And the same to you, Jackboots!
By Richard Littlejohn
Parliament rose for the summer last week.
Not that you’d notice. No one seems to have told the politicians. They continue to behave as if they’re starring in their own soap opera.
It had been my intention not to write another word about politics until at least the party conference season in September.
Frankly, I’m sick of the sight of the lot of them — and I suspect the same goes for most of you, too.
We’ve had politicians in our faces for an eternity. A period of radio silence would be welcome.
For the month of August, the Westminster village should be a ghost town, like Paris during les grandes vacances.
I don’t want to read another word about the tensions in the coalition; spending cuts; the dismal Labour leadership contest; or what Vince Cable thinks about anything.
There was even an opinion poll at the weekend showing how many seats the parties could expect to win if an election were to be held tomorrow.
What a pointlessly fatuous exercise.
There isn’t going to be an election any time soon. Who cares?
We’ve had an election and most people seem content with the result. now shut up, go away and get on with it.
Even though I’ve been offering a reward for sightings of Gordon Brown, his vanishing act should be the template for all MPs.
Gordon was pictured at the weekend on the water with his two sons.
He was wearing a suit jacket under his life jacket. Someone should tell him it’s OK to relax for five minutes.
Apparently, he’s spent the past couple of months writing a book about how to get us out of the economic mess he created — which is a bit like Osama Bin Laden submitting a planning application for rebuilding the Twin Towers. He needn’t have bothered. We’re not interested.
Despite my plan to declare this column a politics-free zone for the duration of the holidays, I’d reckoned without the resurrection of disgraced former home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
With a stunning lack of self-awareness, Jackboots has applied for a £77,000-a-year, part-time post as vice-chairman of the BBC Trust.
Quite why the BBC thinks a two-and-a-half-days-a-week sinecure is worth 77 grand is one thing.
Where Jackboots gets the idea that she’s just the woman for the job is another.
Having being resoundingly rejected by the voters of Redditch, what gives her the right to expect to be reattached immediately to the taxpayers’ teat?
If General Sir Richard Dannatt is prevented from becoming a Tory defence minister, because it’s less than a year since he left the Army, why should a Labour ex-minister be allowed to work in a top public sector job just a couple of months after being kicked out of her seat?
She used to be a teacher. If she’s short of a shilling, she could always apply to open one of Michael Gove’s new academies.
It would be a novelty to see a politician putting something back into society instead of permanently shoving her snout in the public spending trough.
Jackboots, you may recall, was forced to resign from the Cabinet after it was revealed she had deceitfully claimed over £100,000 in expenses by pretending that her sister’s spare room was her ‘main residence’.
She also submitted a bill for pornographic movies and a patio heater.
The real mystery is how she managed to avoid prosecution. The courts have just ruled that four MPs cannot hide behind Parliamentary privilege to escape fraud charges.
For the life of me, I can’t understand the material difference between their alleged crimes and the bent expenses submitted by Smith.
Although these human sacrifices have a case to answer, they are naturally aggrieved at having been singled out while so many others walked away scot-free. There should be dozens of MPs in the dock, as a basis for negotiation.
But rather than show contrition, self-styled ‘honourable members’ have reverted to type and spent the first few weeks of this Parliament trying to subvert the new, stricter, expenses regime.
Their misplaced sense of grievance is matched only by their inflated sense of entitlement. They still seem to believe the usual standards do not apply to them.
Jackboots spoke eloquently for most MPs when she told a reporter who challenged her, quite legitimately, about her BBC job application to ‘f*** off’.
No, pet, that’s what we want you to do. And take the rest of the political class with you.
