the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There’s a fundamental paradox of modern British politics that lies at core of British politics – and I use lies in both meaning of the word – and that is the patently absurd notion that tax cuts are somehow compatible with the effective functioning of good quality public services.

Modern politics now appears to be obsessed with this nonsense, as Penny Lessthan wonderfully proved during Thursday nights ITV shouty lie fest, by constantly claiming that Labour would raise taxes whilst the Conservatives wouldn’t.

Since the mid-eighties it seems to me, the British electorate have been more than happy to enter into a diabolical Faustian pact with politicians, one that denies not just the reality of their own experience, but also denies that there is indeed such a thing as society and that they are just as much a part of it as anyone else.

And nothing better illustrates this doublethink more than at election time, when ironically enough politicians all compete to prove just how honest they are. This they do by the blatantly dishonest means of bullshitting the electorate. And credit where credits due, to must takes incredible skill, nerves of steel and absolute self- belief to bullshit so brazenly, so convincingly and for so long.

About things that the electorate have to know are to be bullshit, not least because many of them work in the public services that are the victims of this bullshit. And that the rest of them will likely have had some first-hand experience of the effects of this bullshit, but despite this, they remain quite happy to be the bullshat.

That there exist yet more ‘efficiency savings’ to be had, that ‘cutting red tape’, ‘streamlining services’, ‘better use of technology’ ‘ being more focused on outcomes by concentrating on our core function’ aren’t predictably grim euphemisms for the same thing. Namely, another round of funding cuts which inevitably means that public services will have to do more with less.

Sometimes events will briefly intrude upon this symbiotic relationship and the electorate, normally because of a scandal or tragedy that’s an inevitable consequence of the reality of lower taxes, will purport to be outraged that such a thing has been allowed to happen. To act all innocent, all ‘nufifnk to do wiv me guv, honest’, as opposed them thinking that maybe, just maybe, it does have something to do with them after all. 

But, to the relief of all concerned, normal service will quickly be resumed, once the electorate and the media have had their fill of demanding heads must roll, that something be done and that lessons must be learnt. Think of how wise parent will patiently let their toddler have its tantrum so as to exhaust them and thus ensure a ten hour sleep. Same thing.

For me most sickening manifestation of this Faustian pact was evidenced by the whole ‘Clap for Carers’ obscenity that took place during the first lockdown. You remember that? You probably joined in, to express your sincere thanks to a NHS that despite having repeatedly endured government funding cuts and ministerial interference, rose incredibly well to the manifold challenges that Covid-19 presented. Challenges that they had to face without adequate PPE so that sometimes they had to wear bin-bags instead. Their reward for all of that?

People clapped at their front gates for a minute for a few Thursdays as a thank-you. Fuck-a-doodle-dandy!

Not for a decent pay rise, something tangible that the medical staff who were performing such heroics could use for, I don’t know, maybe buy food, pay bills, or even have a week-end break. Not extra funding to allow more people to qualify as doctors and nurses. Certainly not having an educational system of sufficient a standard to enable people to get the qualifications to allow them to train as such in the first place.

And most definitely not for people to have voted in sufficient numbers and consistently for a political party that when in government wouldn’t have allowed the NHS to get into the such state as it was when Covid-19 happened. 

And if politicians can’t be honest with electorate about tax, which is both a comparatively simple issue relative to the others this country faces, and yet the issue that will determine if those others to can fixed, then what else can we not trust them on? As I’ve made clear on this blog, simplistic reasons are for simpletons. Issues have many interconnected, some invisible but all complex, factors to them.

So again, who is worse? The person who bullshits, and knows it be bullshit – the bullshitter – or the people who believe the bullshit even though they know it be bullshit because it saves them some money, -the bullhsat?

Today is the start of another instalment of The Great Diversionary Spectacular, better known to all as the European football something. Anyway, England, much to everyones delight, are competing and nowhere will this delight be more keenly welcomed than in 10 Downing Street. 

For the longer that the English team remain in the competition, the happier the incumbent of that house will be, because football – more than any other sport – fulfils many functions in a society, but the primary one is one of distraction.

