Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

6 June 2009

Tamzin Lightwater's unique take on the week

Monday

So exciting! Lots of lovely poor people on our new A-list!! We were a bit worried at first about making the only requirement that applicants should have, at the time of writing and to the best of their knowledge, no association whether in person or through close relatives to moats, tennis courts, swimming pools, duck ponds or servants’ quarters. (Crucially, nothing about stable blocks so yours truly is still in with a chance!) But we’ve been deluged. We’ve got a couple of people who claim to live in terraced housing in the north of England and a woman in a genuine inner-city tower block! Urgent memo from Jed: ‘We wish to make clear that when Dave called for a recall system to get rid of all MPs found guilty of expenses crimes he did not mean immediately, or indeed at all, necessarily. Clearly there may be occasions when a very senior Conservative has made a genuinely innocent oversight to do with his, for example, mortgage repayment arrangements which would be entirely understandable and we would all back him unreservedly and allow him to move on and forget all about it for the good of the country.’ Well, quite.

Tuesday

Why oh why do people persist in ringing in to complain about our EU referendum policy? I don’t see how we could be any clearer. Mr Hague has gone to exhaustive lengths to explain what he means when he says he can’t say whether or not he will say what he means when he says he can’t say what we will do if the Lisbon Treaty passes into law before we get into government, or not. To recap from the briefing notes: ‘“We will not let matters rest there” is a hypothetical holding answer to the hypothetical question of whether or not we will do something about a situation in the future we want to prevent happening in the first place and as such we can only answer a question pertaining to the opposite turning out to be the case because to do otherwise would be to elaborate on the unknowable.’ If people still want to vote Ukip after hearing that, frankly, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

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