Question Time 17th June 2021
Panel:
Mark Harper (Conservative)
Sarah Jones (Labour)
Rosemary Squire (Trafalgar Entertainment)
Daniel Finkelstein (Journalist and peer)
Ian Blackford (SNP)
Venue: London & Cornwall
Gloria de Piero, the gal who puts the ‘G’ into 38GG, being otherwise occupied in the dicky microphone infested Paddington HQ of Andrew Neil’s newly unveiled wobbly organ, it fell upon Fiona Bruce (who puts the F and the B into effing boring) to make the introductions and call for the first question.
How many different ways are there to spell Finkelstein? No it wasn’t, it was, should care workers be forced to take vaccinations and should NHS workers be next?
Euro 2020 group topping panellists such as Roger Daltry, Laurence Fox, Lord Sugar and the inimitable and uncontrollable Lady Colin Campbell (and her spaniel) being pre-disposed at the aforementioned GB News, pointless and goalless Mark Harper (Conservative) answered first. He preferred to start by wondering why some were hesitant to take the vaccine. There were issues. He understood ministers were worried. He mentioned strategies and concluded that he was in two minds.
Mark Harper is the MP for Forest of Dean and chair of the COVID Recovery Group. An Oxford PPE type, Mark previously achieved notoriety for paying his illegal immigrant cleaner less than the London living wage, via his parliamentary expenses, and then having her deported back to Colombia when the world found out. A sorry tale that can be read in full in a previous QT Review.
Rosemary Squire (Trafalgar Entertainment) thought they should be vaccinated and mentioned a family member with Downes syndrome who needed to be protected. Lord Daniel Finklestein (journalist and peer) supported the idea, saying that care workers should cede to some medical requirements. It is a choice between priorities and that would be mine.
A QT panellist struggled with this to the point of being in tears. Fill your body with chemicals or you’ll be out of a job, he wailed.
Sarah Jones (Labour) was outcome orientated but wouldn’t tell us what outcome she had in mind. La Bruce asked, if Sarah’s mother was in a care home what would she prefer? We need to look at places like Wales, Sarah replied. Informing and enabling was her priority with the outcome being everyone being vaccinated without anyone being forced.
Sarah Jones is the Shadow Minister of State for Police and the Fire Service. Comrade Sarah was educated privately at the £17,000 a year Old Palace of John Whitgift School in Croydon before reading History at Durham University.
Lord Daniel saw two ethical issues; the ethics of forced vaccines and the ethics of protecting the vulnerable from infection. Ian Blackford (SNP) claimed 100% of care workers had been vaccinated in Scotland. Because the Scottish Government is trusted, he smirked. “The furst munister” addresses the nation every day and carries the public with her.
Nobody dare mention the disproportionately high number of vaccine-hesitant BAME care workers in England compared with Wales and Scotland.
The crying chap from the QT50 panel got more upset, perhaps suspecting they might force him to watch a Nicola Sturgeon press conference.
Question two was about the delay of Freedom Day.
Rosemary told us of the economics of the theatre industry and the difficult times they are in. There were pilot schemes with partly filled venues. A nightmare sixteen months.
Dame Rosemary Anne Squire (not her real name) was born and bred in Nottingham where she was educated privately at the £14,000 a year Nottingham Girls High School. After studying Spanish at Southampton, Ms Squire attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 2013, a BBC Woman’s Hour power list placed Rosemary at number 16, a disappointing two places behind Pedophile Information Exchange advocate Harriet Harman but a Hampden Park silencing four places ahead of Nicola Sturgeon.
In the guff that comes with QT, Dame Rosemary is credited with being the co-founder, joint CEO and executive chair of Trafalgar Entertainment.
The other CEO is her husband, Sir Howard Panter. Previously they founded the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) and went on to own 39 theatres across the UK.
Their first London theatre was the Duke of York which, according to a BBC interview, was purchased for £3 million, enigmatically “with the help of a number of wealthy friends.”
Question Time Review can now reveal that one of those friends was the interesting Greek shipping magnate, theatre impresario, sports philanthropist, husband of Susan Hampshire and thoroughly good egg, Eddie Kulukundis, who lost two close relatives in the Lockerbie bombing, and who himself died peacefully earlier this year.
Following a private equity blood bath at ATG in 2016, Squire and Panter set off again with the Trafalgar Theatre (former home of Brian Rix’s Whitehall farces) and recently announced the acquisition of a further eleven venues.
Sarah Jones was enormously sympathetic, but not swayed, because of the high infection rates caused by the delta varient which she blamed on the Government’s hesitancy in closing the border with Delta.
Blackford was chilled. He thought easing lockdown would cause more deaths. The Scottish Government had tried to stop people coming here from Delta but the London Government wouldn’t let them. Then he mentioned this humble reviewer! People who’ve had nothing, “not a penny of help”, “freelancers”. Maybe Blackford isn’t such a **** after all. I await his cheque.