Because from now until England get kicked out – traditionally after just managing to escape elimination from the Group stage – this will be the main issue pre-occupying peoples minds. If your ears should be bedevilled by a sports phone-in between now and then, you’ll hear a bewildering array of opinions on what the teams tactics should be, what the manager is doing right or wrong and how these might affect the teams success or lack thereof. 

The media will only be too happy to do perform their usual cheerleading role, to either dress it up as some non-jingoistic and non racist patriotism or to trumpet it as a superb celebration of a diverse, vibrant and modern multi-cultural society. To show not just the matches, but also the pre-match build ups, the post match analyses. News items about the matches, the players, their wives and girlfriends, the fans – be they harmonious and in good spirits or drunken hooligans on a violent rampage, will be reported on, and those reports will be reported on.

This also has the added benefit of eating up time that could be put to much better use discussing actual news and to act rather like a shiny object might distract a small child. Because if one can understand football enough to have an opinion about it, one can understand politics 

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

And anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated thing, not the people hoping to have it simplified for them. This isn’t, I believe, accidental, because in the same way one teaches a toddler to walk, once the basics are mastered, progress is rapid.

The more that the media use jargon, quote endless statistics, baffle us with with talk about GDP, the RPI and the OBR. The more that they fixate upon the narcissism of small differences, – the lack of any real ideological gulf between any of the main political parties, – the more they distract, confuse and ultimately alienate the electorate.

And sport because costs less to cover, the more sporting organisations will charge for the broadcast rights to these events because they know that the cost will be cheaper per minute for a broadcaster than the cost of say a drama.

Consider the amount of airtime both the BBC and ITV will devote to this nonsense, how it will lauded over and fetishised out of all proportion relative to its actual importance. Football – or indeed any sport – provides a welcome distraction, and why politicians love it so. From the Romans, with their colosseums and gladiators, to Hitler and the Berlin Olympics, sport has always served the same function. It won’t improve in any way the life chances of those watching it, won’t make their life any the easier and it won’t change the priorities of the society that they exist in, but it does have understandable rules, a known duration and at the end of it all, a winner.

Actually, if TV executives did have the balls to update the Roman concept of a gladiatorial combat thing, I’d watch it and so would you, in addition to millions of others. A live and uninterrupted, as long as it takes, last one standing amidst the dead bodies of their former rivals, fight to the death. No weapons, no time limit, no adverts, no time-outs and of course, no rules. Taking place in ring the size of a five-a-side football pitch, a ring that was fenced in and with crowd baying for blood. Talk about fighting for every vote! There’d only need be one of these and it’d certainly far more entertaining than last nights shout and lie fest.

Julie Etchingham was so far out of her depth that I thought she might drown.

I was thinking about my post of a few days, wherein I suggested that D-Day was the single most defining moment in European history and because of that, it therefore follows that Winston Churchill is by quite a wide margin the most important European ever.

I know that there are increasing numbers of revisionists who maintain that because a number of controversies in his past, these dwarf any other consideration. In my opinion, proponents of these controversies seek to defame Churchill in order to promote their own reductive narratives or divisive agenda’s and because of the age we live in now, such idea’s have inexplicably become commonplace. This obsession of interpreting the past through the prism now is utter nonsense, because as I pointed out in my earlier post, we only have the values of now because of his actions then.

The undeniable truth of this was borne out in the European elections that took place recently. Not the results themselves – although I might come back to them – but the fact of them even having happened. That there exist the necessary conditions that allow them to take place is thanks chiefly to him. 

Functioning democracies that help create a flourishing civil society, ones that allow a multiplicity of views, the right to hold those views and not be subject to arbitrary arrest if you hold views that are deemed unpalatable, rights that are guaranteed by the rule of law, a law that is interpreted by an independent judiciary, free from the whims and score-settling of politicians and governments. With a free press that is able to hold those politicians and governments to account, and with political parties for those with differing political beliefs to belong to.  

And whilst it hasn’t always been that way for all European countries, all of the time, broadly speaking it has. However imperfect it may have been, and possibly still is for some, it could all have been so very, very much worse. 

