let them eat lamborghinis
Undeniably it’s not been a bad time of late for the Tories. That, on the one hand it worries me, but on the other it’s fine as it’s the time their true colours come out to play.
First of all we thoroughly enjoyed the debut speech of the new Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, where he claimed ‘high immigration had benefitted the wealthy metropolitan elite in hiring domestic workers on the cheap but had done nothing for ordinary hard-working people’. The unscripted off-party-line outburst had his colleagues racing home to check the minutiae of the zero-hours contracts of their servants. Home Secretary Theresa May quickly confessed her cleaner was Brazilian: Cleggy-Boy coughed up his Belgium equerry; the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Smug Face Alexander, shamefacedly admitted he had a Portuguese cleaner; and, as ever leading from the front, the Cammy’s conceded they couldn’t possibly survive without their Nepalese nanny. Incredible.
Next up to the dispatch box was Spitting Image self-caricaturist, Michael Gove, who in a speech of devastating master-of-the-bleeding-obvious proportions, informs us all that it’s all a bit perverse that both a cabinet, a government and a political system can be dominated by an elitist private school system in general, and specifically by one particular institution, Eton School. And to further prove his egalitarian credentials, this, admittedly adopted son of a Labour supporting Aberdeen fish processing factory owner, has enrolled his daughter in one of London’s finest schools, the Anglican Hogwarts, Grey Coat Hospital. Go figure.
And not to be outdone by her husband, Gove’s Daily Mail columnist wife, Sara Vine, subsequently regaled us all with news that, shock-horror, she’d under-boiled Joan Collins’ quails’ eggs at a recent dinner party, but not to worry as ‘everyone knows Joan’s favourite course is the after-dinner cheese & port anyway’. Really.
If this doesn’t elevate the Goves to a seat at the government’s privileged table of food-bank analysis then I don’t know what will. Only a couple of weeks ago Welfare Minister, David Freud, mused (ruminated & digested?) over the tricky subject before providing his invaluable opinion of ‘it is very hard to know why people go to them (food banks)’. Hunger perhaps, David? Mind, it’s going be a tricky intellectual concept to get your head around when your very own Iain Duncan Smith pettishly refuses to meet the leaders of the UK’s largest food bank charity on the basis that they’re ‘scaremongering’. You couldn’t make it up.
Thankfully, and just in the nick of time came their white knight to the rescue in the form the ol’ thick-skinned Chingford skinhead himself, Norman Tebbit, who, keen to show he’s lost none of his political adeptness in his dotage, patronisingly called on his government chums to ‘initiate research into junk food sales in areas where people claim to be relying on food banks for basic food necessities’. Er, can I have that again please Norman – you think people go to food banks for pasta, rice and bread but spend their hard-earned on bargain bucket KFCs and two-for-one Domino’s? Unbelievable.
But let’s leave it to the Chancellor himself, who, whilst basking in the glory of his recently well-received budget pronouncements, declared that if the nation’s eldery wished to blow their (own) pension monies on buying a Lamborghini, then so be it. The fact that the average UK pension pot numbers thirty-odd grand, not the three hundred grand needed for a top-of-the-range Murcielago, surely means it would have been a little more accurate that they blow it on a nice little mid-range 1.6 Ford Focus? I despair.
And if that’s not enough for you, what about his recent proclamation that many of the growing number of people entering the 40% tax band, up from 1.35m in 1998 to 4.4m today, actually get a kick out of paying it as ‘it means they feel they are a success and joining the aspirational classes’. Apparently, this misguided belief even had the capacity to stun listening Tory MPs to silence. Delusional.