Ian Blackford attended the Royal High School, Edinburgh after which he began a career in financial services which included stints at UBS Philips and Drew, Deutsche Bank and CSM. CSM being a Dutch bakery for whom Ian was Head of Investor Relations. A fuller QT Review biography of the great man is available here.
Ordinarily your humble author bans the SNP from advertising on QT Review because of their contacts with fascism and the Nazi Party. Former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson is pictured here with the Hitler Youth. Founding father Andrew Dewar Gibb quoted Hitler in his speeches, was a self-confessed fascist and despised the Irish. Having said that, your humble reviewer will always be on hand to laugh like a drain should Mr Blackford be oratorically lobbed, Hampden Park style, from the halfway line. *snarf*.
Lord Daniel thought we should listen to the medical experts whereas Mark Harper thought that there were a number of different concerns that had to be balanced, and we must not assume that all assumptions are correct.
Rosemary said deaths were rising but only slowly and we need to get back to work. Look at Netflix. The talent comes from Britain. We are great at it, let us get back to it.
Question three. Can we trust the Metropolitan Police after the accusation of institutional corruption regarding the Daniel Morgan murder case?
Dan Morgan’s family lived in Sarah’s Croydon constituency. She had been disappointed by the Home Secretary’s response. Despite this, Sarah said she would absolutely trust the police. Or else she might get an axe put through her head in a pub car park, she forgot to add.
Lord Daniel couldn’t answer 100% ‘yes’ to the question which, because of his politics, disappointed him.
Daniel William Finkelsteen, Baron Finklestein OBE, is a journalist and a Conservative Member of the House of Lords. One of the Middlesex Finkelstenes, Daniel was educated privately at the £21,000 a year University College School Hampstead, before studying at the London School of Economics and subsequently the City University London where he took a Masters in Business Systems Analysis.
In the general election of 1987, 25-year-old Mr Finklestine stood for the Social Democrats in the Brent East constituency finishing a disappointing third, a full 11,062 votes behind victorious Labour candidate, Kenneth Robert ‘Hitler was a Zionist’ Livingston.
Mr Finklestene’s descent into politics and journalism can most likely be explained by him being the thicko in the family.
His sister, Haberdashers’ Aske’s old girl Tamara Margaret Finklestein, Most Honourable Order of the Bath, is a senior civil servant and Whitehall permanent secretary. His brother, Anthony Charles Wiener Finkelstyne CBE FREng, is Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security to HM Government, and holds a Chair in something complicated at UCL.
Daniel’s father, Ludwik Phinkelstein OBE (one of the Lvov Finkelztein’s), was a much-lauded and self-taught Professor of Measurement, whose entire formal education consisted of a five-day journey in the school carriage of the Trans-Siberian Express. Upon the celebration of his 80th birthday, Ludwik’s colleague Mr Roman Z Morawski, in a Meteorology and Measurement Systems Quarterly tribute, was unable to fit all of Mr Finkelsteen senior’s scientific honours into the thousand words allowed.
Perhaps unsuitable even for a career as Church of England clergy, one suspects a concerned and well-meaning aunt may have nudged the disappointing dunce Daniel towards The Times and the Tory Party.
Mr Ffinkelstein’s wife, Nicky, is a public health doctor. They have been married for twenty-six years and have three children.
Certain parts of the department are corrupt, not the Met as an organisation. Only a few bad apples are within it, according to large cockney type in the QT50 audience reading from a police notebook.
Cressida Dick must take responsibility, said Blackford. He grieved at the lack of trust in the police and agreed with the ‘few bad apples’ theory of the previous speaker.
But that isn’t what the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report concluded. The report used the word ‘institutional’ in relation to the Met’s corruption.
“I have great deal of faith in Cressida Dick,” said Rosemary, bizarrely going on to use the 7/7 London bomb attack as an example, forgetting that two weeks later it was Dick who was in charge of the catastrophic shooting of innocent bombing suspect Jean Charles de Menezes.
The next question consisted of a negative spin on the post-Brexit trade deal with Australia.
Blackford was very despondent. The Brexitphobia was high. He couldn’t give a stuff about the consumer and only mentioned the farmers.
“I’m not an expert on this,” observed Rosemary. As a layperson, she thought it environmentally counterintuitive that we should import and export with distant Australia. She then, somewhat counterintuitively, informed us that she travels back and forward to Australia as she’s opening a theatre there.
Daniel was more consumer-focused. This is a threat to British farmers only if consumers chose to buy Australian. He was keen on reducing the cost of goods. Produce what we are good at producing and allow other countries to produce what they are good at producing.
Blackford was sombre and wanted his croft’s sheep to be protected from consumers choosing not to have them killed and eaten.
Final question, is Matt Hancock hopeless?
We all know the answer to that, no need to trouble a panel.
© Always Worth Saying 2021
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