The Europe that Europeans live in today only happened because after the war that had torn Europe apart ended. European leaders looked at the ruins of their former countries and put in place measures to prevent it happening again.  For example, The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), set up in 1949, a security alliance between the US, Canada, and 10 Western European counties. It has grown, as the threats individual countries face increase and the so the benefits of membership become ever more apparent. Now it has 30 members.

Because of that, and the obvious benefits of closer co-operation that helped to ensure continued peace and stability in non Soviet Europe, more institutions were created and more European countries joined those institutions, leading, until recently, to over 70 years of almost unbridled peace and harmony unparalleled in European history.

But this happy outcome only happened because the Allies won the war. A war which I believe was one war, not two, but one with a half time stoppage, like a football match so everyone could take a breather, except in the case of the Germans, who instead massively built up their military. Churchill, being aware of this and alive to the very real threat it posed, constantly sounded warnings and for his troubles he was eventually cast out into the political wilderness. 

Until his warnings proved to be correct in 1939.  Germany resumed the war. European countries were quickly overrun. And he alone had both the moral and political authority needed to provide the leadership that had been so conspicuously lacking and had allowed events to unfold as they had.

Yes, he may not have been perfect. Yes, some of his views might be unpalatable now. Yes, some of the things he did could be judged unfavourably. But those are as nothing when compared to fact that he led Britain through the war, led it when Britain stood alone, when accepting a peace deal with Hitler was more favourable to the political elites. 

But thankfully he didn’t and we live in a better world because he didn’t. That’s why there were elections in Europe, because fascism, the old kind, the unimaginable horror kind, the dictatorial and concentration camp kind, not the modern someone disagreeing with you or misgendering you kind, was vanquished.

No man has ever had more of a single greater influence upon the present he lived through and because of that, the present we now enjoy.  

And that is why, to me at least, he is the most important European to have ever lived.

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The news that Mr Magoo’s son, Wellington, was found guilty yesterday on all counts relating to his having lied about his drug use when applying for a firearms licence was a shock. He seemed like such a nice man, the kind of man who would clear the paths of his elderly neighbours if it snowed and would do it in secret, so as not to highlight what a nice man he really was.

So imagine my dismay upon finding out that this wasn’t, in fact, the case. If anything, he was even more Ryan Giggs than Ryan Giggs himself, something I’d thought impossible. A week or so ago, an article in the Guardian, reporting on his imminent trial noted that ‘Prosecutors also may call Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe Biden’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer. (In 2015) Hallie Biden was dating Hunter Biden when he bought a handgun in 2018.’

So hang on! He was having an affair with his brothers widow at the time of the alleged offences, and they bury this detail at the end of the article? So naturally, I went looking and depending on your view of humanity and also how personally removed you are from the events a bit a Googling unearthed, they are either a savage indictment of the morality of the wealthy and powerful in America, a tragedy caused by an entitled man, a man who even when the game was up, still clings to his entitlement or just typical.

Remember the stolen laptop that was such a big deal out of by people who make a living out of making big deals out of things? Probably not, if you have a life.

Anyway, analysis of that laptop revealed that he sent the grieving widow of his dead brothers wife, the one he had an affair with, a series of emails begging her to get an H.I.V test after their affair had cooled off. This was a month before before he fathered child with someone who worked for him at his consulting firm.

Not only was the mother taken off the firms insurance policy months after giving birth, he also denied he was the father, resulting in a bitter paternity case. Not helped by him claiming to have no memory of ever having met her, I suppose.

His then wife, with whom he has three daughters, bizarrely decided to divorce him. I know!  She only found out about his unorthodox method of grief counselling after she found lots of incriminating emails on his iPad. 

Had he not heard of the delete button?

Sadly, due to various this’s and that’s, The Guardian wasn’t able to let its readers know about such things which took me all of five minutes to uncover. Had it been Fart however, they’d have been endlessly gorging on this story like a vampire at a orphanage. They covered Fart’s judicial circus as if it were something that had some meaningful impact upon British people, all live feeds of irrelevant minutiae and endless updates on trivia.

