29 October 2022
Our third prime minister in three months took office this week – Italy eat your heart out. A cartoon showed the king meeting Rishi Sunak and saying “One hears that your wife is richer than one’s mama”.
Most of the wealth he shares with his wife comes from her father’s business, Infosys, which was founded by her father in 1981. While Sunak had to be shown recently how to use a contactless card, his in-laws live a very modest life. N R Narayana Murthy and his wife Sudha have lived in the same flat for decades and he drives a small car. The only reported difference in their lifestyles is that their flat is now filled with books and his commitment to philanthropy has come to the fore with his having said “The real power of money is in giving it away”.
No doubt his time at Winchester and Oxford will have cured Sunak of any such nonsense.
To everyone’s great relief, Boris Johnson withdrew from the leadership contest after apparently failing to get enough support, saying “ … in the course of the last days I have sadly come to the conclusion that this would simply not be the right thing to do.” A new Johnson! Concerned about “the right thing to do”! Perhaps leopards do change their spots. Perhaps pigs will fly.
The only bum note so far is Sunak’s reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. Six days earlier, she was fired from the post for multiple and serious breaches of the ministerial code on the security of market sensitive information. Although Sunak told parliament she’d declared her error and repented, she actually fessed up only after the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, had challenged her about it.
But let’s give Sunak a clean sheet to start with and see how he deals with all the other problems he’s inherited.
One of these is the controversial public order bill which will add to the restrictions introduced by the new police, crime sentencing and courts act. Their combined effect will be to criminalise carrying a bike lock or superglue with intent, or making a loud noise, so heaven help anybody who sings as they cycle home from the DIY shop.
The right-wing has condemned some road-blocking demonstrations saying they delayed ambulances responding to emergencies, a claim the Ambulance Service has described as “farcical”.
It seems traditional Conservative values are still alive and kicking as Lee Anderson, a Tory MP, asked whether female representation in parliament would “increase or decrease” if Eddie Izzard were elected an MP and he told Talk TV he “would not follow him [sic] into the toilets”, presumably because he considers himself so devastatingly attractive that Izzard would be unable to keep her hands off him. Izzard actually identifies as female and uses women’s lavatories, which means Anderson himself must habitually use ‘the Ladies’ if he’s worried about following Izzard in.
And in Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then business secretary, who saw the writing on the wall and resigned. He then hopped up to the back benches and, when a fellow Conservative MP, Richard Graham, questioned the practicality of repealing and replacing more than 2,000 pieces of EU law within the next 14 months, accused him of refusing to accept Brexit, thereby totally missing the point.
Rees-Mogg had been attempting to get the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill enacted; this would require the replacement of more than 2,000 laws covering almost everything from holiday pay rights to environmental protections to aircraft safety. Luckily, it seems Sunak is likely to de-prioritise the Bill.
(Lawyers behind the original concept of EU-retained law have described the new Bill as “anti-democratic” and “completely barking”.)
Northern Ireland of course doesn’t even have a government in Stormont at the moment because the Democratic Unionist Party still refuse to share power with Sinn Féin who won more seats than they did. I wonder which parts of ‘democracy’ and ‘union’ they don’t understand.
Germany is planning to legalise cannabis for recreational use while some UK politicians (none of whom, I’m sure, ever use nicotine or drink alcohol) are trying to get it reclassified as a Class A drug. Wouldn’t it be more sensible for medical scientists to take an objective look at all drugs, including ‘natural’ and ‘processed’ ones, that are available legally or illegally (or only on prescription) and come up with a rather more sensible classification than the sledgehammer approach of the politically motivated Class A/B/C system?
The new Bond Street station on the Elizabeth line in London finally opened on Monday, four years and an estimated £570m over the original budget of £110m. And that’s just one station. Then try not to think of HS2 and restricted increases in state benefits.
We also heard that Salman Rushdie has lost his sight in one eye and the use of one hand after being stabbed about 15 times in the neck and chest at a lecture in New York in the summer. I read ‘Midnight’s Children’ and enjoyed the first half but found the second half very heavy going and haven’t read any of his other books since. It had won the Booker prize in 1981 and has been lauded ever since, which just goes to show what a philistine I am, but not why anybody should stick a knife in him even if he did subsequently write ‘Satanic Verses’ – it’s just another book. I wish him well.
Some students at Penn State university in America are protesting because Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group Proud Boys was invited to speak at a college meeting last week. My immediate reaction was that anybody should be allowed to speak even if you disagree with what they might say. Then I thought of the benefits arising from Donald Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and wondered how open-minded I actually am, particularly since Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, is apparently considering reversing Trump’s ban.
The number of people killed in clashes with police fell by more than half and the number of people resisting arrest fell by almost two thirds when police in the São Paulo state in Brazil were fitted with body cameras. The far-right candidate who is the favourite to become São Paulo’s next governor, a Covid-denier, is talking about removing them to give the police more freedom of action. Another idea for Trump here.
Did you know that, like lizards, some scorpions can shed their tails when attacked but, unlike lizards, their anuses are in their tails so they are doomed to die of constipation? The researchers who discovered this were awarded the 2022 Ig Nobel prize in biology.
And a smile. The actor Bill Nighy is currently promoting ‘Living’ and, in one interview, said with dry self-deprecation that he’d gone alone to Paris when he was 17 “to write the great English short story”. Well, it made me smile.
Lesser Mutterings 