Same old New Year

Corruption, fat cats and death ...it’s bad start

I’M not entirely sure why we always expect the New Year to be any different.

It feels like this one has not got off to a good start already but why would it? Problems and Prime Ministers don’t just disappear on January 1.

I was intending to be more optimistic this year. It was a resolution so serious I’ve got it written on a little yellow sticker on the side of my computer. Long gone though, and it’s only the 9th.

I blame the cricket. It’s unhealthy – it really is – to go to sleep with Test Match Special on at the moment. Drifting off with England doing OK, and waking up to find the Australians declaring is not good for the psyche.

Grubby

Add that to a Prime Minister caught out yet again on Whatsapp – this time some grubby little exchange about doing up his flat. It’s obvious what went on there. Favours, back-scratching, etc. Corruption, to give it its proper name.

Hopefully standards – who dislike the Prime Minister immensely – will have a proper look at all this.

I still reckon wallpaper is going to do for this bloke, like it did for Napoleon.

Labour’s Steve Reed, shadow justice secretary, was on the radio. “This is an advanced democracy,” he said. “It is not a tin pot dictatorship.”

Really, Steve? I’m not sure.

Bad opening. Politics picking up where it left off. On top of that, the weather is bad, the fireworks weren’t very good, our heating bills are going up, so is food, so is everything else. Leeds can’t field a full 11, Prince Andrew, Covid, and on Friday morning – 9am to be precise – the pay of your average CEO had already passed what the average worker earns in a year. (It has been pointed out to me that average CEO pay fell last year – tragically from £3.25million to £2.7million. I know, put away your violins. They will live. Somehow, they will live.)

Not a great start to any year by any stretch and then on Friday afternoon, just as it was getting dark, the sad, sad, news that Jack Dromey MP had died, aged 73. A fine man and colleague respected by everyone in the House and always a pleasure to deal with. His family said: “He was a much loved husband, father and grandfather, and he will be greatly missed.”

I rang him a couple of years ago just after the Budget and he said: “I know exactly what this is about. This is about what they’ve done to young homeless people this time round.”

It wasn’t about that at all – not even slightly – but by the time he’d finished, it very much was because he cared so deeply and was so passionate and was impossible to argue with.

Sad, sad start to the year. Over Christmas, a hero of mine, the writer

Joan Didion died. I thought, stupidly, that was it for bad news for a bit. Stupid.

She was a journalist, although calling her that is the same as saying Pavarotti was a singer, or Michelangelo a decorator. Sad, sad news.

She wrote: “I know why we try to keep the dead alive. We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”

Books will keep JD alive, and with Jack it will be his family and all those fights he won and jobs he saved and the work he did.

Sad start to the year.