IT’S ALL getting a bit Groundhog Day. Last week in this space I asked whether a troubled minister was still there. This week the same, only Rachel has replaced Jess.
Senior ministers are very busy and do rely on professional agencies to ensure the i’s are crossed and the t’s are dotted when they engage in everyday transactions. Rachel Reeves’s estate agents, it seems, let her down, and what with the pressure of filling black holes and compensating for Brexit, she forgot to get the necessary rental licence.
It’s easily done: under the demands of saving the nation’s finances Rachel even forgot the details of her own CV. Later this month she’ll forget some of the minor points of the 2024 Labour manifesto.
(Since when did it become necessary to get a pricy council licence to rent out your house anyway? Perhaps one for another day.)
The good news for the Chancellor is that her estate agents took the rap and Sir Keir Starmer took the view that her omission required no more than a mild rebuke. That makes her luckier than Angela Rayner, who had to go after her conveyancing firm refused to play patsy over the stamp duty affair.
The other good news for Rachel is that just as on Friday the TV breaking news channels were getting all excited about an email chain that was obviously going to muddy the water rather than identify the guilty, something royal happened. A Mr Windsor, once a genuine war hero, was publicly stripped of his honours and titles. Older readers, think Chuck Connors in Branded.
I hold no brief for Andrew, a victim of his own greed and stupidity if there ever was one. But is the humiliation really necessary? Perhaps they’ll take the old-fashioned way of treating royal offenders, slightly modernised. A date with the block and the axeman in front of a 100,000 crowd at Wembley, with Oasis as support act, and free tickets for the Cabinet?
If you have a nasty mind, it’s always possible to suspect deals between the Palace and Downing Street. The King, usually reined in pretty tightly these days, was given his head over Hurricane Melissa. His statement read: ‘This most dreadful of record-breaking storms reminds us of the increasingly urgent need to restore the balance and harmony of Nature for the sake of all those whose lives and livelihoods may have been shattered by this heartbreaking disaster.’
This recalls one of Dashiell Hammett’s detective stories, set during Prohibition, in which his hero the Continental Op is sitting in a bar in Mexico. ‘I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE,’ the Op muses. ‘I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when . . . ‘
Most dreadful? Record-breaking? Increasingly urgent? Restore the balance and harmony of Nature?’ Love the capital letter on Nature, Your Majesty.
It is too early to assess the full impact of Hurricane Melissa, and I would not downplay its impact. But it is not news that hurricanes happen in the Caribbean. The BBC’s claim that this one was more intense and therefore worse than past hurricanes because of climate change is under challenge. I was in Jamaica in 1988 in the aftermath of Hurricane Gilbert, which lasted for nine days of havoc across the Caribbean. The island really was devastated and many of the population were living in tents. Gilbert is thought to have killed 45 in Jamaica. Melissa is so far reported responsible for the deaths of 19 Jamaicans.
If I were the King, I would take into account the fact that two major political parties have rejected Net Zero, and I would guess that means of lot of my subjects are unpersuaded about the increasingly urgent need to restore the balance and harmony of Nature. I would, accordingly, offer sympathy and help to the people of Jamaica, and I would leave the climate change guff to others.
At the risk of repeating the obvious, Charles’s mother died honoured by everybody because she was extremely bright and knew enough to keep the monarchy above politics.
(On the topic of aid to Jamaica, a member of the Commonwealth, the Government seems not to share the King’s despair, and is sending a measly £2.5million in aid, UK deploys urgent hurricane relief to the Caribbean about as much as it costs to put up our asylum-seeker guests in hotels for 12 hours. On Thursday the amount was raised by £5million, taking it to 36 hours of asylum hotel funding.)
In all this excitement, I rather forgot about Jess Phillips, last week’s struggling minister. Jess is still there, and the inquiry into grooming gangs is safely in the long grass, where the Government wants it, for many months. Victims who objected to the attempt to water the inquiry down and remove the spotlight from Pakistani gangs are forgotten. Well done, Jess! You go, girl!
Until the next time.
