The Times - UK (2022-06-11)

Advances show tide is turning

at last in the war on cancer

Weekend essay

Pages 32-33

Carol Midgley Notebook

583 years ago it was 1439. I

mean, Henry VIII hadn’t even

been born. Actually, neither

had Henry VII.

Doesn’t the passage of

time and the recency of

“history” boggle your

mind if you pause long

enough to think about it?

Which obviously you

don’t because there’s

never time? My

daughter reads out Insta

facts and I say: “Nah, that

can’t be true.” Then I check

it, and it is. Cleopatra was

born nearer to the

invention of the iPhone

than the building of the

Pyramids. Nintendo was

founded when Jack the

Ripper was still on the

loose (1889). Star Wars

came out the same year as

the last guillotine execution in

France (1977). People fret about

pensions, carbs, alcohol units,

I

don’t wish to boast but I’ve just
been to see the Rolling Stones
and next week I’m seeing the
Eagles. Get me. What’s notable
about this is not that I’m getting
off my backside to attend two gigs
(usually I can’t be bothered:
stadiums, traffic, queueing for warm
beer in plastic glasses — so tiring).
No, it’s that the combined age of
these band members is 583 years; the
Stones, 296 (though it’d be more if
Charlie Watts hadn’t died and been
replaced by a stripling of 65) and the
Eagles, 287. And it occurs to me that

The Stones

take me right

back to the

Middle Ages

yet our stay here, born “astride of

a grave”, is so fleeting we may as

well try to enjoy it.

Bartender, charge

my plastic glass.

No text please

I

see people are fed

up with texts being

used as a dramatic

device in TV shows.

Conversations With

Friends is cited as an

offender. It’s certainly

irritating when you

must rewind and

squint at tiny words on

a phone to follow a

plot. My husband moans

about it in Borgen. When

you’re following

subtitles already, it’s a

head-screw; no texts

please, we’re British.

But then writers can’t ignore

that this is how human

communication works now. In

period dramas when someone wrote

a long letter in tiny handwriting,

they got round it by having the

words spoken in a voiceover. You

can’t do that with texts. Quite the

mood-killer to make an actor spell

out LOL (laugh out loud) or LMAO

(laughing my arse off). And good

luck having to narrate the “vomit

face” or poop emoji. I think we’re

stuck with texts.

Did I shut the door?

T

witter isn’t good for much but

there’s one account that has

changed my life. On Fesshole

people confess, anonymously, to

secrets such as liking one child more

than the other or peeing in their

mother’s shower. But one person said

they are so neurotic about not

having locked the front door when

they go out, they take a photo of

themselves doing it. Genius.

I can convince myself when on

holiday 4,000 miles away that all my

doors and windows are flapping

open. I now photograph my

unplugged hair-straighteners, blown-

out candles, the dog safely locked in

the house. So anxiety-soothing.

Luckily I never need to snap the

unplugged iron because, as

previously discussed, I haven’t

ironed anything since about 2012.

My love potion

A

genuine “love potion” which

could make people fancy

each other may be available

within five years, say experts. Such

drugs replicate the effect on the

brain of falling in love, apparently.

Call this news? I think they’ll

find they had a little pill that did

exactly this at the Hacienda in

the 1990s.

And there’s a legal drug which has

done it for centuries. Never knock

“beer goggles”. Without them some

people would still be virgins.

@carolmidgley

Tories pay a price for being careless with cash

A reputation for tight control of the nation’s finances is being shredded by Johnson and Sunak’s fiscal incoherence

Comment

Conservative Party of arguably the

best arrow in its electoral quiver: the

reputation for a sound, assured grip

on the balance sheets. Of course

there must often be tension between

Downing Street and the Treasury.

This can be healthy, and quietly two

grown-ups with a shared interest in

political survival can resolve it.

Dialogue would be fine. But the

picture we’re getting is not of dialogue.

The canvas is abstract art: formless,

fragmented. It becomes impossible to

imagine what a discussion between

Boris Johnson and Sunak on the

national finances would sound like,

or who believes what, or how it could

be reported to the ordinary voter in

terms he or she might understand.

There seems no basis even for

analysis, and I sense colleagues in

both financial and political journalism

struggling for narrative, for plot, for

some kind of shape to their report.

In short, I don’t sense that Sunak

and Johnson are on the same page,

or indeed even reading the same

book. Who’s looking after the

money? Which of the two men will

be the first to acknowledge that

things cannot go on like this? Or

must it finally be an electorate,

which chose Conservative

government for its financial grip if

for nothing else, that tells them so?

know if Mrs T’s (and her chancellor

Geoffrey Howe’s) monetarism was

right for their time. I don’t know how

much Rishi Sunak can afford to spend

now. I don’t know whether tax cuts

would fuel inflation much, or why he

made that strange promise to cut the

standard rate of income tax by one

percentage point, but not yet. I don’t

know if the yield from a windfall tax

on oil giants outweighs the

undermining of business confidence,

nor do I know whether it was really

Sunak or the prime minister who

wanted it. I don’t know if Sunak

favoured using national insurance

contributions to raise revenue, or

whether he wanted to raise the

revenue and the PM blocked him

from doing so through income tax.

