Is Putin the reason my house is so cold?

Justin Webb is normally one of the least self-righteous BBC presenters, but he was out-Maitlising rivals on the Today programme on Tuesday. In that special, shocked tone broadcasters usually reserve for stories about racism or paedophilia, Webb contrasted ‘the final goodbyes not said’ by those who followed the rules with the Prime Minister’s birthday party/gathering in the Cabinet Room. He quoted Adam Wagner, ‘the human rights lawyer and Covid rules expert’, that it had been ‘obviously a birthday party’. It was ‘not denied’, Webb gravely intoned, ‘there was birthday cake’. How does he prevent himself bursting out laughing? The longer this story runs, now with added police, the more preposterous the solemnity becomes. The Prime Minister is unfit to govern, apparently, because his staff gave him a cake on his birthday. In the 1960s ‘satire boom’, Peter Cook warned Britain might ‘sink giggling into the sea’. Now it is sinking much faster, completely po-faced. Half the country feels this way, but dares not say it.

King George VI died in his sleep 70 years ago next week, after a day at Sandringham shooting hares and pigeons (the pheasant season having just ended). ‘I hope,’ said Winston Churchill to his doctor, ‘you will arrange something like that for me. But don’t do it till I tell you.’ He then broadcast to the nation. His phrase about the King having ‘walked with death’ was much admired. Evelyn Waugh was unimpressed. ‘Do your foreign set know that our King is dead?’ he wrote to Nancy Mitford in Paris. ‘Mr Churchill made a dreadful speech on the TSF [Telégraphie sans fil, i.e. wireless]. Triteness enlivened only by gross blunders… George VI’s reign will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen.’ ‘All the newspapers,’ he raged, ‘are full of the glorification of Elizabeth Tudor [because the new Queen was Elizabeth II], the vilest of her sex.’