Monday
It seems a bit much for Harry and Meghan to ask the rest of us to stump up £2.4m towards their new home in Windsor. After all, it’s not as if either of them are particularly hard up. Harry has plenty of family money and Meghan must be doing just fine out of royalties from Suits. But if they are having a cashflow crisis and are struggling to live within their means then you’d have imagined that the Bank of Granny and Grandad might have been able to help them out with an interest-free loan. Now I don’t suppose I will miss the 6p or so I will be contributing towards their home improvements – I feel rather more strongly about the £45 that Chris Grayling has personally cost me with his £3bn waste of public money – but it just feels cheap. Like those MPs who charged things to their expenses that were nothing to do with their jobs and which they could easily have afforded anyway. But what struck me as much as the money was that the royal couple have had five houses converted into one home. How much space do Harry and Meghan need? When the property supply is limited and there are plenty of young couples who don’t even have a one-bedroom flat, for a family of three to remove five homes from the country’s housing stock at the taxpayer’s expense seems like a bad misjudgment.
Tuesday
The Boris Johnson campaign appears unstoppable with opinion polls of Conservative voters giving him a two-to-one lead over Jeremy Hunt. Yet the closer Johnson gets to No 10, the more tenuous his relationship with the truth appears to get. After wisely being kept away from the media by the carers on his team, Johnson broke cover to appear on Nick Ferrari’s show on LBC radio. He was asked more than 20 times when the Mills and Boon photo of him and Carrie Symonds looking lovingly into each others’ eyes had been taken and each time he was unable to answer. Nor could he explain how, if the photo had been taken at the weekend, his hair had managed to grow by a couple of inches in two days. An hour later, Johnson moved on to his second car-crash interview of the day, this time with Ross Kempsell on TalkSport. Asked how he chose to relax, he replied that he built buses out of cardboard boxes and painted them with happy, smiling faces enjoying the ride. It was such an obvious and unnecessary lie. If he’d just said he liked to do a bit of painting, he might have been believed and the question and answer quickly forgotten. Some think this was a deliberate dead cat misdirection strategy, but I think he just couldn’t help himself. The past and the future never were of great importance to him but now he has even lost touch with the present. His narcissistic personality disorder means he is capable of telling people only what they want to hear. And soon he will be running the country. Terrifying.
Wednesday
There were only about 100 Conservative MPs in the Commons to watch Theresa May take one of her last prime minister’s questions. She has become a non-person, with little attention being paid to what she says or does. All eyes in Westminster are on the Tory leadership contest and the divisions within the Labour party. Just after May resigned, her body was contorted as if she was overwhelmed with grief and anger. Now she appears to be more resigned to her fate – almost demob happy – and looking forward to watching her successor fail. She has said she hopes to spend her spare time watching more cricket. Assuming she is an England supporter, I would strongly advise her to wait until after the World Cup is over. Since the tournament started, they have gone from favourites for the trophy to long-shots to make the semi-finals. England don’t appear to have realised that one of the main points of hosting the World Cup is to tailor the pitches to your own advantage, and the last few games in particular have been painful viewing as the team have found brainless new ways to lose games they could have won. It’s all been horribly reminiscent of watching Spurs. Only I had been hoping to have a few months off perpetual sport anxiety. Ah well, the emeritus prime minister and I can always enjoy the Women’s World Cup, as the women are making rather a better fist of it than the men. There again, having both May and me fully behind them will probably be the kiss of death for England in the semi-final. That just leaves the Ashes. What could possibly go wrong?
Thursday
Three years ago when the Brexit department was first established, its departmental questions used to guarantee an almost full house in the Commons. Now, though, everyone has come to realise that the Brexit department is essentially the Potemkin department. It has long been sidelined from the Brexit negotiations and serves no useful purpose other than as a distraction. It exists in order to be seen to exist. As a result, almost no one bothers to attend Brexit questions now, so today’s exchanges between the Brexit secretary, Steve Barclay, and his opposite number, Keir Starmer, went almost unnoticed. Which was a shame as they were particularly revealing. Starmer asked Barclay to correct three misleading statements that Boris Johnson has regularly used to explain his plan to deliver Brexit. Barclay mumbled something noncommittal and sat down. No surprises there. But what was really telling was that he then spontaneously burst out laughing. Just like a guilty child whose subconscious couldn’t quite believe he had got away with it. This was the whole Tory leadership campaign in miniature. Every Tory MP – well, the saner ones anyway – knows that Johnson doesn’t have a credible Brexit plan and that we’re heading for no deal unless he enrages the ERG and does the opposite of what he has promised, but almost no one calls him out. The need to keep the Tories in power outweighs the national interest. It was much the same at the utterly dispiriting hustings in Bournemouth in the evening where Johnson was allowed to tell lie after lie unchallenged. What a time to be alive.
Friday
As someone who doesn’t like camping, doesn’t take drugs, doesn’t like staying up late, gets anxious in large crowds and is far happier listening to opera, it probably won’t surprise you to know that I won’t be going to Glastonbury this weekend. I did once go for a day as an experiment and had to beetle off midway through the afternoon as my psyche wasn’t up to the beating it was taking. But fair play to all those more resilient types, including some of my friends, for whom it is one of the highlights of the year. Instead my wife and I, along with our daughter and her husband who are over the US, will be heading to Brighton to see our son and his girlfriend. Hard to believe but it will be the first occasion we have all been together as a family since last December. The longest we have ever been apart. It will be a precious weekend, though I do feel my age. When the kids were young I would sometimes long for the moment when they wouldn’t be around so much and I would get more time for myself. Now that moment has arrived and I have mixed feelings. I wouldn’t want them both living at home – nor would they – but I would like to have the opportunity to see them more often. I am immensely proud of the people they have become and the lives they have made for themselves, and there is a certain relief that they could now cope perfectly well on their own. But I can’t help feeling that I have morphed into an elderly family pet. Something to be patted and indulged from time to time, but basically ignored. Much like I treated my parents when I was their age. What goes around …
Digested week, digested: The wheels on the bus don’t go round and round.
