How did MP dad stomach the lies?
I DON’T talk about this much, but my dad was a Labour MP for 23 years. He had more integrity than anyone I’ve ever met. I asked him once why he’d gone into politics, and he said, “I wanted to try to help make the world a better place.”
To this day, I can’t walk down the street in my home-town – my dad’s first constituency – without strangers stopping me.
“Your dad helped me when no one else cared,” they say, or “We wouldn’t have a house if it wasn’t for your dad.”
He wasn’t just my hero.
My dad died in 2012. I often think about what I’d say if I could somehow speak to him now, just for a few precious minutes. Of course I’d tell him that I love and miss him, and how much I wish he’d met his grandson. But lately there’s something else I’m desperate to ask, about his work. How could you bear it?
Or, to put it another way, as one brave civil servant tweeted on the day of Dominic Cummings’ wallpaper table mea non culpa: “Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?”
Over the last months, weeks, and 10 days in particular, since Cummings-gate, I’ve become utterly disillusioned with the people in power, and the whole system.
I know people say politics has changed in recent years – the phrase Honourable Gentleman actually meant something once – but still, how did my dad manage being around these kinds of people, day in day out?
The Tories seem to exist in a complete moral vacuum, with no consequences, even when caught red-handed on lie after lie. But never mind, because Boris is “a character”. My dad warned me about this too, by the way – I mentioned having found him funny when he hosted Have I Got
News For You, and my dad was furious. “That man is dangerous,” he told me.
Clearly, he was right. His Government have betrayed us. Around the world almost every country has suffered, but there’s been a growing sense of astonishment at the inept way the British government has mishandled the pandemic.
And yet, we’re not even giving them a hard time about it. America is currently in uproar over injustice. And rightly so.
Yet in this country an estimated 60,000 people have now died from Coronavirus and there’s not even a murmur of protest. Instead we’re pathetically grateful we’re allowed to have a barbecue, and watch sport soon. Roman emperors used to pacify the dissatisfied masses with “bread and circuses.” That.
Woo-hoo the lockdown’s been eased, but do they really think we’re stupid enough not to notice they’ve done it to distract us from Cummings-gate? Former chief scientific adviser Sir David King has said that it is “too early”, and the Charlie Brown lookalike on the podium, Chris Whitty, is said to have refused to allow Johnson to reduce the threat level.
There was a clear choice – the British people, or Boris’s mate, and as history will show, the PM of this country did not choose us. So now scientists are forced to embark on some panic damage limitation, with Jonathan Van Tam urging us not to “tear the pants” out of lockdown easing.
No chance, when Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have scared the pants off me... because theirs are constantly on fire. Don’t worry though, I’m sure it will be us, not them, who gets burned.
It can’t just be me who wants someone to tell them everything is going to be alright.
And while part of me is glad he’s not around to see this mess, a much bigger part wishes my dad was still here to do that.
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An estimated 60,000 people die and there’s not a murmur of protest