Tories at non-party political conference. Boris and Donald Trump.
In any other year the party political conference season would have been one of those frivolous, knockabout, seaside end of pier gatherings where bellowing speeches would have been broadcast to almost every home, working man's club and anybody who'd willingly take the time to listen to them. We'd have all sighed with that sense of deja vu and just accepted the fact that they're politicians and none of us really take anything they say that seriously anyway. So let them just get on with it and the sooner they get it off their chests the better.
This week the collective known as the Conservative Party will be bleeding our ears, picking our brains and wonder whether we can still be bothered to entertain their every word, sentence and paragraph. We'll privately chuckle under our breath, indulge them almost reluctantly and then come to the conclusion that we've heard it all before. But this year is certainly not like any other year because even the politicians had nothing to do with Covid 19 and there is a sense that any understanding or knowledge of the coronavirus simply went over their heads at the beginning of April.
Still, credit where credit is due. The Tories, under Boris Johnson, did try to explain why, how and what to do in the long term and there was a justification for everything that happened then. For the first couple of weeks or so, Johnson, that beacon of lovable eccentricity, turned up every day for the 10 Downing Street media briefing with his chief medical and scientific officers as, quite literally, the middlemen. The flaxen-haired one from Uxbridge would stand at his lectern every day, swivelling his eyes from side to side, almost looking for somebody to confide in. Every so often, by his own admission, the cornea and retina would glaze over, pleading for assistance and enlightenment.
Because the truth is that poor Boris didn't really know what to say that could either console us or tell us something we didn't really know about anyway. So his default position was that if you had nothing to say that was constructive or resembled anything like clarity or clarification then you'd better say what had to be said and repeat yourself almost constantly. Then Johnson trotted out all of the pertinent bullet points, sputtered out the statistics and percentages before resorting to a medical bulletin unlike anything any of us had ever heard.
So it is that Johnson and his Tory colleagues will be assembling at a Zoom computer screen of their choice and trying to appeal to the hardline, traditional members who still fondly remember the grocer's daughter from Grantham who did so much to radically change the direction of her own party. She also emerged as the Tories poster girl, a revolutionary figure who both infuriated some and endeared herself loyally to the other Conservatives.
When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in May 1979 the Tories were in a bit of a pickle, it had to be said. They were languishing comically in the depths of anonymity, fighting to hold onto a battered reputation because Labour Prime Minister of the time Jim Callaghan had dragged Britain into a bedraggled mess. So along came Mrs Thatcher with her adoring husband- cum, full-time whisky and scotch drinker and golfer Dennis and the magic wand was waved in an instant.
At one party political conference Thatcher, as stubborn and outspoken as ever, insisted quite categorically that while others may have given up on everything she would not be turning and that was final. She was the leader of all leaders, the leaders of the pack, immovable, unyielding, ruthless, forthright and goading her party forward into the land of brazen prosperity. When Mrs T. said no she meant it and it was too bad if you didn't like her because she knew what she was doing and nobody dared challenge or question her as she sought world domination.
Most party political conferences were always fun when Thatcher was around. You can still see the sniggering sixth formers next to her, rehearsing even then for a spot of caricature on TV's hilarious Spitting Image. There was Norman Tebbitt, widely regarded as a snarling misfit, a Hell's Angel biker wearing a leather jacket and bovver boy boots. There was Cecil Parkinson, the posh, prudish and puritanical one who professed to living the clean life and then was caught off guard with some serial philandering. Parkinson was then exposed for who he was, a snobbish toff disguised as a womaniser. But then who are we to judge?
The rest of the Tory supporting cast could almost be singled out for their very unique characteristics. There was Norman Baker, smart and presentable but somehow too gentle and inoffensive to make any kind of impact on the party. There was Jeffrey Archer, another renegade playboy who genuinely thought he could lay claim to being one of the greatest novelists of all time but then discovered that, although people did read his literary works, a question mark hung ominously over the overall quality of his books. Archer also went behind people's backs, scheming quite frequently and notoriously falsifying details of his educational qualifications.
And so we find ourselves back in the present day and another party animal, unashamed socialite, gadabout, author, ladies man and a member of the hedonistic Eton Bullingdon club. Boris Johnson will this year be coming to you live via a computer screen and he'll be pointing his fingers, stubbing his thumb onto tables and then waving his arms quite purposefully. Johnson knows the score.
Of course he does. He does gesticulation like no other politician and he knows what the country is going through. He knows that the good people of the United Kingdom have been gritting their teeth, suffering because of a disease for which no background information can be provided and just hoping that it'll all go away sooner rather than later. Johnson knows and we know that there is no answer to the coronavirus at the moment so we may be advised to just stick it out and maybe one day we'll have the biggest party of all time to celebrate its end. Life of course is beautiful and can be even more beautiful.
We woke up to this morning to the news that the cinemas could be closing again much to the astonishment of those who thought they were never truly open in the first place. Just when we thought it was safe to smuggle our popcorn or hotdogs into a darkened room, cinemas across Britain have announced that the lack of any kind of lucrative Hollywood blockbuster is proving a major financial headache so let's close the doors and leave it for another time.
We have now been informed that Donald Trump has now gone down with the dreaded Covid 19. For Boris Johnson back in April read the President of the United States. It almost seems that nobody in political circles is exempt from coronavirus. But Trump is now in hospital and the likelihood is that he may be showered with grapes and approval by those he genuinely cares about or maybe he's just Mr popularity and everybody loves Trump.
For Trump the timing could not have been worse. In November he'll have to negotiate the minefield that is an American election. But now Trump is full of fighting spirit, a figure of comedy in the estimation of many but still battling on in adversity. Most of Trump's opinionated rants are now the stuff of legend but here we are at the beginning of October and the world is still coming to terms with something it can neither see or feel. This may sound like flippancy but those bottles of bleach were not the answer to Trump's continuing medical predicament. Perhaps Boris could help Donald. Just a thought.
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