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Christmas funny books

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Stocking fillers

Just occasionally Parris and Mason are unfair to politicians, pillorying them for imagined verbal bêtises which were clearly intended as humorous sallies. Norman St John-Stevas (Lord St John of Fawsley) must have had his tongue in his cheek when he said, in 1979:

But I mustn’t go on singling out names. One must not be a name-dropper, as Her Majesty remarked to me yesterday.

I think Sir Geoffrey Howe and Lord Jenkins had their respective wits about them when they said (1986 and 1989): ‘The future, where most of us are destined to spend the rest of our lives…’ and ‘I’ve found the future rather difficult to predict before it happens.’ (When Jenkins uttered that, of course, he said ‘pwedict’.) And surely a Labour spin-doctor, talking to the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley during the general election campaign of 1997, was being ironic when he said: ‘You want spontaneity? Spontaneity is scheduled for Wednesday.’

The authors miss an unfortunate turn of phrase that Parris immortalised in one of his parliamentary sketches. I forget the exact details, but there was a debate in the House of Lords that involved dogs — perhaps it related to dangerous dogs, or dog licences. And one noble lord piped up and said something like: ‘My lords, we need to be sure that this Act is on all fours with European law.’

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