We hear a lot about “dead cats” these days, the theory that to get people to stop talking about a tricky topic politicians will throw something attention-grabbing on the table, though surely even Boris Johnson didn’t create a baby to distract from Christmas parties. In the 19th century, the expired felines flung at politicians were real. Yesterday in the Lords the Archbishop of Canterbury recalled that in 1831 the public took badly against the 21 bishops who voted against the Great Reform Bill and rioted, burning their palaces. One threw a dead cat at Archbishop Howley, which struck his chaplain in the face. “Be glad it wasn’t a live one,” Howley told him.
THAT’S THE SPIRIT
Given the nippy weather, the actor Simon Farnaby was glad to wear jeans at a BFI preview screening of the Christmas episode of Ghosts. In the BBC comedy series he plays a Tory MP who dies in flagrante and is cursed to spend eternity without trousers. There are worse fates: Farnaby said the original script had him with his trousers round his ankles the whole time. Ghosts is one of those comedies that appeals to all generations (my 11-year-old daughter loves it) though there was a concern that one line in the Christmas episode went too far. When a portrait of the house’s ghostly matriarch is damaged and needs restoration a character sighs: “Lucky Fanny to be touched up by such a hand.” As Farnaby admitted, that’s not even a single entendre.
SMOKE RINGS
The decision by New Zealand’s puritan government to eliminate smoking will go down badly with Bilbo Baggins. New Zealand has built a tourist industry on being the backdrop for the Lord of the Rings films but Tolkien’s Middle Earth was definitely not a smoking-free zone. The place abounds with hobbits and wizards after a good shag, preferably a pipe of Longbottom Leaf or a suck on Old Toby. And Tolkien swore by the weed. In 1968 the author said: “Every morning, I wake thinking: ‘Good, another 24 hours of smoking’.”
When Liz Truss tried to evoke memories of Maggie by posing in a tank it was a long way from her childhood at Greenham Common. Her mother took her to CND protests clutching a 10ft model of a cruise missile made out of carpet rolls. “My mother had covered it with flowered wallpaper,” Truss tells Political Thinking, “so it didn’t have the psychological effect of a real nuclear weapon.”
TOO FAST TO FAIL
A letter from Winston Churchill appointing the son of a previous prime minister to his cabinet has sold at auction in the US for £2,100. In May 1945, after the wartime coalition ended, Churchill asked the 6th Earl of Rosebery, whose dad was PM in the 1890s, to be his secretary of state for Scotland. It was the briefest spell in high office. Two months later Rosebery’s government career was over. His final words on leaving the Scottish Office were to say: “Well I didn’t make a bad job of this, did I? Didn’t have the time.”
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As we near Christmas, it’s time to kick off our annual readers’ competition. I’m sure you all fall on the right side of the naughty or nice ledger but how might public figures justify themselves in their letters to Santa this year and what present are they hoping for? Email ideas to diary@thetimes.co.uk and I’ll print the best over Christmas.
