Bertie Wooster’s next aunt and a night of the living dead
In the House of Commons, an MP was shouting about zombies. “Zombies are running wild in our communities!” cried John Mann (Lab, Bassetlaw).
His fellow MPS hardly batted an eyelid. You couldn’t really blame them. After all, the world is on the brink of nuclear war, hurricanes are tearing through Ireland, and the sky over England has turned an apocalyptic orange. In the circumstances, then, an outbreak of zombies comes as no great shock. Tomorrow: a plague of frogs. Thursday: locusts. Friday: Godzilla climbs the Shard.
To the House’s surprise, however, it turned out that Mr Mann was only speaking metaphorically. By “zombies” he meant the users of a psychoactive drug called Black Mamba. Mr Mann said he wanted possession of it to be made illegal. I’m sure he has the best interests of his constituents at heart but, quite frankly, psychoactive drugs are the only way some of us can get through the news these days.
“Mr Speaker, I SHAR the honourable gentleman’s CONCARNS,” blared Amber Rudd. A tip, for any producers trying to cast a new adaptation of the Jeeves and Wooster stories: the Home Secretary would make an excellent Wodehousian aunt. She’s blisteringly loud, furiously brisk, and, in the manner of all terrifying aristocratic women, pronounces almost every vowel as “AR”. I’m not knocking Ms Rudd. In politics, a loud voice invariably trumps a quiet one.
Look at Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley Central. There used to be lots of excited talk about Mr Jarvis as a future Labour leader. This was based largely, I suspect, on his back story: he’s a former British Army Major who served in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He looks the part, too: rugged and brutishly handsome.
Since the election, all leadership talk has fallen silent. Perhaps one day it will start up again, but Mr Jarvis’s trouble, I fear, is his voice. Not that there’s anything wrong with his voice, per se – it’s just not the voice you expect him to have. After you read about his military heroics, you expect him to speak in a cavernous boom: not loud, necessarily, but stern and resonant. Yet when he opens his mouth you can hardly hear him.
Yesterday, he asked a question about the meetings of the intelligence and security committee. Thirty seconds later, the Speaker called his name again – having already forgotten he’d spoken.