Proper Britons keeping it real
RTHE big problem for Boris Johnson in reaching out to younger voters – and by younger, I mean those aged up to and including their mid-40s – is that they simply don’t remember the really bad times under old Labour. Most weren’t even born during the 1978-79Winter of Discontent, or they were babies and toddlers. They have no idea what the Winter of Discontent was; the better educated among them mostly think it’s the line spoken by Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s the same with the Cold War. It’s just not on their radar.When I was becoming politically aware, the Cold War was a huge fact of life that dominated our daily thinking. My generation quickly became familiar with acronyms such as MAD – mutually assured destruction – that underpinned the whole concept of deterrence: you nuke us, we’ll nuke you straight back. It was the fear of MAD that forced Kennedy and Khrushchev into cutting a deal over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Most people under 45 barely know who Kennedy was, haven’t even heard of Khrushchev, and have a vague idea the Cuban Missile Crisis was a film starring Kevin Costner (even that movie,Thirteen Days, is almost 20 years old now). Trying to communicate these blood-freezing realities to people born anywhere after the early 70s is, frankly, a waste of valuable
Relectioneering time. I know: this week, chatting to a group of 30-somethings, I described what the Winter of Discontent was actually like if you were there (I was 23).
Endless power cuts, freezing evenings spent by guttering candlelight or evil-smelling paraffin lamps; no fire service (the lads were on strike); no funerals (so were the gravediggers); rubbish piling above head-height in the streets (what we used to call the dustmen were all out too) and a useless Labour Prime Minister who flew back, suntanned, from a political jolly in theWest Indies to be asked what he was going to do about it all.
His reply, headlined: “Crisis? What crisis?” (yes, I know his actual words were: “I don’t think other people in the world would share in the view that there is mounting chaos”, but the crisp three-word summary was an eminently fair distillation of his
QUITE what Eleanor Tomlinson (Demelza in Poldark) is doing as Amy in BBC1’s The War Of The Worlds (starts tomorrow) isn’t exactly clear. There’s no Amy in the H.G. Wells classic... but who cares?
Sunday nights haven’t been the same without her.
She’s a terrific actor and hugely watchable, and we’d see her in anything, especially fighting Martian invaders (spoiler alert: it’s not Amy who eventually prevails over the aliens; it’s the sniffles wot do for ’em).
Welcome back to the weekends,
Eleanor, right.
Rpompous answer) caused uproar and Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent first election landslide.
But as I described it all, I realised my audience was looking at me the same way I used to look at my dad when he talked about rationing and National Service.
I tried again. “But don’t you see – this is what will happen if Corbyn wins,” I said. “He’s a Marxist! He says he wouldn’t even press the button! He doesn’t understand the basic principles of deterrence!”
Reader, I’m not sure they even really knew what Marxism is – and as for “the button”...
Oh well.TheTories now have a 14-point lead according to a midweek poll, taken after Nigel Farage’s partial climbdown.
It’ll probably all be all right. It’s just that if we forget history, it has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
JUDY writes about our response to the tremendously moving Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall. The following morning I attended the 11am Service of Remembrance at Looe’s War Memorial.
It was packed – at least 1,000 people were there; young, old, of wide-ranging ethnicity and economic status, all sharing the emotion of the moment and the same sense of profound gratitude to the fallen.
Standing under the November sunshine in this little Cornish fishing port, I was struck by how quietly constant and relevant the REAL Britain is, outside the cynical, mad, twisted world of Westminster.
And I gave thanks.