But having an affair with your brothers widow months after he died, then when you’ve ended the affair but before your new mistress is about to have your baby, beg the widow to have H.I.V. test, that isn’t news. Neither is the fact he has consistently denied paternity, so much so that neither he, nor Mr Magoo, have ever met his five year old daughter.

One might be forgiven that might be a reason to explain why this might be so.

And for added cringe, I’ve included the video below, in which he claims that the affair was…well click on the link and try not to think, ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging!’ It’s less than three minutes long, and honestly, it speaks volumes about his character…

Today, in a break from my normal interminably worthy posts, I’m going to play a quick game of ‘Bullshit or Bullshat?’, a game predicated upon the theme of yesterdays blog. Namely, who is worse, the bullshitter who bullshits or the people who deep down know that it’s bullshit, but go along with it anyway out of some expedient sense of self-interest, the bullshat.

Thankfully we have three prime examples of bullshit, each provided yesterday by the two main parties and the political dilution and combination of the two of them that is the Goldilocks party.

All it takes for the bullshat to realise that they’re being bullshitted to is a couple of minutes on Google, a healthy degree of scepticism and most importantly of all, the will to do it. That last one tends to be then that eludes some people. 

First off we have the Conservatives, who really have gone all out to put the con into Conservative with this epic bullshit,

‘Conservatives pledge to recruit 8,000 new police officers’ and as the BBC reported, ‘ The Conservative Party is promising to recruit 8,000 additional police officers over the next three years if they win the General Election…The new police officers would join the 20,000 already recruited since 2019, the Tories added.”

Great. Except that the 20,000 officers recruited since the last general election, had simply replaced the 20,000 officers who left the force between 2010 and 2019, on account of how government funding had been cut by 20%.

And if we consider the rather unhelpful statistic that 94% of all crime is unsolved, one can’t help but think that adding more crimes for the police not to solve is taking the piss. 8,000 more after 3 years? Seriously.

Next up, Labour who ‘pledges 100,000 new childcare places‘

The Labour party has pledged to create 100,000 additional childcare places and more than 3,000 new nurseries as part of its childcare plan…Labour has said it will turn classrooms in existing primary schools into “school-based nurseries”, for an estimated cost of around £40,000 per classroom.’

Which is all fine and dandy except Labour haven’t said how this is to be funded, aside from charging VAT onto private schools and using that. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this might raise £1.6billion a year and we can be sure that they’ll be plenty of other claims upon that money, if they’re elected, that is.

Anyway, lets go with their 100,000 staff. Say we be generous and give them £15 an hour. Working a 40 hour week, because parents, and allowing for a 52 week year because parents work. That’s £78 million right there.

Then you have the costs of the training needed for them to qualify – because no doubt Labour is willing to put our money where its aims are and to provide non-repayable loans to incentivise people to train – and also to increase the funding to the educational system to ensure that there are the staff and the capacity in place train them in them, and most importantly of all, magically find enough people prepared to do the job in the first place. To see it as a career and not some diabolical torture from which there is no end.

And to my utter amazement, Labour haven’t said when this lofty ambition is to be achieved by or how many places they hope to make create each year if elected into government. I know!

And then we have the Goldilocks party so, called because they’re like the Tories but not too much like the Tories and they’re like Labour, but not too much like Labour.  They are a party effectively defined by what they’re not, and what they’re not is relevant. 

So yes, super, the ‘Lib Dems pledge £8bn NHS and care package in manifesto’ but then they could promise everything to everyone and they’d still be as useful as a cheese trumpet. 

Probably, it’d be some foul smelling, artisanal nonsense cheese. So awful you couldn’t even eat it.

 No doubt, the question will remain unanswered.

Once again, I am faced with a riddle that has long vexed me, and that especially at election time, seems both more pertinent and more intractable than ever. Namely, who is more culpable, the bullshitter or the person who deep down know it is bullshit, but goes along with it anyway, the bullshat.

