Why the Norman conquest works for me every time

Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the knowledge, when they are found, that they are a day late, and that events must surely have moved on.

This year it would have been especially agonising. Lord Tebbit discovers spotty youths in Central Office! Such a phrase, as various authorities instantly pointed out, is a euphemism for Mr Iain Duncan Smith himself. For ‘spotty youths’ read ‘Iain has been captured by the gays, the women, and the ethnic minorities, insofar as the three categories are distinguishable’. The authorities explain that in the Middle Ages, when barons wanted to attack the king, they attacked the spotty youths advising him. That is how things are done in Norman times: the times of Norman Tebbit and Norman Fowler.

Intra-Norman conflict had been aroused because Lord Tebbit had written his article again. That is, the one about how the Conservative party was much more successful during that heroic period in our history when he was chairman, working closely with Mrs Thatcher and, he almost implies, Churchill. I always agree with the article and, more to the point, always enjoy it. Long may Lord Tebbit continue to write it.

This August, another Norman peer -Fowler by name; also a former Conservative chairman – set himself up in opposition to the article. He went on radio to say that the Central Office people were not spotty youths, but just as good as in Lord Tebbit’s day, and earlier.