Even Conservative councils now think like the left

The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is very handsome, isn’t he? If I were a woman, or a homosexual, I would certainly set my cap at him; I would let him order for me in restaurants and handle me brusquely in the bedroom as he revealed to me the full tumescent glory of his ‘killer app’, as he would undoubtedly put it. We lefties, and especially women lefties, are often sexually beguiled by the whiff of sulphur from unreconstructed reactionaries like Niall.

Ferguson was interviewed in the Guardian this week by one of their highborn leftie babes, a woman called ‘Decca’. He was thrillingly peremptory and ruggedly uncontrite to her. Among other things he announced that his side — the right — had won on both of the important issues of the 1980s, ‘the economy and the cold war’. Well, the Cold War certainly; home win, no question, five goals from the big centre-forward Reagan and some useful assists from the tricky right-winger Thatcher. As for the economy, it looks to me as though the right was coasting to victory until the left, quite remarkably, pulled it back in 2007 with all that sub-prime business and the banking collapse and the effective nationalisations (G.W. Bush og, 89) of the failed financial institutions. Right now I think we’re in extra time with penalties looming.

What Niall didn’t say, however, was that the left — and particularly the bits of it which I do not like — won on every other issue.