This self-serving avoidance of reality, which I discussed here in relation to war and Israels prosecution of it, also has a domestic public policy element to it. An unwillingness to examine in any great detail claims made during an election campaign, claims that a combination of common sense and few minutes Googling would expose to be bullshit.

Yesterday it was Labours turn, as according to The Observer,  ‘Labour pledges 80 new rape courts in bid to tackle backlog crisis. Plan for specialist unit in all police forces amid manifesto drive to reduce violence against women and girls.’ It’s a fantastic proposal, as much needed as it is long overdue. As the article all too clearly explains,

‘ Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, Labour says, there was a 346% increase in the number of adult rape cases in the crown court backlog, leading to claims that rape was effectively being “decriminalised”.

Just 2.6% of rape cases result in a charge. Labour leader Keir Starmer has said he will halve violence against women and girls, and bring in tougher sentences for rapists, under his “missions” for government.

Last month, the National Audit Office said it no longer believed that the Ministry of Justice’s ambition to reduce the overall backlog of cases to 53,000 by March 2025 was achievable. Of the 67,573 cases awaiting trial, almost a fifth (18%) are sexual offences.

The NAO says this is partly because there has been a large increase in the number of rape cases – the number of these going to trial increased from 624 (1.6% of all cases) in 2019 to 2,786 (4.1% of all cases) in 2023. Rape cases are more complex, with a lower proportion of defendants pleading guilty, so take longer on average to hear.’

All very depressing and what’s even more depressing still is that there isn’t the remotest likelihood of this becoming a reality any time soon, because there doesn’t exist in the justice system the capacity to make it so.

First off, solicitors. The people who advise the accused of their rights when they are arrested by the police. They are also the initial point of contact with alleged victims of crime which might eventually result in that arrest. Many solicitors are leaving the profession, and those that do perform the ‘duty solicitor’ role at police stations are often very inexperienced juniors, calling into question the advice they give. But let’s imagine all of that doesn’t exist and a case goes to trial, like most of them don’t, 95% of them.

The solicitor will have instructed a barrister to either defend or prosecute the case at court. Unfortunately, there are dwindling numbers of barristers too and those that remain recently went on strike over pay. And this creates another problem, because judges are only drawn from the available pool of barristers and despite the government increasing their working age to 75, they too are leaving creating a staffing crisis and cancelled trials.

Which means that even if a rape case somehow does manage to get to trial, that trial can up to three years to happen.

It only took me a few Google searches to find out that, and I didn’t even bother with searches regarding staffing problems with the people who help make the whole court system function smoothly. Them that provide the necessary skills and perform the many tasks needed to make everything happen, the court stenographers, the clerks, the ushers, the people who oversee and then jury selection, the legal secretaries and well, you get the gist. Such people have experience, experience of how the system actually works in practice and not theory, of the little workarounds needed to ensure the smooth running of the court, and have built up informal networks to facilitate this.

We all do in whatever job we have, those little shortcuts and deals one makes to get things done. And one only develops them because experience will have taught us that we need them, to save both time and frustration.

And if I know about the problems of capacity in the legal system, then I can only imagine the scale of the problems that Labour are privy to. Which brings me back to the question I ask every election, who is worse, the bullshitter or the bullshat?

One would have thought that given the commemoration’s to mark D-Day being just a few days ago now, people might finally come to their senses about the realities of war. 

Namely, that in order to successfully prosecute a war there are certain unavoidable circumstances one has to accept from the start.  Tragic as it is, there will be civilian loss of life, especially if one’s enemy combatants have deeply embedded themselves within the civilian population. There will be destruction of housing and infrastructure, because the very nature of sustained bombing makes that inevitable.  And many others.

Quite why these inescapable truisms seem so difficult to comprehend, and allowed this impossibly absurd distortion of reality to become a fashionable virtue to signal, has no more egregiously offensive manifestation than in the very public condemnation of the way Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza.

I’ve thought this from the beginning of the war in Gaza, the way in which Israeli military actions are continually judged against an unrealistic and constantly altering number of moral precepts. Precepts, it has to be noted, that none of the countries now condemning Israel, have themselves ever followed when at war.

