Priti is muddy stupid

Grandpa would cringe at how Patel plunged into the muck WILDLIFE minister Therese Coffey says she hasn’t discussed conserving antelopes with African politicians. Oh deer oh deer.

I AM old enough to have had a grandfather who fought in the First World War and 100 years ago today he was up to his knees in French mud.

To be strictly accurate he didn’t do much fighting because he was an Army medic and a volunteer, not a conscript.

Grandpa was 17 when he signed up, one of 250,000 young men who lied about their age because 19 was the legal minimum age for overseas service.

He only did it because his girlfriend said he would look dashing in uniform. But when he turned up in it, with the wire taken out of his new peaked cap in a devilmay- care fashion, she ditched him.

This had nothing to do with his non-regulation headgear, but because she didn’t want a boyfriend who was going to spend the next few years burrowed away in foreign foxholes.

The Army decided that as he looked so young he might struggle to haul a rifle so they made him a stretcherbearer instead.

Grandpa laughed all this off to me. But I reckon he was quietly warning his young grandson against the perfidy of women.

To do so today would be sexist, but he came from a different age.

And I do wonder, on t his Remembrance Sunday, what he would make of the present one. My grandfather lived through the reigns of political giants such as David Lloyd George, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Clem Attlee.

Priti Patel isn’t exactly in the same league.

But I was astonished to hear veteran Tory MP Bernard Jenkin excuse her behaviour on the grounds that ministers are ill- prepared for high office and need help.

Come again? Running the country isn’t meant to be work experience.

All ministers are new to the job when they’re first appointed.

Neither Tony Blair nor David Cameron had held ministerial office before they became PM. Among Ms Patel’s misdemeanours was to offer British taxpayers’ cash to the Israeli armed forces.

How off her trolley did she have to be to do that?

My grandpa did not tolerate fools. Nor does Theresa May.

And Priti Patel was up to her knees in the mud of her own stupidity.