Primrose Hill isn't looking its best these days
It’s the summer of 2043. A father and his eight-year-old son trudge across the tundra of north London. Despite the watery August sun, the frozen grass crackles under their heavy boots.
“Look!” says the man. “Do you see the ruins on top of that hill?”
Silhouetted against the sky are the remnants of grand houses. The roofs have fallen in, the grey stucco has buckled and crumbled. It’s hard to imagine that these villas and terraces were once a visual feast of pastel pink and yellow.
“You’re looking at the remains of Primrose Hill,” says the father.
“Daddy, what’s a primrose?”
“A lovely creamy yellow flower.” He sighs wistfully. “They all disappeared in the Great Freeze. Like so much else.”
“And who lived on Primrose Hill?”
“They were a tribe called the liberals, but they don’t exist any more.
“Do you remember me telling you about the Mayans, who disappeared almost overnight? It was a bit like that. Things started going really badly for the liberals in about 2013…”
The boy perks up. “Did they do human sacrifices like the Mayans? Did they worship savage gods?”
“No human sacrifices,” chuckles his father. “But, yes, they had some very bizarre religious beliefs.
“For example, they thought the centre of the earth was in a place called Brussels in Belgium. Like the primroses, it doesn’t exist any more, but it was a mixture of Holland and France and it printed toy money that no one wanted.
“Brussels was famous for its nosey parkers who bossed everyone around. They pretended they were emperors of Europe. Everyone hated them – except the liberals. Eventually the ordinary people rose up and destroyed the empire.”
“Was it as bad as the fall of the Roman Empire?”
“Oh, much worse. And the liberals were doubly upset because, at the same time, they were proved wrong about something called global warming.
“You see, they thought the planet was getting very, very hot and the only way to stop it exploding into flames was to pay extremely high taxes.”
“Global warming? That’s just crazy. It’s never warm,” says the boy, shivering in his duffle coat. “Why did the liberals think those things?”
“Has your history teacher taught you about the BBC? It was a government broadcaster that took everyone else’s money to make programmes specially for the liberals.
“According to the BBC, the North Pole was just about to melt and you’d see camels in Greenland. Also, it encouraged children to spy on their parents in case they were naughty and wasted energy.
“But then some of the global warming prophets – scary rich men with names like Yeo – suddenly changed their minds. They said the planet wasn’t getting hot after all, that the scientists had been tricking them – and of course they were right.”
“Daddy, were the liberals terribly upset when they were proved wrong?”
The man pauses as he surveys the ghostly ruins of Primrose Hill. Should he mention the sudden rush to the Dignitas clinics?
Best not. “Well, they cried a lot and did this strange thing called wringing your hands.” He gives a demonstration.
“How funny,” says the boy. He copies the gesture and makes a mental note to teach it to his school chums. It will be like a secret handshake!
“Anyway, that’s enough about the liberals,” says the father. “Let’s get back in the snowmobile and go home for tea. Mummy’s toasting some crumpets. And the Prime Minister is giving a talk on the wireless.”
“Oh goody,” says his son. “I do like Lord Farage.”
Where’s wally? Anywhere but No 10
Ed Miliband often gets a easy ride from his opponents. Although they berate him for a lack of policies and the uncanny ability to murder a scripted joke, they don’t want to seem to mock the afflicted.
But this is sheer wimpishness: the guy could end up in No 10, for God’s sake. So thank goodness for Michael Gove, who used these pages yesterday to cover the Labour leader in blancmange and, such is his genial cunning, make it stick. His criticism of Miliband was full of sly Goveian touches, but its message was simple. This man is a wally. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. If the Tories keep drawing our attention to it, they’ll win.
Now the Church is truly split
The Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Rev Nicholas Holtam, not only favours gay marriage but compares its opponents to Christians who supported slavery or apartheid. Worshippers are furious: how dare “Bishop Nick” tell the Archbishop of York and millions of Africans that they are, in effect, the heirs to slave owners and racists?
But the offence caused isn’t the main story here. All dioceses were not created equal: if the Bishop of Guildford were to back “equal marriage” it wouldn’t matter. Salisbury, on the other hand, traces its roots back to St Aldhelm and has a breathtaking cathedral. Now that its bishop has endorsed Dave’s legislation, the C of E is properly split on the question. Eventually it will cave in to the secular consensus. It always does.
Hate comes in many forms
Peter Wilby, former editor of the New Statesman, writes a regular diary in the magazine couched in muddled but toxic prose. This week, he tried to pin the blame for the Woolwich atrocity on his colleagues in the media: “Some young men don’t need many excuses for going to war; think of how Britons were prepared to enlist in 1914. Politicians and the media are as culpable as the dreaded 'hate preachers’ in providing excuses for Lee Rigby’s killers.”
It’s true that the subject of terrorism inspires some vile articles. Consider the following, published immediately after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre: “American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no.” Yes and no? Who wrote that? Answer: the anonymous leader writer of the New Statesman, widely believed to be its then editor, Peter Wilby. You can’t help wondering: who exactly is the hate preacher here?
Cream under, over and on the side
What a fascinating week in the world of scones. A Sheffield mathematician has calculated that the ideal thickness of cream on a scone is 4mm, in the process reviving a dispute between Devon and Cornwall over whether the cream goes underneath the jam (Devon) or above it (Cornwall). Fortunately there’s no such dilemma in the No 10 kitchens. “We put clotted cream under the jam and whipped cream on top of it,” confides my source. “Plus a jug of single cream on the side in case the scone is a little bit dry.” Isn’t that rather too rich? “You must be kidding,” she laughs. “In fact, when the plate and the jug come back, they’re so clean that it’s hardly worth putting them in the dishwasher.”
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