The USA and its ‘collateral damage’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The UK’s notion of ‘precision drone strikes’ in Afghanistan. Turkeys own genocide against Armenians and more recently, war crimes in Syria. The French in Algeria. South Africa in Angola and Namibia. You get the gist.      

The only thing to account for any of this is not that the conduct of war has changed, but more that expectations regarding how a war is prosecuted have changed, and it seems to me that these higher expectations are only expected of Israel.

 Hence we had another outbreak of delusional posturing in, shock horror, yesterdays Guardian, ‘Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide’ 

Hooray they’ve created a new word whilst also ignoring reality. Does the sub headline, ‘The attack on Palestinian education, educators and cultural knowledge isn’t new, but it has reached horrifying new levels,’ make any kind of sense to anyone with even the most basic understanding of what bombing means?

The article explicitly makes the point that the Israeli’s are deliberately targeting educational establishments, as opposed to them just being part of an urban landscape that has been violently remodelled.

What, one wonders, would the writer of such an obscenely reductive piece of blame-mongering – if she can make up words, then so can I – have made of the bombing of the French town of Caen in Normandy in June 1944? Over 6,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it by the Allies. 73% of the town was destroyed. Deaths necessarily ensued.

But efforts to take Caen had been thwarted for nearly two months because of heavy German resistance.  Both sides were aware of the strategic importance of Caen, of how crucial it was to the liberation of France and to the eventual defeat Germany.

Had any of this this criticism by armchair generals and all of this dangerously naive absurdity that we see now happened then and had we had lost the war, then all of my Jewish friends would never have been born, and the freedoms we take as a given would never have been.

Either you set out to win a war or you are destined to lose it. 

Shit happens.

The Leaders Debate on ITV on Tuesday night between Prada and NotHardie was like watching two bald men fighting over comb. 

The most obvious thing to remark was that the host, Julie Etchingham seemed as capable of hosting a debate such as that as I would be to run The London Marathon. Why she wasn’t given a mute button for when either man spoke on after his allotted time, repeatedly talked over his opponent or transgressed in some other way, I don’t know. Instead all she had were her increasing ineffectual plea’s for them to stop behaving like the entitled stuffed shirts they were, plea’s which they quite happily ignored

That’s the trivial point made.

According to his Wikipedia page, NotHardie became an MP in 2015, and held a number of Shadow Cabinet posts prior to becoming Labour leader in April 2020. Before that, in 2008, he became Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, holding these positions until 2013.

I draw your attention to these facts because to me they suggest a man who should be used to public speaking. He became a barrister in 1987, after all, so one would think he’d have had gained at least some proficiency by now. Someone possessed with flexible mental acuity, a recall of facts and figures all the better to help him to weave a convincing narrative. And if along the way, a commanding and engaging presence developed, so much the better. One would’ve hoped so, if only for his clients sake.

And as an MP, from campaigning to become one – attending hustings and addressing constituency events – to making the transition from backbencher, then frontbencher and eventually leader, you’d think all that would’ve sharpened his skills somewhat.

No.

Before television became the main vehicle for politicians to communicate with the electorate, how politicians presented themselves didn’t much matter.  But for better and worse, progress has dictated otherwise and now we live in an age where this matters. Famously, Margaret Thatcher had lessons to soften her voice, to make it seem less hectoring and to not alienate viewers.

How a politician presents themselves is important, especially now when every move, every utterance can be forensically speculated over, discussed and criticised in our endless media nightmare. This being so, and things having been heading this way for many years now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that NotHardie would’ve realised the need to ensure that the way he presented himself matched his ambition. That upon becoming leader, that he would’ve immediately charged his media team with preparing him for moments such as Tuesday night and that they – and him – had risen to the challenge. 

I saw no evidence of this.

I saw no passion, no burning sense of injustice on behalf of of families struggling under the cost of living crisis, no indignation about the woeful state of a nation that needs over 2,500 food banks and no controlled anger at the systematic underfunding, staffing shortages and the increasing use of the private sector in of the NHS. Something one would imagine he has more insight about than most, given that his wife works for the NHS in Occupational Health.

