Look who Red Ed’s been bothering on Hampstead Heath
If you go down to the Heath today, you’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the Heath today, you’d better go in disguise. otherwise, you may find yourself being accosted by a weird-looking man with a toothy grin attempting to engage you in intimate conversation.
If he invites you back to his place to look at his bust of Karl Marx, run a mile. Don’t look back.
you’re in grave danger of being ‘outed’ as a closet Labour Party supporter. you just don’t know it yet.
Don’t worry, the man promises. Relax. you’re not alone any more. We can do it. Together. Stick with me, comrade, and I’ll make you a star. your name will be dropped into the leader’s speech, your picture plastered across social media. you’ll be on television and in all the papers.
Whenever Ed Miliband wants to meet ‘ordinary’ people, he leaves his home in fashionable North London, crosses the road and strolls on to Hampstead Heath.
This vast public open space has long been a popular destination for close encounters and dangerous liaisons.
Earlier this week, police scrambled a helicopter after reports of a woman screaming in distress. Turned out to be a man and a woman coupling noisily in the bushes.
The only surprise was that it was a man and a woman. The Heath is best known as a notorious gay dogging venue.
But this is the first recorded instance of party political dogging. Miliband has been soliciting complete strangers for intellectual intercourse. Take 36year-old Gareth Edwards, an unsuspecting software engineer, who had gone to the Heath for a quiet picnic. Next thing he knows, he’s befriended by a sympathetic stranger.
yes, it’s Mister Ed, anxious to know what Gareth thinks about Austerity Britain. Soon Gareth is pouring out his heart about his five-year-old daughter and his struggle to make ends meet.
AfEW DAyS later, Ed is sharing Gareth’s worries with the world, telling the Labour conference, to wild applause: ‘ He’s earning a decent wage, he can’t afford to buy a home for himself and for his family, he’s priced out by the richest. He thinks that unless you’re one of the privileged few in Britain, the country is not going to work for you.’
Those wicked Tories are grinding poor Gareth into the dirt. What hope does he ever have of owning a £2.6 million home near the Heath like, er, Ed Miliband?
Perhaps that explains why Gareth voted Lib Dem last time. oops! Maybe Miliband will stand a better chance with the two pretty girls heading off for an open-air swim. Beatrice Bazell and her friend Helen Goodman were hoping to meet the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead they had to settle for Mister Ed.
Seduced by his charm, they complained that they were ‘falling into a black hole’. That’s Highgate Ponds for you, girls.
Ed decided to share Beatrice’s tale of woe with his delegates in Manchester, painting a picture of downtrodden students crushed by this cruel Conservative-led government.
unfortunately, Miliband chose the wrong victim. It has now been revealed that Beatrice and her sister Clemency come f r om a privileged middle- class, oxfordshire background and had more than £ 250,000 l avished on their private school education.
you don’t get many Clemencys to the pound in Doncaster.
Beatrice’s dad, Barnaby Piercy Bazell, a 61- year- old chartered accountant, said: ‘She went to a good all-girls’ school. It’s fair to say her studies cost me a great deal of money. She might be feeling a bit gloomy about the job prospects of people her age, but she can have no complaints.’
Beatrice, who got straight As at Alevel and has a first- class degree, attended the same £13,500-a-year St Helen and St Katharine school in Abingdon as the Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron and her aristocratic sister Emily Sheffield, deputy editor of Vogue magazine. I A COUPLE of years ago there was an outbreak of violence involving men dressed as Oompa Loompas, from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. A gang of Oompa Loompas started a mass brawl at a Star Wars convention in Norwich. There were also scuffles between Oompa Loompas and men dressed as Spiderman, Ozzy Osbourne and Wyatt Earp. The trend for don’t remember Miliband mentioning that in his speech, do you? Still, nothing’s too good for the workers.
We have, of course, been here before. Last year, a Labour party political broadcast featured as its ‘modern face of poverty’ a woman who was quickly unmasked as a Left- wing celebrity blogger and Guardian food columnist called Jack Monroe.
ONE of Labour’s other poster boys for poverty was a charming chap called Beresford Casey, a former advertising agency executive who now runs an upmarket chain of burger restaurants called Haché, a posh french name for mince, where a ‘scotch steak burger topped with celebrated Reblochon cheese’ will set you back a very reasonable £10.95. Would you like fries with that? Mr Casey lives in a house in Primrose Hill, not far from Ed Miliband. Last year it was valued at £1.5 million. Today, you can bet your fancy dress fights appears to be spreading. This week, Manchester Crown Court heard about a punch-up between United fans and a stag party dressed as ‘Where’s Wally?’. Both had been drinking all day and squared up at a Manchester railway station. Just as well there weren’t any Oompa Loompas around at the time. It could have been a
bloodbath. life it would fall foul of Miliband’s proposed £2 million ‘ mansion tax’ threshold.
on Tuesday, I said Miliband doesn’t know the difference between Barnet and Barnsley. The circles he mixes in are just as rarified as Cameron’s wealthy Chipping Norton set.
That’s why, when he goes in search of ‘ ordinary’ people, he looks no further than Hampstead Heath, on his f ront doorstep, surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in London, let alone the rest of Britain.
It is the natural stomping ground of multi-millionaire Marxists and Labour luvvies who have made a fortune in the arts and entertainment.
Maybe Miliband goes looking for ‘ordinary voters’ like an explorer with a giant magnifying glass and a butterfly net.
So when he stumbles across a software engineer out for a picnic, he thinks he’s discovered a new endangered species.
The girl he found in a Lucky Bag during a photo- op in Bolton was paraded on the conference floor in Manchester like a pygmy from a l ong- l ost tribe somewhere i n the Amazon.
Twice, Elizabeth Shepherd was f orced t o stand f or applause. Look, everybody, it’s a real working- class person.
oh, well done, Ed. She’s perfect. Quite exquisite. Where did you find her?
Hampstead Heath, I think. or that may have been the other one. Brittany, Beatrice, something like that. They all look the same to me.
And at six o’clock, their mummies and daddies will take them home to bed ...