Cancer is a tragedy, not men behaving like boorish oiks
WHAT is ‘a tragedy’? Former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell’s illness with cancer might merit that description, though she is too modest to say so.
Lady Jowell (Lab) will today make a House of Lords speech about cancer care and yesterday gave the BBC a preview, talking about how she was ‘not afraid’ of what the future might bring. Her limpid fatalism reminded me of my sister Penny’s similar calm when confronting the devil cancer.
Back in 1997, Tony Blair forced Miss Jowell, then public health minister, to let tobacco firms continue advertising on Formula One cars. She put up a fight but Blair’s sidekick, the bad Jonathan Powell, told her Tony was adamant. Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone was a sevenfigure Labour donor. Powell’s instruction to Miss Jowell to ignore the public-health benefits and let the cigarette firms go on promoting their death sticks came just after Blair had a meeting with Ecclestone.
Bloody Blair. He claimed he was ‘a pretty straight kinda guy’ and he got away with it. He always does. Now it is poor, decent Lady Jowell who has got cancer. ‘Tragedy’ does it for me.
Her Lords debate was mentioned at Prime Minster’s Questions yesterday by Sarah Jones (Lab, Croydon C), who used to work for her. Ms Jones praised her old boss’s ‘relentless positivity and commitment to changing the world’. Mrs May was in the middle of replying graciously to that, and saying how the whole House would wish to send best wishes to Lady Jowell, when Chris Bryant (Lab, rhondda) started shouting at the Prime Minister from a distant corner. Mrs May narrowed her eyes, as if to say ‘come off it, have some tact and manners’.
Mr Bryant was agitated because he wanted Mrs May to meet personally with Ms Jones and Lady Jowell, whereas she had only agreed to them having a meeting with the Health Secretary. ‘Shame! Shame!’ cried Mr Bryant. It jarred. Mr
Bryant – once a clerk in holy orders – was bored. I later saw him juggling his mobile telephone from hand to hand. He was itchy with under-use. Europhile and Blairite that he is, there is not much for the clever Bryant to do in Parliament at present. Ennui can generate hyperbole – and hyperbole can make the Commons look daft.
And that is what happened after PMQs when Speaker Bercow granted an Urgent Question, no less, to some row about an all-male charity dinner at the Dorchester Hotel at which various men had behaved like oiks. In previous decades this might have warranted a few inches in a City diary column and possibly a page three lead in the Daily Telegraph. In this era of Twitter, it was allocated hours of airtime on rolling-news television and an urgent debate in the Commons. Is it any wonder that so many voters look at this place and give indifferent shrugs?
The parliamentary day did already promise debates on pensions, refugees, public-sector outsourcing and the railways in the South East of England – things that really might be of concern to the electorate. Yet the Squeaker decided that chauvinist rowdiness at a Mayfair hotel fund-raiser for a children’s hospital took precedence over those matters. Such are the times.
Labour MPs alighted on the most marginal of Governmental connections to make a partisan to-do: one of the dinner’s organisers was a businessman who held a non-executive position at the Education Department. Education minister Anne Milton happily told MPs the bloke, name of Meller, had quit. Meanwhile, junior minister Nadhim Zahawi had been present at the dinner. Up went cries that he must ‘resign, resign!’.
Mrs Milton, a former nurse, admitted she knew nothing about the dinner. That rather raised the unasked question ‘so why is the Commons wasting time interrogating her, then?’ She added that it was ‘a tragedy’ youngish men behaved in such a way.
It may be many things – boorish, rude, drunken – but ‘tragic’? Can we not, please, keep a little perspective?