Neither was there much sense of a foundational principle, one that has informed his entire way of political thinking. Come to think of it, it is almost impossible to think of any principles he truly believes in, other than that he wants to be PM and will say or do anything to get elected. 

The only thing he does stand for is the National Anthem.  

Wikipedia also gifted me the absolute treasure that his middle name is Rodney. 

Which means that from now on I’ll be calling him Plonker, obviously.

Today is the 6th June and it has always been a constant source of unique amazement to me that this date isn’t immediately synonymous to people as the anniversary of the single most important day in European history.

I once knew someone whose birthday was on the 6th June and upon him telling me this I remarked that it was a day of incomparable import. His look of total incomprehension was matched only by his subsequent casual indifference when I told him why. 

This was someone who had just completed a P.hd in Art History, so had received an education sufficient to detect numerous meanings from the types of crockery used in old paintings, or how the use of certain colours were signifiers of social status  – I jest not – but somehow D-Day had passed him by. Despite all of his schoolings, his exams and his comfortable life in academia, he had no knowledge of it.

He voted Remain in the European Referendum and whilst not as vociferous as others regarding his belief that a profound injustice had been orchestrated upon him, he was still possessed with a low-level simmering resentment about it. The sheer hypocrisy that permits such opinions to be championed are no less offensive if one is ignorant of the fact that such a hypocrisy exists. 

The European Referendum, no matter its causes and eventual outcome, was a democratic exercise enacted by our democratically elected government. The right to protest about the verdict is itself a product of our democracy, from parliamentary agitations, the legal challenges, constant media criticisms down to the basic freedom of an individual to hold, let alone express or communicate, a dissenting view. 

The democracy that allows all of these concepts to grow, to embed themselves in a society so much that they become part of what we understand democracy, indeed the very idea of a parliamentary democracy, was so fundamentally antithetical to Nazi ideology, but for D-Day we might never have known.

But for D-Day and the eventual liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny, the world would be very different. I probably wouldn’t be here in London, because I doubt if my parents would’ve left the Republic of Ireland if Germany had won the war. The decision might not even have been theirs to make, if Hitlers desire for total domination of Europe was left unchecked.

That’s why the anniversary of D-Day is so very resonant now, why it isn’t just another dry fact of history, why it doesn’t just exist in faded black and white newsreels, increasingly few personal recollections full of unspoken heroism or patriotic nostalgia. Instead all of us owe a debt of the most sincere and boundless gratitude for the fact we are in the middle of yet another election campaign because Britain robustly defended the democracy we enjoy today.

The simple fact that we take for granted what we consider inalienable rights, rights that could so easily been crushed under a jackboot, is precisely why D-Day is for me the single most defining moment in European history. 

In just under two hours from now, there’ll be live head to head debate between Prada and NotHardie on ITV. Unfortunately it won’t be the sort of head to head one tends to find online, but the much more boring and less interesting spectacle of two men both desperately wondering exactly how Farrago’s announcement yesterday that he will be standing for election will affect them.

It’s a pity he hadn’t waited until today to make the announcement, because that would really have scuppered their carefully rehearsed strategies for the debate. Like him or not, no-one can seriously deny that Farrago has done again what he’s always done, which is to shake things up. 

By entering the fray, he’s perfectly illustrated how both Prada and NotHardies dullness is matched only by their lack of ambition. Farrago pretty much single-handedly brought about the Brexit referendum, while all the other two have given us are similar versions of uninspiring.

So the spectre of Farrago will be at their shoulders, the question is whether they’ll rise up to the challenge and show some gumption or will they retreat into easy soundbites. Thankfully their spin doctors will be on hand to tell the assembled media whores that what was said we actually misheard and that was meant was actually quite different.

Spare a thought for ITV though. A commercial broadcaster having to give up an hours prime-time slot and for what? Low viewing figures and being forced to fill the breaks with plugs for its own shows because no advertiser wants their brand to be tainted by such a visual cure for insomnia.