Or so it says in this headline:
Let me spell it out for you. This means that every single Londoner has been named on the New Year Honours list. All ten million of us, or however many it is these days. I’m a Londoner, so …
What services are they honouring me for? Services to blogging, presumably.
I find that newspaper headlines, photoed in such places as shops from which I purchase other goods but not newspapers, can make pleasingly evocative souvenirs, as time goes by. Things that loomed large once upon a time, but which are now forgotten, can instead be remembered. Ah yes, that! Whatever happened to that ruckus? Good lord, him. Good grief, her.
So, here is a gallery of such photos, celebrating the amazing diversity of dramas that London’s various newspapers splashed all over themselves during 2019:
January 17, February 14, March 14, March 29, April 21;
May 28, June 28, July 29, August 9, August 21;
August 21, August 27, August 27, September 13, October 2;
October 2, October 2, November 12, December 6, December 13.
Just kidding. Variety, not.
Most pundits seem to agree that this argument has now been won and lost, following the recent General Election result (also noted in the final photo above). I’ll believe that when I see it. I now expect that there will be plenty of Leaving still to be done, after January the whenever it now is. Much depends, I think, on whether any substantial number of Remainers decide to become Rejoiners; or whether, to use a favourite phrase of such persons when they were winning this argument, the Remainers, aside from an insignificant rump, will now “move on”.
When Boris Johnson appointed Dominic Cummings as his behind the scenes shouter-in-chief, I started to hope that things had taken a turn for the better. I continued to fear the worst, but stopped assuming it. After the Cummings appointment, the air was thick with claims that he was a Satanist, but then it all went quiet. Presumably after Cummings had shouted at everyone then mentioning him to stop mentioning him, if they didn’t want to be set upon by Satan. But I didn’t forget. I knew that Cummings was Satanising away, behind the scenes.
So, when a link to this story at the Telegraph showed up on my Twitter feed, I clicked, hoping against hope to be able to read the whole thing. As it turned out, I was only able to read the top few paragraphs, but I got the bit that mattered to me, which was the Dominic Cummings angle:
They were the lifelong Labour voters on whom Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to be able to rely – even if he failed to sell his vision to a new market.
But to Dominic Cummings and Isaac Levido, the masterminds of Boris Johnson’s landslide victory, they became known as “persuasion ones”: a category of voter whose allegiance to Labour had been profoundly shaken by Mr Corbyn’s leadership and his party’s involvement in blocking Brexit.
Ultimately, the identification and targeting of those voters helped cause an electoral upset that shocked even some of the Conservatives’ most senior figures.
The phrase emerged from some of the most intensive use of focus groups and polling ever seen in a UK election …
I’m sure there will soon be much more to read along these lines.
From Matthew Parris (The Tories will win – but with no thanks to the North), on the other hand, there may be a rather thoughtful silence for a while.
First, this:
Conservatives by anything from a comfortable to a cataclysmic (for Labour) majority. Well, thank goodness for that.
Soon after that, the first Portillo-esque moment happened, when a place called Blyth, where they were all raised by whippets and pigeons in cardboard boxes in coal mines and have voted Labour ever since the Romans buggered off back to Gaul, went: Conservative. The winning Conservative did not sound like he owned much in the way of rural acreage and serfs. He sounded like a Geordie. And in his rather Geordie voice, he read out what he had to say. But towards the end of it, he paused, because, it became clear, he was emotionally somewhat overcome.
Andrew Neil did an interview with Nigel Farage, and said that, what with Brexit obviously now going ahead, and what with Farage’s Brexit Party not going to get any seats at all, that makes him, Farage, a footnote. Farage disagreed, and so do I. Basically because of this:
I draw your attention to the fact that a lot of people switched from Labour, to the Brexit Party. The Conservative vote went up only a very little. In Farage’s phrase, people “who couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative” were still able to desert the Labour Party in a great flock, and to vote for the thing that Labour was now denying to them. In that picture, it didn’t do enough to cause the seat to change hands, but across the North, it will be more than enough.
So, some footnote. I for one am delighted that Farage, the most consequential British politician of our time, will yet again be keeping his eye on the Brexit process, and telling us all what he thinks of it.
