RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I've never known a political class so out of touch

2022-10-31

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I’ve never known a political class so out of touch with the people… who, after all, pay their wages

This is going to be another one of those columns that begins: Days like this it’s difficult to know where to start.

I’ve almost reached breaking point. As Tom Robinson sang back in 1978: I’ve given up reading the papers, I’ve given up watching TV.

Which might be considered a bit of a disadvantage in someone who is paid to write a topical newspaper column.

But we now live in a Looking Glass World, where like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, words mean whatever the political class want them to mean.

And by ‘political class’, I don’t just mean the politicians, ghastly as most of them are. My definition includes the civil service; the sclerotic, self-serving standing bureaucracy; the entire ‘justice system’, from the useless police to the courts; and vast sections of my own trade — in particular, the broadcast wing of the Boys In The Bubble.

Witness how the pack is hunting down Home Secretary Sue Ellen Braverman. Having congratulated themselves on bringing down not one but two Conservative Prime Ministers, the self-appointed arbiters of truth and decency have alighted on a new quarry

What passes for news and political commentary these days amounts to little more than onanistic, navel-gazing nonsense. None of it bears any relation to the real world. Television news specialises in confected outrage, while entirely overlooking real scandals.

For instance, if you watch Sky or the BBC, you won’t have heard a single mention of the shameful elevation to the Lords of the odious Tom Watson — a malicious smear-monger who shouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of high office.

But then again, he’s Labour. Which, as long as you’re on the Left, means never having to say you’re sorry for anything, however heinous, because it’s accepted without question that fundamentally you’re a ‘good’ person.

Not so, if you have the misfortune to be a Tory. Witness how the pack is hunting down Home Secretary Sue Ellen Braverman.

Having congratulated themselves on bringing down not one but two Conservative Prime Ministers, the self-appointed arbiters of truth and decency have alighted on a new quarry.

As Sue Ellen emerged from her front door yesterday, she was greeted by a shrieking harpy from one of the TV channels demanding to know: ‘Are you a threat to national security, minister?’

This was straight from the ‘When are you going to resign?’ songbook of Sky’s resident heckler-in-chief Sam Coates. It was a cheap jibe designed to produce a soundbite which could be repeated on the hour, every hour. What it wasn’t was proper journalism.

From what I can gather, Sue Ellen’s crime was to press the wrong button on her iPhone and send an unencrypted message or six to the wrong recipient. It happens.

But we’re not talking Philby and Maclean here. It was an honest error, no harm done. Trying to blow this up into a major national security breach is absurd.

I’ll tell you what’s the real national security scandal — the illegal, uninterrupted arrival of 40,000 foreign nationals in Kent this year alone, many of them military-age Albanian men who will quickly disappear into criminality and the black economy.

Braverman’s job is sort out this mess, to put an end to the madness. Yet prominent sections of the political class and the media are determined to prevent that happening by making her the villain of the piece.

Take the outraged reporting of overcrowding at the Manston reception centre. Somehow that has been twisted to make it appear that it’s all our fault, for not making the ‘vulnerable’ migrants more comfortable.

The latest manufactured row is over Dishi Rishi declining to attend the COP 27 climate summit in Egypt. Why should he? Sunak’s got enough on his plate at home, without jetting off to Cairo for another jolly-up, which will achieve precisely nothing

Hang on, no one forced them to come here. And if the 1951 ‘refugee’ charter had been applied to the letter, they would have had to settle in the first safe country they reached. But we are asked to accept absurdly that international law doesn’t actually apply until they land in Britain — in which case it is our duty to provide them with everything from hotel suites to legal aid.

All attempts to remove those who have no right to be here are resisted vigorously, in defiance of the overwhelming wishes of the British people. Labour would let them all stay. So here’s a question for them, one which you won’t ever hear any right-on TV presenter ask.

