I have long been of the opinion that Mr Michael Howard was, and is, a robot controlled by a team of malevolent criminal masterminds living in an air-conditioned bunker beneath the mountains of Switzerland, but there has not been much external evidence to support this view.
Until now. Mr Howard was on the Today programme this morning, along with Lord [Norman] Lamont and Mr John Selwyn Gummer, to discuss their appearance together in a photograph at the wedding of Mr Kenneth Clarke. Also in the photograph are Mr Leon Brittan and Mr Norman Fowler.
The picture - which can be seen on the website of Today (http://bbc.co.uk/radio4/today) - is a fine document. The men are smartly attired in the style of 1964. Their hair is short and well-combed. The smell of Vitalis pollutes the air. Mr Clarke cradles a top hat.
With the distorting glow of nostalgia, they look a little like the "Rat Pack" of Mr Frank Sinatra, off to cause havoc on the "crap" tables of Cambridge. Or, they could be a group of rural undertakers who have forgotten where they parked the Bentley.
It is a photograph from a different time, made powerful by what me know of these men. Five of them are future cabinet ministers. Mr Gummer will become famous for feeding a beef burger to his daughter Cordelia at the height of the BSE panic of 1990. Lord - then Mr - Lamont will be remembered for his radical decision to emphasise the first syllable of his surname, and for "Black Wednesday". Mr Clarke will campaign tirelessly for human rights; particularly the right of a gentleman to wear brown suede shoes with a business suit in the town.
And what sadness, now, to realise that their time has passed. The Conservatives are in hurry to appoint as their leader another man in a hurry; velocity and ambition being substitutes for substance in current affairs.
In their interview with Mr James Naughtie, Mr Gummer, Lord Lamont, and (the increasingly louche) Mr Howard, were keen to deny that they were not yesterday's men, but their efforts were hampered by a series of electronic whirrs and clicks. Mr Naughtie said the noises were interference from the BBC "radio car". But, really, it sounded like the death-wheeze of a group of yesterday's robots.
In that bunker in Switzerland, the gnomes of Zurich were pulling the valves and coils from their robot control devices, and tranferring the power to the microchips of their new model, The Cameronator.
2 comments:
It is fitting that you employ Harold Wilson's xenophobic Sixties 'Gnomes of Zurich' rhetoric whilst attempting to mock Conservative politicians from that era. Well at least the Conservatives were not responsible for bringing the economy to such a baneful state that the IMF had to be called in. That was the doing of such Oxford First holders as Wilson and Healey. Your real animus should, of course, be reserved for genuine villains, viz Jewish social-Marxists like George Soros. Oh I forgot that, unlike the Leftist-promoted Black and Asian ethnic interests, Jewish group interests are not allowed to be seen to exist in case Britain's ovine Whites come to realise who are the true authors of their country's country's parlous condition.
Sorry for being so shrill and rude.
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