O Dave New World?

Morning comrades.
I have a hell of a hangover. Not from alcohol, but from exhaustion (I got locked in my office last night) and depression at five years of the landed gentry marauding round the country like they own it (which they do: 99% of the nation's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 5%). There's a gloriously hostile article on the New Tories here.

The Bullingdon Club. Oxford University's £10,000 per year drinking and vandalism club for Etonians and selected other public (private) schoolboys. Members include David Cameron (now Prime Minister), Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) and Gideon Osborne, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. Cameron's second from left, top row.

Zac Goldsmith MP (on left) with Hooray Henry friend.

Multimillionaire dilettante and tax avoider.

Another star New Tory is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the very posh banker who plagiarised articles from the Sun in his election material.

Key Rees-Mogg events:

In 1997, he waged a memorable campaign in Central Fife, crawling the dank, staunchly Labour streets in a Bentley and distributing leaflets with the help of his nanny, Veronica Crook. “I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about the nanny,” he said afterwards. “If I’d had a valet, you’d think it was perfectly normal.”

…once referred to people who hadn’t been to Oxbridge as “potted plants” and who shares the use of an “exclusive” loo at Claridge’s with the King of Spain…

When asked for his reaction to a Newsnight survey showing that Tory parliamentary candidates were still drawn predominantly from private education and/or Oxford or Cambridge, Rees-Mogg controversially replied "[T]he Tory party, when it's elected, has to be able to form a government and it's not going to be able to form a government if it has potted plants as candidates simply to make up quotas." He went on, "[w]hen you go to an MP, you want somebody who will write an articulate letter to the social services or whoever it is to get your problem sorted out."

Rees-Mogg is notoriously partial to top hats.

Rees-Mogg himself stated (in The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999) that "it is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much", though he then went on to say that "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf". He later told The Scotsman (October 2001), "I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth."

His sister ('Annunziata', if you please) lost the neighbouring constituency, thankfully. This is what their mother (!) says:

Do people like him? “Well, he’s got quite a weird reputation,” she says. “He’s outspoken and ... unusual. But he and Annunziata like sticking their heads above the parapet.” She sighs. “Can you imagine if they both got in?”

This is what we have to look forward to:



Today sees me marking yet more dissertations (yesterday's were very good indeed but so long) rather than working on my urgent research deadlines, and invigilating another exam. My office looks like the house of one of those hoarders who's found dessicated under a pile of old newspapers and the smell is none too pleasant either. Perhaps there is some body under a pile of essays.

Still, I'm listening to cheery Camera Obscura bootlegs.