Potting the red

Mary Riddell, in the Telegraph, castigates her Labour friends for wanking instead of working.

She loftily tut-tuts at their desertion of their constituency when in government and for wasting time pleasuring themselves in a testosterone-fest of party political warfare, Labour's genetically-programmed default activity.

Indeed. How many times did Gordon Brown and the comrades promise to 'fight' for... well, absolutely everything? Wearying, passé, irrelevant tribal ritual. Riddell has plainly spied the glimmer of political fact beneath the mountain of indisputable evidence following the election, although of course, being a Leftie, she cannot identify it. She does not grasp the scale of public outrage not at Labour's politicking but at the offensive damage her party has done to the country. She therefore restrains herself in censuring her fallen hero.

Mr Brown, for all his great qualities [such as?], only knew the politics and precepts of conflict. There was no compromise, no truck with dissenters, no quarter given. [Just McBrides, Drapers, Whelans and the Forces of Hell. Lovely. Such a credit to the nation.]

That inflexibility explains, in part, the erosion of civil liberties [she noticed?] and the haemorrhage of public hope [obit. c.1999]. It explains, too, why people turned away from a party that offered battle cries when the country craved a vision. [Tsk - see this rampaging herd of elephants, Mary?]

Well, all right, I suppose that's the most we can expect of Grub Street's Left although the words analysis and flawed spring unbidden.

On the other hand, those of us who understand Labour's 'vision' only too well are happy for Milibrothers, Ballses and Burnhams to devote their time exclusively to pocket billiards.

I usually don't bother reading Riddell but, grinning at the prospect of hilarity as Labour goes about its tent-pitching in the wilderness, today I did. And guess what? She annoyed me. So I wrote this:

After your own years of fighting talk in this column, I detect no sign that you, personally, are intoning the 'mea culpa' which you commend in your friends, but only the usual Grub Street de haut en bas hypocrisy. Motes, beams, casting first stones, etc. Contemptible.

With her self-righteous finger-wagging, Riddell is either making some sort of Labour in-joke or she's after her own memorial column in the Eye to lighten her declining years. Must try harder.