GB News Review

GB News 19th August 2021

Present:

Alan Hope (Election candidate)
Jacob Rees-Mogg (Conservative)
Nigel Farage (Broadcaster)

Venue: Pints of View

This week’s first guest was Alan Hope. Who he? Alan ‘Howling Laud’ Hope leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, the OMRLP.

Nigel Farage and the Monster Loonies go back a long way. Since the Eastleigh by-election, Mr Farage informed us, when the then Ukip candidate beat the then leader of the Monster Loonies, David ‘Screaming Lord’ Sutch by 160 votes. Nigel conceded that he’d liked David Sutch who died in 1999, to be succeeded by Alan Hope and his cat, Cat Mandu, who were appointed joint leaders of the party.

Admiral Dönitz became German head of state when Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker on 30th April 1945. Lindon B Johnston was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States of America upon the assignation of Jack Kennedy on November 22nd 1963. Hosni Mubarak became the fourth president of Egypt after his predecessor Anwar Sadat was shot and killed during a military parade in Cairo on 6th October 1981.

Mr Alan Hope became sole leader of the Official Monster Raving Looney Party when Cat Mandu was squashed on a Hampshire road in June 2002. A sobbing Fred Dinenage removed his spectacles while breaking the news on Southern Television’s Day by Day.

Mr Hope sat before us in mandatory white suit resplendent with frying pan sized party rosette and generously festooned with badges showing some of the other party leaders, such as David ‘Greensill’ Cameron, who he has seen off in his time. He was also wearing a white twenty-gallon stetson hat.

Mr Hope is an autocrat, the Looneys aren’t a democracy. It’s in the constitution, he explained to us.

Farage laughed and recalled the fun and beers that they’d had during the former UKIP leader’s abortive attempts to get himself elected to the Westminster Parliament.

A mirth filled backslap-athon between two by-election veterans ensued.

“How many?” wondered the GB News host.

Hope had stood in nineteen by-elections and nine general elections which he announced to be a record.

Farage reminded us that even before being leader of the OMRLP Alan Hope wasn’t a stranger to elections. One or two of which he had won.

Indeed, Alan replied, he had been elected as a town councillor and mayor.

A politician to his fingertips, former Mayor Hope is both right and wrong at the same time. Yes, he was elected to Ashburton Town Council in Devon in 1987 and subsequently became mayor. Similarly, he was elected to Fleet Town Council in Hampshire in 2010, but on both occasions he was elected unopposed.

Farage declared Ashburton to be “down there on the edge of Dartmoor” where Alan had been a publican, hotelier and rock and roller.

This was the cue for the Monster Loony supremo to hold up his book “Great White Hope” and tell a story about The Beatles. Twenty-two pages of this book are about the Beatles he helpfully informed us.

As a young musician in Aldershot, the rock and roller had been double booked with the Fab Four. Gazumped from the Palais to the Central Ballroom, he had filled the place whereas only 28 had been at The Beatles’ venue. Aldershot being homely in those days, Alan went on to name all 28 of them, starting convincingly with John, Paul, George and Ringo.

No stranger to larger crowds, when prompted Mr Hope informed us the Raving Loony Party has 336,000 members worldwide, mainly ex-pats, some as far away as Patagonia. Helpfully for the Loonies, a Southern Hemisphere territory packed with the descendants of Welsh miners.

Farage mentioned the party’s policy successes which are in inverse proportion to its performance at the ballot box.

“All day pub opening,” rued Farage.

“And passports for pets,” added Alan triumphantly, “although it does mean dogs from the EU can come here and win at Crufts.”

“Are you going to carry on fighting elections?” Asked Nigel.

“I am.”

Alan reminded us he is the longest-serving party leader. At 22 years, he has broken Clement Attlee’s 1935 -1955 Labour Party leadership record. Not only that, in further proof that God exists, Attlee played for Fleet Town, Fleet being the nicest, safest place in England and where Alan has made his home for over twenty years.

“Whats in the next manifesto?”

“Can’t tell you that.”

Farage and Hope had both contested the Bradford West by-election along with George Galloway. What did the Bradfordahnis do to deserve that? The pair of them were going to make Bradford bonkers. Maybe start by making Bradford British, gentlemen?

Likewise in Rochester, where Mark Reckless fought his own seat after moving from the Tories to Ukip. Farage recalled the after election party when Hope had mentioned he was thinking of defecting to Ukip.

“No, infecting,” the diminutive funnyman quipped.

Farage wondered if the fun patriotic party was popular anywhere else?

Oh yes, insisted Alan. In the urban areas of North Rhine Westphalia. Munster, geddit? And in the counties of the extreme south of Ireland. Munster, geddit? Dear me.

On that low note, Farage signed off with,

“Best prime minister we never had. Alan Hope.”

Is the Pope a Catholic? Compared to Nigel Farage’s next guest he might not be.

In a behind the paywall Bookbenchers Spectator Magazine article, after recommending Wodehouse’s Psmith as a cure for all ills, Jacob Rees-Mogg lists reading St Cuthbert’s Gospel, the Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio as being his contribution to literary life. Mr Rees-Mogg is far too modest.

