Better Late Than Never
Daniel Finkelstein made me laugh with his self-deprecating column in The Times in which he says he was thoroughly grateful for Santa's arrival last Thursday evening, albeit 30 years late.
All this time I’ve been waiting for Christmas
By Daniel Finkelstein
Notebook
All the way through Thursday, other political commentators and analysts were tweeting that for them, election day is like Christmas Day. It is not a feeling I could relate to.
In my adult life I have twice stood on the platform to hear my loss of an election read out to a TV audience of millions, once stood at the door of party headquarters to greet a vanquished prime minister as the scale of his landslide defeat became clear, and three times had to go on television to explain why friends and allies hadn’t quite clinched victory.
Christmas Day it hasn’t been. Or maybe it has. The problem being that I’m Jewish.
Anyway on Thursday night, I was at ITV ready to be interviewed about the exit poll and prepared for another, ahem, great evening.
They spent quite a lot of time rehearsing the introduction. When they finally showed the exit poll, I genuinely thought it was a rehearsal mock-up.
It wasn’t. It was just Santa arriving, having taken nearly 30 years to get here.
Burning ambition
The funniest moment of the election campaign — I mean besides the results — has to have been Ed Miliband’s 8ft-high pledge stone. I mean, who came up with that one, eh? And what on earth are they going to do with it now?
Silly political stunts are not the preserve of any one party, of course. I’m frankly not sure who would win a silly stunts competition.
I remember in the late 1990s sitting in a meeting when the party chairman proposed that Conservative Central Office should organise events at the party conference to distract attention from dissident fringe meetings.
This was not a strong idea to start with but I also noted that one of the proposals was for a bonfire of regulations on the Bournemouth seafront. As head of policy I gently noted that we had been quite careful not to identify the exact regulations we would abolish. What, then, would we be able to burn? People could bring their own, I was told. And throw them on.
I started to say that normally when I go to Bournemouth I leave my regulations at home, when someone interrupted. Didn’t we need to provide people with something to eat, if we were going to have the bonfire at lunchtime? How about a barbecue of regulations, suggested someone else.
This silly stunt didn’t happen in the end I’m pleased to say. It turns out that having bonfires on the seafront at Bournemouth is against regulations.
Triple whammy
I didn’t vote Conservative. It would have been a crime. I mean, literally, it would have been criminal.
I had a polling card because I am registered to vote in local and European elections. But if I had tried to use it, I would have broken the law that forbids peers from voting in general elections.
It’s an ancient part of common law, apparently, that bars peers because they already exercise a vote in parliament.
The Labour peer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell tweeted that she “can’t help but think Mrs Pankhurst would like me to have a say”. I’m not so sure. At the end of her life Emmeline Pankhurst was a Conservative parliamentary candidate. She’d have been happy with Baroness Bakewell not voting.
A friend of mine who was a famous MP and is now a peer came back through customs and was asked whether he was returning to the country to vote. He explained that he wasn’t allowed to. “They bar Lords, criminals and lunatics,” he said.
“Ah,” replied the customs man. “That must be difficult for you. Forbidden on three counts.”
Notebook
All the way through Thursday, other political commentators and analysts were tweeting that for them, election day is like Christmas Day. It is not a feeling I could relate to.
In my adult life I have twice stood on the platform to hear my loss of an election read out to a TV audience of millions, once stood at the door of party headquarters to greet a vanquished prime minister as the scale of his landslide defeat became clear, and three times had to go on television to explain why friends and allies hadn’t quite clinched victory.
Christmas Day it hasn’t been. Or maybe it has. The problem being that I’m Jewish.
Anyway on Thursday night, I was at ITV ready to be interviewed about the exit poll and prepared for another, ahem, great evening.
They spent quite a lot of time rehearsing the introduction. When they finally showed the exit poll, I genuinely thought it was a rehearsal mock-up.
It wasn’t. It was just Santa arriving, having taken nearly 30 years to get here.
Burning ambition
The funniest moment of the election campaign — I mean besides the results — has to have been Ed Miliband’s 8ft-high pledge stone. I mean, who came up with that one, eh? And what on earth are they going to do with it now?
Silly political stunts are not the preserve of any one party, of course. I’m frankly not sure who would win a silly stunts competition.
I remember in the late 1990s sitting in a meeting when the party chairman proposed that Conservative Central Office should organise events at the party conference to distract attention from dissident fringe meetings.
This was not a strong idea to start with but I also noted that one of the proposals was for a bonfire of regulations on the Bournemouth seafront. As head of policy I gently noted that we had been quite careful not to identify the exact regulations we would abolish. What, then, would we be able to burn? People could bring their own, I was told. And throw them on.
I started to say that normally when I go to Bournemouth I leave my regulations at home, when someone interrupted. Didn’t we need to provide people with something to eat, if we were going to have the bonfire at lunchtime? How about a barbecue of regulations, suggested someone else.
This silly stunt didn’t happen in the end I’m pleased to say. It turns out that having bonfires on the seafront at Bournemouth is against regulations.
Triple whammy
I didn’t vote Conservative. It would have been a crime. I mean, literally, it would have been criminal.
I had a polling card because I am registered to vote in local and European elections. But if I had tried to use it, I would have broken the law that forbids peers from voting in general elections.
It’s an ancient part of common law, apparently, that bars peers because they already exercise a vote in parliament.
The Labour peer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell tweeted that she “can’t help but think Mrs Pankhurst would like me to have a say”. I’m not so sure. At the end of her life Emmeline Pankhurst was a Conservative parliamentary candidate. She’d have been happy with Baroness Bakewell not voting.
A friend of mine who was a famous MP and is now a peer came back through customs and was asked whether he was returning to the country to vote. He explained that he wasn’t allowed to. “They bar Lords, criminals and lunatics,” he said.
“Ah,” replied the customs man. “That must be difficult for you. Forbidden on three counts.”