I find that these photos I take of my TV, typically of sporting events but also of things like election coverage, can be extraordinarily memory-jogging, when I look at them months or years later.
Will this be the first election to see a “shy Labour” factor? How many voters are embarrassed to admit that their hostility to Brexit, or their tribal anti-Toryism, trumps their concern for their Jewish fellow citizens?
Scary times, for every political obsessive in Britain. Because every political obsessive, me included, is terrified that their preferred tribe will lose.
Here.
It’s Bryan Caplan (the guy who gave this lecture that I recently attended), talking to Darren Grimes of the IEA. Caplan disagrees with most voters, but in an ingratiating way. As he himself says towards the end of the conversation, if you have disagreeable things to say, say them agreeably and people will be more likely to listen.
LATER: Now, I’m listening to another interview. Scott Adams autobiographising. Terrific.
Hong Kong just had two big reasons to celebrate. First, there was the result of their recent elections, which Hong Kong won and the Chinese Communists lost. And second, the USA just passed a law supporting the HongKongers, with wide support across the political spectrum. American politicians can agree about very little just now, but they do agree about what the Chinese Communists are doing to Hong Kong. They’re against it. Pretty much all of them.
Here’s the photo at the top of a piece about how Hong Kong is now celebrating this law:
And, since this is my blog, let me mention also that I too have today expressed my displeasure at the behaviour in Hong Kong of the Chinese Communist government of China, by posting a posting at Samizdata entitled How to defeat the Chinese Communists.
That’ll show them.
I have a meeting about Hong Kong at my home, tomorrow night. Judging by the RSVPs so far, the room will be comfortably full, and maybe even uncomfortably full.
Today, to mark Remembrance Sunday, I photoed poppies outside Westminster Abbey, and got the sort of photos I usually do get at this particular time of year:
But then, I made my way along Whitehall, where wreaths had earlier been laid at the Cenotaph, and then turned right towards Embankment tube. Thus it was that I walked past the Royal Tank Regiment Memorial …:
and I photoed one of the messages that had been placed on it:
To me that brings it home more vividly.
I wonder how long that life together lasted.
Well, I didn’t watch England slowly torturing the All Blacks to death yesterday, because I could not bear the thought of watching what I was sure would happen, viz: the All Blacks slowly torturing England to death. I merely recorded it all, in the unlikely event that England won and I would then want to see it all. While England were, in fact, winning, I had a Sunaturday morning lie-in.
The thing is, England are pretty good this time around, and watching all the hope being squeezed out of them, and experiencing all the hope being squeezed out of me, was more than I could have endured. I just wanted one nice, humane bullet to the head, with no messing about.
The thing also (see above) is, England never beat the All Blacks at the World Cup. Never. It just doesn’t happen. They always lose to them. Not necessarily by much, but by enough, every time. The French, yes, they beat the All Blacks at the World Cup, every other decade. But England? Never. As Shakespeare would have put it had he been a rugby fan: Never never never never never. So, why was this game going to be any different?
Now, my problem is that I, along with millions of other real rugby fans (such as I clearly am not) by no means all of whom are even English, now think that England are favourites to beat South Africa. South Africa only just beat Wales this morning, and Wales only really really care about beating England. England beat South Africa at the World Cup quite often, just as South Africa beat England at the World Cup quite often. More to the point, England have now beaten the All Blacks at this World Cup, and the All Blacks beat South Africa at this World Cup in the group stage. So, logic says that England will accordingly beat South Africa. So I probably will watch the final. At which point all those South African backs will go crazy and beat England by twenty points. Deep down, however, I only say that to stop it happening. What I really think is that England will win, and very possibly by quite a lot.
It really would be something if England could dump the three senior Southern Hemisphere teams out of this thing, bang bang bang, one after another. Trouble is, this has not happened yet, and with sport, you never know. Sport is not, to put it mildly, always logical.
I mean, I imagine all those All Black fans got the shock of their lives, as it gradually dawned on them that England were, yesterday, better than them, and were going to beat them, at the World Cup. For the first time. Ever. Ever ever ever ever ever. They should have stayed in bed or gone to bed early, or whatever they would have needed to do in their time zone, to spare themselves the grief.
Stephen Fry once quoted Vincent Price saying: exquisite agony. That about sums up what I’m trying to say in this.