Rudeness at someone else’s wedding is worse than segregated seating
Is it possible for Jim Fitzpatrick, the Labour MP for Poplar and Canning Town, who so recently stormed out of a segregated wedding, to wear underpants? I don’t see that it is. I can’t see how he’d get hold of them.
Imagine going with him to a shop. He and his wife Sheila seem pretty inseparable, so she’d probably have to come too. Look Jim, you’d say. Voluminous stripy boxers, just the sort you like. Shall we get you some? ‘Never!’ he’d have to declare. ‘I shall only buy pants where my wife can also buy pants!’ Principles, eh? So off the three of you dutifully slog, to the lingerie section, to find him something frilly and plus-sized. But he has to try them on, and they won’t let him into the changing rooms, and so off he storms. Pantless. Forever.
Swimming pools can’t be easy, either. No problem getting there — he could wear his unisex leotard from home, under his clothes. Indeed, that would solve the pants problem rather nicely. But then, after he’s swum, where does he go to towel off and get dressed again? The men’s locker room is out of the question. So either they let him keep hold of Sheila’s hand, like a toddler, or he has to go home all sopping wet. And what if he gets pneumonia? What if there isn’t a spare bed in a mixed ward?
Sheila, I read, is a GP. That’s got to be tough too, hasn’t it? What with her beliefs, I mean. Some chap comes to see her with problems down below. He’s elderly. Maybe the old chap would rather get out his old chap in front of another old chap. Dr Fitzpatrick can’t be having that, though. Not while remaining true to her principles. I suppose there would be some grappling.
Still, you’ve got to make sacrifices when you have convictions, don’t you? I keep thinking of how Jim Fitzpatrick might have behaved on the Titanic. ‘Women and children first!’ they’d all have been shouting. ‘Bugger that,’ he would have to have said, perhaps before headbutting a bejewelled old lady on the bridge of the nose and leaping into a lifeboat. That’s our Jim. Always true to his beliefs.
‘The vast majority of Muslim constituents who have contacted me have expressed sympathy that I was placed in this predicament,’ Fitzpatrick told the BBC’s Today. Predicament? This? Have you ever heard anything so self-important in your life? It’s not as though they put a bag on his wife’s head, or were about to stone her to death for showing a knee.
What is less acceptable, I wonder, in contemporary UK society? Segregated seating? Or astonishing rudeness at somebody else’s wedding? I’d say the latter. Manners first, principles second — this is the British way. You can go a long way with manners. We talk about the need to spread tolerance and an acceptance of cultural diversity through our multicultural society, but what we really mean is that we need to spread manners. Once you’ve got them in the bag, you don’t need much else. Manners are about doing the right thing by everybody else. Get them right, and all else follows.
The Minister for Farms has no manners, only principles. What was he doing at a random constituent’s wedding, anyway? I can’t say it occurred to me to invite Frank Dobson to mine. Maybe it’s considered good luck to have Jim Fitzpatrick at your wedding in Bangladeshi circles. Much like some other subcontinentals, with eunuchs. Or maybe the tradition is to invite absolutely everybody to your wedding. Maybe he just always turns up, in his ill-mannered way, to schmooze and scrounge for votes. That seems more likely. Also on Today, he said that he knew this sort of segregation was unusual, because he has been to an average of one Muslim wedding a month for the past 15 years. That’s almost 800 couples. I suppose they’ll be thrilled to have finally found a trick to keep him away.
What to do, then, about these accursed Americans, and their snivelling and persistent refusal to pay London’s congestion charge? That’s over three million quid they owe us now. The previous ambassador established a policy of just not paying, because he didn’t fancy it. Obama’s new ambassador Louis Susman just took over, and there were hopes that he might be more reasonable. Not a bit of it. ‘It’s a tax,’ the Americans continue to bleat, even though it plainly isn’t. ‘Diplomats don’t have to pay tax.’
Well, diplomats can get their bloody cars towed, then. Why the hell not? Boris Johnson (born, let us not forget, in New York City) is being distinctly fey over this, with his own spokesman merely describing him as ‘disappointed’. For God’s sake, man, this won’t do. Get some backbone. Think of those damn people in Grosvenor Square, ripping up their penalty letters and sniggering at us. Slapping themselves on the chest afterwards, no doubt, and shouting ‘hoo-rah!’ like Marines. Because they’re bigger than us. Because they think they can.
It won’t do. Tow, baby, tow. Why the hell not? What are they going to do? Retaliate? Fine. What do we care? What have we got to lose in Washington, anyway? An Austin Allegro? A Triumph Acclaim? We can get cabs. They’d be doing us a favour. Sorry, ‘favor’.
I know it won’t be easy. People will make YouTube videos, calling us Nazis and communists and Third World heathens all at once. Barack Obama will do his disappointed voice. There’s simply no way that Daniel Hannan will be on our side. But still. British pride demands it. Plus, it gives the rest ideas. The Russians already owe us plenty, as do the Japanese. The damned curs. Slap the Americans into line, and they’ll soon follow.
If necessary, we can always be passive-aggressive about this. We’re Brits. We’re good at that. Let’s start by telling our traffic wardens to stop enforcing diplomatic parking places. Right? It’s that easy. Just do nothing. They become, effectively, free parking for everyone. So all these diplomats, they have to park somewhere else. Will they pay? Will they hell. So we tow them. And we tow them far. Diplomatic immunity might make it easy to avoid parking fines, but nothing makes you immune from having to collect your car from a nocturnal facility outside a business park in the arse end of Epping. I’m not kidding. Get it together, Boris. Let’s go to war. Hoo-rah.
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