our stranded compatriots home from the Continent?

Personally, I feel an increasingly soft spot for the invisible ash cloud that has stopped all those pesky carbon-emitting flights and may yet cool the whole northern hemisphere. How green is that? If only it were standing for election …

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.