What if all 40,000 turned up together on a single day? Would we still be obliged to roll out the welcome mat? Or would we be entitled to treat it for what it really is — an invasion — and muster the forces to repel it?

Far easier to blame ‘racist’ Tories for failing to meet our international obligations. Ah, yes. Those international obligations. The latest manufactured row is over Dishi Rishi declining to attend the COP 27 climate summit in Egypt. Why should he?

Sunak’s got enough on his plate at home, without jetting off to Cairo for another jolly-up, which will achieve precisely nothing.

After an all-you-can-eat buffet of sheep’s eyes and champagne, the assorted dignitaries will pay lip service to a meaningless accord to cut emissions before flying home by private jet to open a few more coal-fired power stations.

America will carry on fracking, which is why, unlike us, it is self-sufficient in energy, and China and India will take no notice whatsoever. Yet here in Britain we will be told we have to ‘lead the world’ in setting an example, by impoverishing ourselves and freezing to death, just so the political class can feel good about themselves.

Meanwhile, on the streets of London, law-abiding folk will continue to have their days ruined by middle-class toddlers with mental health issues gluing themselves to the Tarmac and spraying buildings with orange paint in the name of saving the planet.

And how do the authorities respond to this daily anarchy in our capital city? They side with the headbangers. Yesterday the police warned members of the public not to confront Just Stop Oil nutters blocking their way. If there’s one thing the police will crack down on it’s ordinary folk ‘taking the law into their own hands’.

I’ve been at this game for more than 50 years, almost 35 as a columnist. Yet I have never known a time when the political class have been further removed from the rest of us who pay their wages.

I’d like to end on a positive note. But some things just don’t change. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, just a broken-down HS2 train after running out of public money.

We are all going to Hell in a handcart.

A veritable cornucopia of animal magic for Gary to get his teeth into today.

In Gateshead, a runaway wallaby called Choppy has been captured and transferred to a local zoo.

Tie me kangaroo down, bonny lad.

In Llandudno, a special task force has been set up to tackle a herd of Kashmiri mountain goats which has been running riot in the town, sleeping in bus shelters and brawling in a car park — presumably after chucking-out time. Meanwhile in Gloucestershire, where boar baiting is apparently a thing, police are looking for someone who set an illegal gin trap, which ensnared a local cat.

It’s a cat trap, and you’ve been caught!

And in Sandbanks, one of Britain’s most exclusive seaside residential areas, plans for a new £9 million leisure complex have been put on hold because of the presence of a group of rare nesting sand lizards.

Bring on the Depressed River Mussel!

A veritable cornucopia of animal magic for Gary to get his teeth into today. In Gateshead, a runaway wallaby called Choppy has been captured and transferred to a local zoo. Tie me kangaroo down, bonny lad

When Suella Braverman (see elsewhere) ran for the Tory leadership, I couldn’t resist calling her Sue Ellen, given this column’s predilection for nicknames.

I now discover her real name is Sue-Ellen, with a hyphen. Her parents were big Dallas fans. She changed it to Suella some years later.

You couldn’t make it up, even though I did.

Posturing Pixie Balls-Cooper was full of faux outrage over the treatment of migrants who have arrived here illegally.

So when will she honour her promise to take ‘refugees’ into one of her own homes?

Don’t hold your breath.

Looks like we had a lucky escape when Fizzy Lizzie was forced to fall on her letter opener. Turns out the Russkies had been hacking her phone. They knew more about her than we did, even after an eight-week leadership contest.

Thanks to Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, in The Mail on Sunday, we now learn that far from being PM material, she was more like a flaky schoolgirl, who went the full Violet Elizabeth Truss whenever she couldn’t get her own way. She took against Chief Whip Wendy Morton, telling aides: ‘I just hate her.’

Another saucer of milk for the PM, please.

It didn’t take long for her to descend into paranoia, obsessively studying wind charts to assess the chances of radiation from a Russian nuke in Ukraine reaching Britain.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. But in Lizzie’s case, they were…

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