What a difference 10 months can make. When I did my last post, I little thought we’d end the year having clocked up a new monarch and TWO new prime ministers. Even back in the summer it was looking like quite a year to bottle and keep: Fibber Johnson clinging on to power as if it were his birthright, finally being dethroned by a mass exit of almost everyone else in his government; then the interminable Tory leadership contest, in which Liz Truss promised tax cuts at any cost and the grassroots members voted exactly as everyone expected them to do; then finally (we thought), the remarkable, and, as far as I know, unprecedented prospect of a new PM and a new monarch coming to power in the same week. But there was stranger to come, for Truss proved such a disaster that history will be kind indeed if she's simply remembered as that woman who read the lesson so turgidly at The Queen's funeral. She did serve one useful purpose, though: by taking over Johnson's job just a couple of days before the death of Her Maj, she robbed him for ever of a major bit of Churchillian glory-basking. But for Truss, Johnson could for ever more have bored people with the fact that Winston Churchill was QE2's first PM, and he, Johnson, was her last. Bad luck, Boris: there's just not the same ring to "penultimate". Anyway, it's 3rd Jan and, last time I looked, Rishi Sunak was still PM.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing Santa at Leeds Castle – in Kent, not Yorkshire, though still the subject of a daily three-hour round-trip commute. Notwithstanding, it's been a joy, greeting the kids and their parents as they come to the end of the sumptuous illuminated walkway in the grounds of the castle, and in the process enjoying the kind of Christmas spirit that two months (at least) of rapaciously cynical TV ads can do so much to destroy. That's me in the picture on the evening of Mrs Claus's visit. Happy new year, readers!!!
0 Comments
|
AuthorRobert Cohen – a man in showbiz so stepp’d in that, should he wade no more, to go back were as tedious as go o’er. These are among his musings. Archives
September 2023
Categories |