What I do know is that a growing

impression of incoherence in fiscal

philosophy threatens to rob the

Mrs Thatcher shows Matthew Parris,

second left, how to tidy up in 1978

on the national finances. In the face

of every call for compassionate

government and the role of

“empathy” in modern democratic

politics, and every shout about public

hunger for public spending, I still

wonder whether the Tory party may

now be undermining the first, best,

most deep-seated and lasting

argument for voting Conservative.

We may never love them but we do

value a party that understands

financial management and keeps a

firm grip on spending.

In more than 40 years of

canvassing for Tory candidates I

must have rung thousands of

doorbells and chatted on thousands

of doorsteps with thousands of

voters, some sympathetic, some

hostile, some undecided. Faced by

voters complaining about Tory

meanness, I’ve stoutly defended the

party’s record of support for the

poor, of investment in public goods

like education and health, and of

humanity in politics.

But I have hardly ever won any of

these arguments. Rarely have I been

able to persuade a doubtful voter

that the Tories “care”. It goes against

the grain of people’s thinking.

With only one argument have I so

often made headway, so often

elicited grudging acceptance that I

have a point: that Conservatives

won’t squander taxpayers’ money;

that Tories won’t wreck the national

finances like those socialists will; that

Tories know money doesn’t grow on

trees. Deep in the national psyche is

lodged a perception that at least a

Conservative government won’t

bankrupt Britain. If Toryism has a

unique selling point, I’m certain

that’s it. Sometimes it feels like the

only selling point.

As you can see, mine is the

language of marketing, not product

assessment. No economist, I don’t

‘L

et me do this. A woman
gets into the corners men
don’t see.” It was the
spring of 1978. I was a
candidate for Wandsworth
borough council in the London local
elections. Margaret Thatcher had
joined our campaigning team, and
we were storming through the
Saturday market on Northcote Road.
She had been reminding us what
excellent value fresh vegetables
represent for the frugal housewife.
Now she had grabbed from its
operator the controls of a kerb-
sweeping machine. As press cameras
clicked, Mrs T was doing her
well-rehearsed “women know about
good housekeeping” schtick.
It always worked. She had a
shrewd if unconscious grasp of
branding. She knew her weaknesses
and strengths. She knew her party
was still in two minds about a
woman leading the opposition, and
she accepted she’d never come across
as mumsy or warm. Where then
could femininity intersect with what
the electorate wanted from a
Conservative pitch for government?
The answer was good
housekeeping. A tight grip on the
purse strings, that’s all: neither she
nor her party needed to be loved.
Sympathy was not her brand, and —
she understood — not what voters
looked for in the Tories: she was
impatient with what she memorably
called “moaning Minnies”. When
years later she told David Dimbleby
she had no time for people who
“drool and dribble that they care” the
media called it a gaffe. But I wonder.

Political parties each mine their

own seams in the geology of a

nation’s psyche, and there are rich

seams that can only be mined to the

exclusion of other rich seams. If you

seek a reputation for sound and

unsentimental financial management

you must brace yourself to be

attacked as tight-fisted: a Scrooge or

Gradgrind. Only Tony Blair ever

rode both horses — caring yet

tough-minded — and even then only

for a while, only by promising to stick

to Tory spending plans, and only on

the back of the generous economic

harvest he inherited from John Major.

History, I accept, cannot teach us

everything. We’re emerging from an

unprecedented spasm caused by a

virus with which Thatcher never had

to deal. This time, a Conservative

government did need to push back

against its own instincts, and voters

understood and applauded a Tory

chancellor’s open-handed response,

in his furlough scheme, to the

ambushing of the economy by

lockdown. To those who called it

needlessly extravagant, the voters’

jury returns a “not guilty” verdict.

On this government’s astonishing

splurge to protect households from

inflation, however, the jury is still

out. When government says “here’s

some money”, the voters will

naturally reply “yes please”, and the

immediate response will be an

approving grunt, or even demands

for more. We’ve heard both already.

That’s the surface noise.

But there are deeper currents, and

one of them is the Conservative

Party’s reputation for keeping the lid

On doorsteps I often

made headway with

only one argument

Which of the two will

first acknowledge it

cannot go on like this?

Matthew

Parris

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the times | Saturday June 11 2022 V2 25