Damn this wretched government, has it no respect for columnists? I wrote my party-that-wasn’t-a-party story last week. Indeed, when I filed it on the Friday morning, I was genuinely worried that the prime minister might come out and make a statement at some point in the day, clear up all the confusion and render my column irrelevant. So, at the time, I was very glad that he didn’t. But it’s been more than a week now and he STILL hasn’t cleared it up, and that stupid party continues to be the only thing that anyone wants to talk about. What am I going to do, write the bloody column again?
I don’t know what you think governments are for. Maybe to legislate in the best interest of the majority, protect the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable and maintain the country’s good name on the international stage? I don’t know. I’m just spit-balling. I don’t really care what governments do, just as long as they keep the story moving, so there are plenty of fresh things for me to write about. And this government is signally failing to do that. All it is giving me is this ridiculous Christmas party story, which I’ve already done to death.
And, no, rumours of a possible second party-that-wasn’t-a-party do not count as a new thing. Nor does a third party. Or a fourth party.
Nor does the promise of a Cabinet Office investigation into whether or not the party that wasn’t a party was a party or not.
Nor does paying a small fine for the wallpaper thing: I did my Downing Street home dec column in, like, July. So I’m sitting here at my laptop with my paper hat and party kazoo, all ready to go on something new, and beginning to feel, frankly, a little bit silly.
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Now, I do appreciate that the prime minister probably thinks he has given us something to write about with these new instructions to work from home. But does he have any idea how many columns I have written over the past 20 months about The Rules for Working from Home? And not just about The Rules for Working from Home, but about The New Rules for Working from Home, Given What We Learnt From The Last Time We Had to Work from Home? Three times is the answer. Three times! It is déjà vu all over again, all over again.
Of course, I thank the government for sending out a set of social-distancing rules that have no visible cohesion or logic — such as the one where, as opposed to last year, a large group of people can meet up in a small sweaty room only if they promise that they ARE having a party, whereas if they are meeting for work then they must do it from home — and I can quite see how that might look like a humorous column to them. And it would be, if this were not the fourth set of mad, contradictory social rules they’ve given us in two years. I can’t do the “here are some of the even sillier rules you might have missed” column again because I haven’t got any left.
And nice try with the new baby, Boris, but I did the “what must it be like to be an infant born into this shitshow?” column last time.
No 10 Nativity play
I say that but, to be fair, Boris has given us a child in actual Advent, which I suppose is a generous invitation to dust off the old nativity spoof column. You know:
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Sajid Javid that all the world should be locked down. Kind of. Although not really. And all went to be locked down, sort of. Everyone into his own city.
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And Boris also went up from Downing Street, out of the city of London, into wherever he wanted (because he was of the house of Johnson, and there was one rule for him and one for everyone else): To be locked down with Carrie his espoused wife, or one of them, being great with child. Again.
And so it was, that, while they were there, she brought forth her second born child, but Boris’s seventh, or possibly twelfth, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in the papers; because they thought it might distract people.
And there were in the same country journalists abiding at the end of the drive, keeping watch over their phones by night. And, lo, the former press secretary to the prime minister came upon them, and the glory of the poor woman’s head rolling shone round about them: and they were sore excited. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto Boris is born this day at UCH a Saviour, which is . . .
No, I can’t, my heart just isn’t in it.
Room at the inn
One thing I’ll say about these new rules: they’ve made organising the Times Comment Christmas party — which fell to me this year for reasons I shall not go into — quite a bugger, because I cannot expect the likes of the Lords Finkelstein and Hague to risk falling foul of the partying rules that have made such trouble for other members of their party.
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I have thus made it clear to all attendees that this meeting in a room above a north London pub is absolutely a party — there will be wine, there will be cheese — and that it will remain, by my understanding, completely legal as long as there is plenty of eating and drinking and party gaming, but that if anyone has a mind to start pitching columns to editors or discussing politics, they will be asked to leave, on the basis that the gathering could then be construed as “work”, could certainly have been done from home, and may lead to a police raid. And while this would no doubt provide some Guardian columnist with a very funny piece, it would be no use at all to me.
Let’s drink to leadership
Yes, a north London pub. Because if you organise a party you get to choose where it is. So we’re going to my local, which sits at the end of the road where Ed Miliband has his house with the many kitchens, right on the boundary between the constituencies of Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer. Ed and Keir have both been known to skull a pint in there and even Jeremy Corbyn has been seen occasionally, rooting about in the bins. So I’m looking forward to getting at least one former Tory leader in there to redress the balance. And I’m working on getting some more. I think Theresa May might like it in summer: it’s bang opposite Hampstead Heath and, when the grass is high in August, she could run for miles through the fields without worrying about angry farmers.