Some politicians don’t read their own manifestos. And some don’t even read the names of their own parties. When it comes to academy schools, the Lib Dems are struggling to comprehend ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. A Suffolk school earmarked for closure was rescued by campaigning parents who invited a commercial operator — International English Schools UK — to take over its administration. Rather than celebrate, Nick Clegg was hopping mad. He apparently regards the profit-making IES as blasphemers against his ideology. A few months ago IES leafleted homes in Twickenham and Teddington offering ‘a new choice of education from September 2014 when IES welcomes the first pupils to a brand new primary school’. They may regret having distributed the pamphlet so widely in Vince Cable’s constituency. Sure enough, IES Twickenham was not among the list of free schools due to open in 2014. If you want to kill off reforms that are liberal and democratic, you can rely on the Liberal Democrats.
Dignitas is celebrating its 15th birthday this year. Everyone’s invited. There’ll be arsenic cake and an exciting game of pass-the-pill-bottle. The Dignitas website carries startling news for voters in Scotland. The SNP wants to help you die. A cuddly MSP named Margo MacDonald, representing Lothian, is keen to make suicide legal for Scots who’ve had enough of life under her party’s administration. Dignitas reveal that her assisted suicide bill will include ‘elements of the practice of accompanied suicides in Switzerland’. But staff at Dignitas, in their haste to send out the birthday invitations, have overlooked the fact that the MacDonald’s consultation ran out of time at the end of April. In other words, the bill died of natural causes. Perhaps canny Alex Salmond has decided to delay the voter-cull until after the independence referendum.
How best to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Britain’s accession to the EU? Photographer G. Roland Biermann will help us get into the festive spirit. Like the EU itself, Biermann was born abroad but now has a prosperous foothold in London. The EU’s swanky headquarters in Westminster is to stage a commemorative exhibition of Biermann’s work this October, which will ‘explore the contrapuntal relationship between beauty, death and transience, through a delicately crafted set of Warholian photographic representations of plastic carrier bags floating in a sea of used engine oil’. I know. It’s worrying, isn’t it? But police leave has been cancelled to cope with the crowds.
Rogue peers are to be evicted from parliament under new laws planned by the Lib Dems. Cheats like Baroness Uddin, who had to repay £125,000 in fiddled expenses, will be shown the door, although the miscreants will retain their nominal status as members of the nobility. This, of course, is what most peers want. A posh title to impress the maître d’ and no parliamentary chores whatsoever.
Heathrow expansion? All sorted. A glance at the map reveals a sodding great man-made pond, the George VI reservoir, languishing rather uselessly next to the airport and taking up enough space for four new runways. Stick the bloody thing under concrete and hey presto. Heathrow is bigger than Charles de Gaulle. Nesting birds can flap off and nest elsewhere. And a portion of George VI can be left exposed for arriving jumbos to splash into if they happen to overshoot the landing-strip. My man at Terminal 5 says his bosses have filed the scheme under the codename ‘Bugger Bognor’.
Maria Miller is said to be ‘having a tough time’ at the Department of Culture, Media, Sport, Hop-Scotch, Jazz, Whist, Cake Decorating and Synchronised Acrobatics. Or whatever it calls itself. There are even rumours that the entire ministry may be taken out and quietly buried in a midnight ceremony. If so, Ms Miller is being tipped to re-emerge as boss of Overseas Development. ‘We’re hoping she can work her magic there too,’ says a Cabinet insider.
No need to tell David Davis we’re all under surveillance. He already knows. In his days as shadow home secretary, DD once received news from an aide that his BlackBerry had gone missing. He summoned his staff for a secret briefing and revealed that MI5 had intercepted the device in order to de-encrypt his diary engagements and trace his movements around the country. The great champion of civil liberties then announced a counter-intelligence sting which would expose the treacherous spooks and trigger the home secretary’s resignation. At this point an assistant found the BlackBerry tucked under a yoghurt box.
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