Littlejohn is back!
You can’t turn your back for five minutes. or, at least, that’s what I used to think. Whenever I took a holiday, I always worried I might be missing something.
not any more. These days you can safely turn your back for five or six weeks and nothing much changes. It’s almost as if I never went away.
This summer I decided to take an extended break, after 30 years writing this column. Frankly, I’d had enough of trying to find something original to say about the same old nonsense. I didn’t want to read, let alone write, another word about Brexit.
I’d had it up to here with grandstanding politicians, lobbyists and campaigners, flaunting their faux virtue and peddling their prejudices.
nor did I want to end up like the ageing rock star in randy newman’s song I’m dead (But I don’t Know It). I have nothing left to say But I’m gonna say it anyway Thirty years upon a stage And I hear the people say Why won’t he go away?
So off I went, fervently hoping against hope that by the time I stumbled back to the wordface, the world would have moved on.
With Parliament breaking up for the recess, maybe the political class would all calm down. Sanity might prevail. Some hope. These people never take a day off.
I’d only been gone a week when news of Mother Theresa’s attempted Brexit betrayal at Chequers filtered through, forcing me to interrupt my slumbers.
When even that craven effort to keep us in the Eu in everything but name was contemptuously rejected by the chief Brussels negotiator Michel Barnier, I wrongly assumed it was safe to return to my sunbed. BuT
like rust, Project Fear never sleeps. Barely a day has passed without yet another horror story catapulted into orbit by the remoan camp and being treated faithfully as gospel by the slavishly pro-Eu sections of the media.
I can’t be bothered to revisit them all here. The latest involves portable toilets being placed every five yards along the M20 to accommodate the thousands of lorry drivers who will allegedly be stranded for hundreds of years on the approach to dover after we leave.
It’s not called the silly season for nothing. This kind of alarmist drivel deserves to be filed along with the ridiculous ‘ racism’ allegations which greeted Boris’s burka remarks and the confected outrage over Jamie oliver flogging Jamaican jerk rice.
Frankly, these so-called ‘stories’ should be laughed out of court. They’re not worthy of serious comment. The reassuring reality is that, outside the political/media bubble, nobody’s taking the slightest bit of notice. Be honest, how many conversations about the predicted Brexit apocalypse have you had this summer?
When I started writing this column, news was something which actually happened.
Today it has been reduced to what somebody says, usually on social media, and the tiresome Twitterstorm which inevitably follows. This isn’t news, it’s froth and bubble, mere noise.
Elsewhere the same old stories I’ve been writing about for donkey’s years have been coming round again on the hurdy-gurdy all summer. Labour riddled with anti- Semitism (more of which elsewhere). Check. Police abandon the streets.
Check. The first column I wrote headlined ‘Mr Plod has lost the plot’ appeared in 1989.
Prisons in turmoil. Check. How many Porridge spoofs off the back of these reports have I written over the years?
I must admit I got a warm, nostalgic glow yesterday when I read The Times’s front-page splash about South american criminals moving in on London. Been there, done that. More than 30 years ago, when I was on the Evening Standard, I spent a week with the Met’s dip squad on the trail of South american pickpockets who were targeting shoppers in London’s West End.
Seems that Los desperados have graduated to housebreaking these days. Long
hot summer caused by ‘global warming’. of course it was, just like 1976, before climate change had been invented.
anyway, since I arrived home last week, it hasn’t stopped raining.
Still, the good news is that the Whitehall committee which meets every Monday morning to give me something to write is due to reconvene next week after its own summer break.
Insiders tell me they’ve been secretly working on a wealth of new material. you ain’t seen nothing yet.
There are battles still to be fought and won, bucketloads to be tipped, pomposity to be pricked, and plenty of politicians to be pilloried and brought down to earth.
It’s good to be back.