The selection of a local GP, Dr Sarah Wollaston, as the Conservative candidate
for Totnes has brought back happy memories to me. The Tories allowed the
entire population of the constituency to vote on a shortlist drawn up by the
local party. It is thought that being a doctor helped the winning candidate,
although it may not have mattered too much if she’d been a cross-dressing
estate agent who in her spare time raised funds for Al-Qaeda – the other two
people on the shortlist were career politicians, you see. We do not know
much about Dr Wollaston except for the fact that she is not a politician – a
point she made repeatedly while campaigning.
This is where we have got ourselves: the last thing anybody wants is for their
local politician to be a politician; they would rather they were anything
but – a coalman, a zoologist, a plate of cheese. This may or may not be a
temporary phenomenon.
If Dr Wollaston, flushed with success, announces tomorrow that the mentally
handicapped should be sterilised and that bananas are agents of Satan, then
we have the people of Totnes to thank for, in effect, making her the next
MP.
She seems terribly nice and I’m sure she won’t do that – and of course the
Tories put her on their shortlist. But then, without any help from the
public, they also selected Annunziata Rees-Mogg to fight a seat in Somerset
and her brother Jacob to do battle in Fife (during which it was rumoured
that he drove around the rather working-class constituency in a Rolls-Royce
braying unintelligibly at the locals).
Wollaston is probably rather better than both of these – but, as I say, we
know nothing about her. She has no policies. Is she pro-EU or sceptical?
Does she think the Tories should be the party of lower taxes and grammar
schools? Should we hug a hoodie or kick him in the balls? Again, we do not
know; she is not on the political radar. Shouldn’t politicians be on the
political radar? The happy memories she brought back concerned my time as a
campaigning activist with Streatham constituency Labour party, back in the
mid1980s. We would meet in some dank hall every month to choose which
lesbian maniac would be standing for us in some forthcoming local election.
The candidates were all different – some wished to nationalise the top 2,000
companies, others thought it should be only the banks, ha – but they were
all lesbian maniacs.
The bar had been set high by a nearby ward which had selected the interstellar
lesbian maniac Linda Bellos as a candidate: Linda announced that Mrs
Thatcher was planning to gas the poor, the blacks and the Jews. Hell, we
couldn’t outdo that, though we did our best for a while. We selected
possibly the last people on earth that our constituents would have wished to
represent them and, as a consequence, lost every time (until we wised up by
1987 and selected the excellent Keith Hill as prospective parliamentary
candidate, who was, uniquely, neither a lesbian nor a maniac. He got in).
But still, despite the obvious flaws in the process I have recounted, I find
it preferable to the one that selected Dr Wollaston. At least with the
parade of lesbian maniacs we knew – and the electorate knew – what they were
about. Elections should be fought on the basis of ideas, not on the basis of
competing notions of attractiveness; and the candidates should tie
themselves to one or two principles here and there with which people can
agree or – as was the case with the electors in Streatham – profoundly
disagree. That, surely, is the point of democracy.
Rather graciously, one of the defeated candidates in Totnes praised Dr
Wollaston and suggested that it was her refusal to become party political
that helped her to win the day. But political parties exist for a reason,
and it is good that the members of those parties should feel fervently about
the principles they hold. Otherwise, why have political parties at all?
+ We’re still waiting. On the day Barack Obama was elected president
of the United States, a voter in Nutsack, Arkansas, or somewhere similar was
interviewed on the news. This lady predicted that as soon as Obama got in
the White House he would “put on a turban and start shooting all the white
folks”.
The turban bit was a brilliant touch, I thought.
Oddly, since his victory about the only charge that hasn’t been levelled at
him by the deranged US far right is that he is a Sikh. Instead, it is
alleged that he was born in Kenya or is a naturalised Indonesian citizen and
therefore ineligible to be president (you can find more out about this by
tuning into Illuminati TV, presented by a sane and rational man called
Molotov Mitchell).
And now we have the poster of Obama done up as Heath Ledger’s Joker character
and with the shocking word “Socialism” underneath (the equivalent over here
would be “Estate Agent” or “Paedophile”).
The poster first appeared in Los Angeles but has now “gone viral”, as they
say. The American conservatives love it; right now, abuse is all they have
to fling at the man. But give them time.
You’re old enough to be my dad
Towards the end of his lover’s funeral in Los Angeles, the actor Ryan O’Neal
attempted to cop off with his own daughter, whom he apparently did not
recognise. It is something of a miracle, I suppose, that Tatum recognised
her dad in the nick of time. O’Neal accepted that this sort of behaviour was
a bit rum. At the same moment, over in Pennsylvania, Amy Wolfe, 33, was
getting married to a fairground ride. Amy suffers from “objectum sexuality”,
a term made up by doctors to refer to mentalists who form sexual attachments
to inanimate objects – a fact that will be of interest, you might assume, to
Bob Ainsworth’s wife. Amy has tried out the ride 3,000 times, which the
authorities considered a sufficient term of engagement.
A sober Brit? That would be a myth
The Greeks have a new heroine, and an updated version of the myth about Cupid
and Psyche. According to legend, Psyche chances upon the sleeping god Cupid
and accidentally spills burning oil from her lamp on him, causing him to
howl a little. In the 2009 version, the role of Cupid is taken by Stuart
Feltham, of Swindon, who beguilingly unzips his shorts in front of Marina
Fanouraki in a “crazy” bar in Malia, Crete. Lacking an oil lamp, Marina
allegedly throws lighter fuel over Stuart and then sets his penis alight.
Stuart is now in hospital and Marina is in court – not how it worked out in
the myth; but hell, times change.
Marina has become a heroine because the Greeks are reportedly fed up with
drunken British holidaymakers. But clearly not that fed up on Crete,
given the amount of money brought in by sozzled Brits. Check out the adverts
for Malia to see what I mean – they are catering for a specific clientele.
What sort of person did Marina think would be drinking in the Electra bar?
Rowan Williams?
+ British diplomats exposed the cult of Scientology as the work of a
charlatan 30 years ago, according to reports last week. Good for them,
although I don’t suppose it was a terribly difficult thing to prove, given
that it is based upon the supposition that our souls are descended from
aliensbrought to Earth by spacecraftthat looked like US fighter jets circa
1950.
So why, a generation later, is Scientology still afforded charitable status in
this country? One doesn’t mind people believing this rubbish if it gives
them some strange comfort, but why should we subsidise them for doing so?
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