Quality | 2010.03.29
Malcolm Tucker | Like Christmas Day on the western front
So we and the Tories could climb out of the trenches to play football with Geoff Hoon\'s head. Now back to war
Well what a great week. Brilliant. The Tories have been granted a baby, and unto us was born a child of solid fuck.
Obviously I know you have ambivalent feelings about those involved in the Dispatches show. And when it came out that it was Hoon, Byers and Hewitt who\'d been done, it was a little like Christmas Day on the western front. Our press office and the Tories climbing out of the trenches to have a nice game of football kicking around Geoff Hoon\'s head, to the supportive clatter of an old-time football rattle constructed from Byers\'s dried-out nuts.
But even though the lobbying revelations have discredited internal rivals, I personally do not believe you would have been short-sighted enough about their political impact to have been found, in their wake, walking around No 10 swigging from a bottle of "Chekov" supermarket vodka, punching the air and singing, at great volume, and for no apparent reason, "Opal fruits! Made to make your mouth water!!" We probably need to get on top of that rumour.
Look. We can\'t enjoy this. Whoever\'s been nailed we still need to counter-attack, or it could be: at first they came for the Blairites and we did nothing, then they came for the trade unionists and we did nothing, so when finally they came for us there was no fucker left to brief against. We must remember also we haven\'t seen the full interviews. After all, it\'s possible the preamble to the screened segments went along the lines of: "Hello. We are prepared to pay a million pounds to charity if you could make out for 20 minutes that you are a self-aggrandising, phoney-worldy, shit-eating-grinning, bullshit fuck-job."
Office matters: Re the office. Thank you for your intervention about the quality of my theoretical desk at Victoria. And due to your efforts I have now been provided with a fax machine. Presumably in case I need to communicate with Mr PJ Whackcock in Epsom, the sole other surviving user of the fax machine. Thanks. Sometimes Charlie Whelan comes in, and late at night when Damian McBride sits the other side, together they look like a lineup at The Hague for Bosnian war crimes.
Cameron baby: So re Sam Cam\'s election bump . Think we shouldn\'t kid ourselves that this is a big factor. The reality is – everyone here got a bit excited that the public had seen through Cameron. But we have to be very careful in terms of taking the parliamentary Labour party as a good barometer of what the British public think or feel about anything whatsoever. I mean, if you took a poll on the Death Star, you\'d get a majority saying Skywalker failed to convince in terms of his vision of the future. What with a key part of his vision of the future being the blowing up of the Death Star. Now I\'m not saying Cameron is Skywalker, or that you came across in public this week as combining a mixture of the dizzy optimism of Darth Vader and the incoherent moaning wail of a wookiee.
But what I am saying is that there\'s a danger that we think it\'s over with the public and the Tories when it\'s not. Their poll dip looks to me like the public having a postcoital fag after their first good rogering from Cameron and feeling a bit "meh". But soon enough they\'re going to be ready for Dave the Happy Shopper-Clinton to turn off one of his beloved westerns and clamber on top of them to resume his determined, joyless huffing and a-puffing.
And finally … the budget: Since you asked, my view on the budget is: "Yeah, sure. Fine." Seriously. Budget schmudget. A billion here, 20 billion there. Twenty pee on diesel oil, forty pence off kerosene. Paraffin\'s up, cigarillos are down. Clogs are out, sandals are in. The Bronx is up, the Battery is down. Mortgage Pension Fund Rebate Tax has been halved by double to massive acclaim from a man on page 18 of the Daily Independegraph. I mean, I\'m sure it\'s all very important but no one really gives a shit do they?
Regards, Malcolm .
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