Monday
We last went abroad for Christmas back in 1989. That was the year my wife and I decided we might be ready to start a family and we wanted to treat ourselves to one last mega holiday before we were too broke and too tired to enjoy it. So we went to Australia to visit friends and family for two and a half weeks, spending Christmas Day on the beach outside Melbourne and Boxing Day at the Test match. That last outing might not have been quite Jill’s idea of fun. This year we went off to Minneapolis to see our daughter. Anna has been living in Minnesota for five years now and what with lockdowns we had never got round to a Christmas visit. So it was about time.
We arrived to find several people wearing shorts and T-shirts. Apparently, it was unseasonally warm for the time of year. That means it was just a whisker above freezing. We were somewhat disappointed to find no snow but relieved not to hit the depths of winter. That far north in the midwest it can get down to -30C during winter. Our son-in-law picked us up from the airport and drove us to our Airbnb near to where he and Anna live. We got through the front door … and were knocked back by an overpowering smell of skunk. The dope variety, not the animal. Hard to say which would have been worse. It turned out that the downstairs flat – we were on the first floor – was a skunk farm. Or that the residents were stoned from the moment they woke up in the morning to the time they fell into an even deeper state of unconsciousness at night. We had forgotten that since the last time we had visited Minneapolis in May the state had legalised dope.
On one occasion during our six-day stay we did meet a semi-comatose man in the hall but he quickly stumbled back into his apartment. But we couldn’t stop the smell leaking upwards through the floorboards, and our clothes stank of skunk. It’s a wonder we weren’t arrested at Heathrow on our way back. That aside, it was a lovely few days. A special time with a special couple.
Tuesday
Let’s call it the transformative power of great television. Art that can change lives. Last week’s four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office has certainly done that. What had been a miscarriage of justice that slipped beneath many people’s notice – if they had heard of it, they didn’t linger long over it – has become the national scandal it always should have been. Now the Horizon disaster is dominating the media agenda and Westminster, and will continue to do so until justice is done.
This isn’t now going to conveniently go away until all the post office operators have had their convictions quashed – fewer than 100 have been so far – full compensation has been paid and those responsible have been held to account. The scandal started back in the late 1990s with the introduction of a new Fujitsu software accounting system that execs decided must be infallible – they assumed it was responsible for uncovering widespread fraud in post offices. They then covered up the evidence when it was known to be at fault. Unbelievably, the Post Office is still paying Fujitsu millions of pounds each year to use the system. No one does outrage better than Westminster and MPs have been first in line to demand justice. To call for heads to roll, particularly those of their political opponents. But something about this weaponisation of other people’s misery just feels wrong.
For the real truth is that – with a tiny number of very honourable exceptions – almost no MPs come out of this well. Computer Weekly and Private Eye have been reporting on the scandal since the 2000s and yet few MPs showed more than a passing interest in it. I’ve attended several urgent questions on the crisis over the years and there’s never been more than 50 MPs in the Commons. Even after the first convictions were overturned. So that meant there were 600 MPs who had better things to do. We’ve now reached the point where an MP who spoke for 20 seconds two years ago can present himself as a tireless campaigner. Time for a little humility here. The whole country took its eye off the ball and it’s time to prioritise the real victims. And the real villains.
Wednesday
Talking of which … with more than a million people signing an online petition calling for her to return her CBE, the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has decided to jump before she was pushed. Though she is not yet contrite enough to hand back the £3m or so in bonuses she got for presiding over a business that wrongfully accused so many of its operators. Nor has Westminster asked too many questions about why Theresa May’s government was so keen to reward Vennells back in 2019 when the problems surrounding the Horizon system were already well known. But it’s a start I suppose.
I’ve never quite understood the British obsession with the honours system – I’m guessing it’s linked to the royal family’s habit of dressing up in costumes and medals they haven’t earned – and already there are calls to make Alan Bates, the post office operator who has led the campaign, a “Sir”. As if that would make it all OK. As if he even necessarily wanted that. Rather, we should be using this moment to rethink the way we do honours. We’re probably never going to do away with them entirely – the establishment would lose its will to live without the possibility of endless self-preferment – but we could make it more democratic.
So while the king and the prime minister get to choose who gets the gongs, perhaps there could be a public vote each year of 10 people who get to lose theirs. It would make the system far more honest and be a useful check, by making sure that the undeserving get kicked out. Bye-bye, Baroness Mone. Welcome back Ms Mone. Same with Baroness Owen. Not even Charlotte knows why she got a peerage, so the public could put her out of her misery. And wouldn’t it lift the national mood if we had the power to reverse Liz Truss’s entire resignation list on one day? It would feel as if we were getting our country back.
Thursday
You have to admire Abbey Clancy. She recently went to the doctor, convinced she had multiple sclerosis. According to her podcast, she was hysterically sobbing as she told the specialist that she was experiencing episodes of numbness from the waist down and had diagnosed herself from Google. The doc gave her the once over and declared that the problem was that her jeans were too tight and the blood was not circulating to her legs. I mean, that is top-rate hypochondria.
I shouldn’t criticise, because I, too, have had my moments. In the mid-1990s, I woke up on Christmas Day convinced I had mad cow disease. My wife was profoundly unimpressed. But because there was no real test for BSE back then – apart from postmortem – I went around for weeks telling everyone I was going to die. That bout of hypochondria only ended after a period in a psychiatric hospital. Weirdly, I’ve become less fixated on my health, the older I’ve got. I’m not sure why. Maybe everyone gets more sanguine about their mortality in their 60s. I even recently forgot to get some test results back from the doctor. I was so chilled about my cough, I failed to consider lung cancer. Let’s hope I don’t pay for taking my eye off the ball.
Friday
George Osborne has said he reckons the general election will be held on 14 November. He doesn’t actually have any special hotline to No 10, he’s just repeating what most people in Westminster happen to think. Rishi Sunak is almost certain to want to carry on to the end of the year. Two years as prime minister will look much better on his CV than 18 months and there’s the faint chance that a miracle will happen that makes the country fall in love with the Tories again. A November election would also allow the party conference to go ahead as planned. No party will want to have to cancel its conference, as they are always a useful money spinner. And Sunak is unlikely to delay to January 2025, as it would just look even more desperate and no one would thank him for ruining Christmas with an election campaign. But whenever the election does take place, the campaign is already up and running.
It’s going to be a long year of Rishi doing stage-managed events in front of a few handpicked Tory members who clap politely as he tells them the country is going from strength to strength and his Conservative government has nothing to do with previous Conservative governments. It also looks to be a thoroughly unedifying campaign. Dirtier than most. We have the Tories running smear campaigns against Keir Starmer about his time as head of the CPS. Why couldn’t he have previously been a hedge fund salesman like Sunak? That’s what I call public service.
The Sun has revealed that Starmer saved a few murderers from death row. Apparently capital punishment is absolutely fine so long as it doesn’t take place in the UK? The Tories have also tried to claim that the real villain of the Horizon scandal was Starmer. Mmm. Remind me who has been in government since 2010. And after prime minister’s questions, the Tories tried to confect a race row. Literally everyone knew Starmer was referring to Sunak’s wealth and privilege when he said the PM “didn’t get Britain” but the Conservatives have insisted it was about ethnicity. Unlike them to go all woke. Calm down, everyone. It’s only January.
