The secret life of MPS would be television worth watching
What do MPS actually do? A question for the ages, especially this one, where formulating words about a political process that has not yet happened has seemingly been, for the past three years, the bulk of the job.
Since Parliament returned from its Easter break – a two-week period of rest from repeated “meaningful” votes and identical outcomes that were not, as we have been wrongly informed until now, a sign of madness – tumbleweed has been blowing through Westminster’s crumbling doors; licence, surely, to get up to no good.
If fulfilling their one job is off the table, a second (of which politicians are big fans) surely calls. To which I suggest beginning production of The Secret Life of MPS, a fly-on-the-wall documentary series that would seek to bridge the constituent/representative divide. Channel 4’s iterations have done rather well – though they were following small children who, by virtue of never having heard about Brexit, were more carefree and entertaining than their grey-faced, grey-suited replacements could ever be – and this might just be the good PR that politicians need.
Provided, of course, they’re behaving themselves. Which they
may well not be – spending that many months trying to find new ways to twiddle one’s thumbs addles the brain, one assumes.
The outcome is all too easy to imagine: Jeremy Hunt practising phrases from a German language app, should a visit to the Netherlands arise; Chris Grayling making paper doll chains out of his now-defunct ferry contract (weeks of fun!); Penny Mordaunt blow-drying every honeyed lock with the kind of military precision that will be used, if anyone asks, as evidence of her ability to head up the Ministry of Defence.
Boris Johnson, meanwhile, has surely whiled away many an otherwise quiet afternoon by sliding down the corridors on his leather document holder – five minutesegments that have been rebranded as “thinking time” – while Matt Hancock, pleased that a diminished workload means MPS are spending less time sitting at their desks (it’s as bad as smoking, you know), no doubt now spends his days ordering outdated medicine books from Amazon with increasing fervour, finding new (old) diseases to announce as curable if we all just took up gardening or dancing.
Liz Truss is probably using the time to work on her memoir – more of a picture book, really, filled with the kinds of images she would otherwise be posting online: fry-ups, her evolving feelings about cheese, that sort of thing, while Michael Gove practises how to look less like a cartoon in the mirror.
Idle minds are the devil’s workshop. So if stalled governance is inevitable, a little light entertainment is the least voters deserve.
Is there any greater indignity than having the offer of the unlimited crisps you were promised with your first class rail ticket unceremoniously rescinded on account of the perk being “abused”? Apparently not, for Greater Anglia, who have announced they are axing the free snacks given to travellers on weekend services as unfettered access to water, juice and biscuits is “no longer commercially viable”. Which, incidentally, is how most people might describe UK train travel.
Anyway, I can wholly imagine that passengers were not exactly sparing in their approach to refreshments, there being something very deeply ingrained within us that says that, if we have paid for a service, anything that falls within its remit is ours for the (biggest possible) taking. It’s a logic that exists across the spectrum, from IKEA pencils to hotel toiletries. And somewhere in the middle are train tickets which, on account of being so extortionate, mean disgruntled travellers probably feel that they are owed a little more than a seat.
Plonk a tray of crisps or biscuits in front of any Brit and the outcome is usually akin to one of those nature documentaries in which a pack of hyenas are let loose on the rotten halfcorpse of an antelope: add a train from Liverpool Street to Norwich into the mix and all bets are off.
Our utter lack of control in the face of free food is an unfortunate part of our DNA, one that most of us accept as a blight on our otherwise clean records but that, when observed by innocent bystanders, may still shock. Alan Bennett’s description of his hotel breakfast buffet experience – in which one guest filled her pockets with “free” fare “to the extent that in the process nature itself is demeaned” – is just the kind of horror we should feel when confronted by our pointless gluttony, but sadly do not.
Much as I find myself tickled by Bennett’s assessment, I’m not sure there is anything so wrong in making the most of what you’re given.
After all, you’ve paid over the odds for it anyhow – and a free crisp or two might just soothe the pain.
A morality tale this week from Hawksmoor, the steakhouse in which a waiter’s error in serving a £4,500 bottle of rare French wine to a customer who had not paid for it was laughed off by the manager. He tweeted of the affair with a breezy: “Chin up! One-off mistakes happen.” Easy enough to laugh about, perhaps, when much of their menu is equally eye-wateringly priced, making such a slip-up a little less injurious.
But Hawksmoor’s handling was far more gracious than the approach taken by parents of pupils at Malvern St James, an independent boarding school with fees of £37,000 a year – at which their children spent two years studying the wrong GCSE literature book. Which was only discovered during the exam.
One particularly dismayed parent has promised that “heads will roll” for the offence which, in truth, is pretty dreadful. Not least in making it seem that three bottles of extravagant plonk at Hawksmoor, equivalent to a term’s fees, would have been money comparatively well spent.