GB News Review can reveal that from his modest abode on a cobbled and ox urine-soaked street between the tannery and the Rhine in 14th century Mainz, among the printing presses, blocks of hand-carved wooden letters and drapes of drying velum, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was the proud possessor of a Jacob Rees-Mogg Bible. True fact.

Ordinarily, Nigel presents Talking Pints over a glass of beer. No so when the guest is an old Etonian, Leader of the House and Conservative MP for North East Somerset who has his own cidery.

A grey looking Mogg provided the drinks explaining they were from his own Somerset apples, barrelled and left in a barn for a year, before his large family (Jacob is a father of six) ‘dip into it’.

“Strength?” Asked the thirsty host.

“No idea,” replied Mogg.

“That’s real,” announced Farage while refreshing.

“Don’t drink all of it,” advised the cidermeister cum MP.

Noticeably during the interview, Mr Rees-Mogg didn’t touch a drop of his own poison.

“Cricket. Fell to pieces,” said Nigel referencing the previous days Lord’s test disappointment against India.

Mogg had been at the home of cricket with his eldest three sons and had enjoyed the contest if not the result. By the sounds of it, an Indian tail end Charlie wallah, with a test average of two, had put up a good show to frustrate the England bowlers.

Good players but not a good team the two cricket fans concluded of the England side while marking out Root for special praise. Joe Root was quite an age, noted Farage, unlike his guest who first appeared on television appropriately reading the Financial Times aged eleven.

Jacob’s father, William Rees-Mogg was a Fleet Street big wig and former editor of The Times who Farage recalled offering him a job on the Fleet Street Newsletter.

Inflation. The Federal Reserve Bank in the United States are poo-pooing rising prices but former City metals trader Nigel Farage reminded us that inflation is a disease to be got rid of that chews its way through the value of everything, especially ordinary people’s savings.

Mogg, not a stranger to increasing amounts of cash, wanted to talk about the “money supply inflationary effect.”

Jacob also worked in the City, after graduating from Trinity College, Oxford. He co-founded a hedge fund, Somerset Capital Management, did rather well and is rumoured to be worth up to £150 million.

If the Pope isn’t quite as Catholic as Jacob Rees-Mogg, likewise Moggy, despite his first Tweet being in Latin, isn’t quite as posh as his wife. Daughter of the late author and politician Somerset Struben de Chair, Helena Rees-Mogg is the granddaughter of Admiral Sir Dudley Rawson Stratford de Chair, KCB, KCMG, MVO. Her grandmother was one of the Transvaal Strubens.

Jacob proposed to Helena beneath one of her mother’s stately home’s six Van Dykes.

Simpletons like your reviewer think of inflation as being money chasing after goods. Mogg preferred to blame “trade disruption with containers in the wrong place” rather than the Government printing trillions through quantitive easing and borrowing and then throwing it and furloughing it about.

“Excess liquidity,” Mogg conceded, returning to firmer ground before spoiling the effect by adding that the Bank of England is doing the right thing. Speed of response, don’t want to hit the (cut public spending and raise interest rates) brake too hard, he optimistically concluded.

“Having a staycation?” Farage asked.

Rees-Mogg replied he always has a staycation in preference to getting six children through an airport. Better still, no ‘cation at all but stay in Somerset with the occasional day at Lords and an odd session at the House of Commons.

One of such was this week with a recall of Parliament to decide what to do about Afghanistan after it’s too late to do anything about Afghanistan.

Challenged by Farage, Rees-Mogg responded it wasn’t Parliament’s job to pre-empt the Government, for instance having a vote before a war, but for the House to call the Executive to account subsequently.

There’s been a fundamental error with the withdrawal from Afghanistan noted Farage.

Rees-Mogg suggested the error wasn’t ours. Even under Ronald Reagan we hadn’t known about the invasion of Grenada, a Commonwealth county, until after it had happened. “We are not a superpower but the ally of a superpower.”

Given Afghanistan, the lack of a trade deal and the one-sided implementation of trans-Atlantic Covid travel restrictions, is the special relationship struggling?

We haven’t been let down by Biden, replied Mogg, the original decision was Donald Trump’s. This is not easy, it never is easy to withdraw (Catholic father of six *snarf*). The job in hand now concerns our relationship with the countries that neighbour Afghanistan. He repeated it was never easy to withdraw.

“Not when you make a mess of it,” responded Farage as he moved on to a more successful withdrawal – Brexit. The settlement with Brussels was not perfect. The fishermen are jolly angry. As for Northern Ireland, is there a political will to stand up to the EU?

“Northern Ireland is part of our country.”

“Was.”

“Still is,” responded Mogg, the EU was being inflexible regarding the Irish border. The EU are hurt and angry with us over Brexit.

Nigel wondered where Mogg had been? What happened to Moggmentum and talk of Jacob being future prime minister material?

Jacob had a collective responsibility as part of the Government and no longer had the latitude he once had. He might have added that Boris was cannily keeping his rival busy.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2021
 

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