Question Time 7th October 2021
The Panel:
Nadhim Zahawi (Conservative)
Lisa Nandy (Labour)
Minette Batters (NFU)
Nick Ferrari (Broadcaster)
Rosie Jones (Comedian)
Venue: Aldershot
We’re doomed, doomed I tell you, doomed, said first questioner Hassan (a Hampshire Hassan no doubt) who wondered how the Tories can be the party of ordinary people as crisis after crisis after crisis fills the pages and airwaves of the fake news media.
Lisa Nandy (Labour) rhymed off a few more, including the poverty caused by cutting Universal Credit.
Regular readers will need no introduction to regular QT panellist Litha who has been frequently covered (no, don’t, behave yourselves) in previous QT Review biographies. Marxist Indian public school boy’s daughter, and Liberal member of the House of Lord’s (Baron Byers OBE PC DL) granddaughter, Comrade Litha is the Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and represents Leave voting Wigan in the House of Commons.
Her husband is Andrew Collins yet another public relations consultancy political spouse, this time on behalf of City of London blue chips.
Nick Ferrari (broadcaster) mentioned timing. It’s not just about what you say, it’s also about when you say it. Boris had timed his conference speech badly, it being on the day Universal Credit was cut.
A gentleman in the audience, wearing a pink jumper, said when you give somebody something they get used to it and don’t want it taken away. Quite.
Your humble author doesn’t know what Universal Credit payments are but, if they are less than £120 a day, claimants would be better off driving a van. Perhaps if Universal Credit was abolished altogether, recipients would thank us for coaxing them into work?
Minette Batters (National Farmers Union) said we couldn’t take anything for granted. Food supplies? Energy? We need a long term plan. The government doesn’t seem to want to partner with businesses. There’s plenty of food at the farm, but getting it into stomachs needs planning.
Rosie Jones (comedian) thought Boris’s speech was Trump-like. Excellent. For some reason, Rosie was less impressed and found Boris too ‘catchphrase driven’.
A teacher spoke. We work. We work hard. Not in July and August or Christmas or Easter you don’t, love.
“We select our audience carefully,” Bruce reminded us unnecessarily.
Nadhim Zadawi (Conservative) rhymed off some big numbers. £36 billion into the NHS. Boris has dealt with adult social care which wipes out families financially if a relative has dementia. He boasted about wind farms, unaware that their inefficiency is the reason we’re having energy problems. Do your prep, Nadhim.
Question two. What’s gone wrong with domestic food production?
Minette wanted to talk about a cull of pigs. Instead of living to be seventy and dying in their sleep, the pigs are going to be killed. No? The daffodil harvest didn’t happen. Speak for yourself, sweetheart. *Guilty face* I jump out of the car and cut my own from the roadside. Shhhh.
There’s a shortage of abattoir workers, said Litha. She is an expert on such things, her cousin is a farmer no less. Rumour has it, no matter what the state of her physical and mental health, during the pandemic Litha has suffered from an overactive knife and fork. I would love to give a definitive assessment. No doubt I have a cousin somewhere, possibly a couple of times removed, who is an expert on the examination of the female form. But with Litha, I just couldn’t tell. She was tucked behind a desk and was wearing a body-shame camouflaging light coloured baggy tee-shirt, further disguised by a grey jacket.
The abattoirs have had the China market closed to them, said Nadhim, as if that meant something. The Germans are falling behind because of a shortage of labour. The speed of the post-pandemic economic bounce-back was catching everybody out.
There was an elephant in the room, said a carefully selected audience member. Did she have a better view of Lisa Nandy? No, that elephant was called ‘Brexit’. Zzzzzzzzzz. The BBC had lined them up like suicide bombers. Three-month visas were an insult to Johnny Foreigner, said the next one, no trade deals, the one after that. Bomber number four blamed Brexit for wanting to stop foreign workers. We need foreign workers he decided, perhaps unaware of all the Universal Credit claimers who would benefit from having a job.
I’ve no idea what Rosie Jones said as I have to look at the keyboard rather than the subtitles while I type. No doubt it was an ‘Allah Akbar’ aimed at Leave.
Through no fault of her own and because of a cruel injustice of fate, Rosie had to sit opposite Nick Ferrari. She also suffers from ataxic cerebral palsy.
In 2019, Diva Magazine announced Rosie to be the 94th most powerful lesbian in Britain. However by 2021, Rosie had dropped out of the list and must therefore be positioned even below number 100, Owen J Hurcum, (they/them/mayor) the non-binary mayor of Bangor, pictured here in, well, judge for yourselves.
Rosie achieved a first class honours degree in English Language and Creative Writing from the University of Huddersfield before becoming a trainee on Channel 4’s diversity production trainee scheme. After which, she was a researcher at Objective Productions on their BBC3 Movie Mistakes III programme while developing other comedy formats.
Despite her concerns about the environment Rosie regularly flies halfway around the world to Melbourne to perform at the Antipodean city’s international comedy festival.
More recently, Rosie has starred in Channel 4’s prime time travel show ‘Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure’ in which she visits, what (empty shelf, petrol queue and stabby) Londonistan’s Guardian newspaper sneeringly calls, ‘Stereotypically shit places’ and asks people why they go there on their holidays.
Previous destinations have included Norwich, Whitby, Anglesey and Kendall to which, not so much Aldershot more Question Time, can now be added to the list.
The next question was about Prince Andrew. Should he go to America to face the allegations made against him?
No, the American legal system is a farce, a mickey take by rich lawyers and bent politicians aided and abetted by rich politicians and bent lawyers. Look at what happened during the presidential election. Prince Andrew would have to be mad.
Litha was an expert on this too. She claimed to have worked with the victims of grooming gangs. I bet she hasn’t. These things should be put out in the open, she continued, and the alleged victims should be given a chance. Unlike how the Labour Party treated the thousands of girls victimised by Muslim grooming gangs, Lisa forgot to mention.
Nick said the murder of Sarah Everard did for women what the death of Stephen Lawrence did for race.
Nicolo Ferrari is the son of Fleet Street legend Lino (or Dan) Ferrari. A cub reporter in London during the war, after being called up and serving in France, Lino married Barrow-in-Furness born Kent policewoman Evelyn and started the Ferrari News Agency. Prospering on the woes of vicars who’d run off with the money and distraught housewives who’d discovered their scoutmaster husbands were paedophiles, Jaguar driving Lino had Nick and his two brothers privately educated at £20,000 a year Eltham College.
After selling his press agency, elegant and moustachioed Mr Ferrari senior moved to Fleet Street where he rose from the Daily Mirror’s news desk to be head of their investigations unit.
At Nick’s 16th birthday party, the surprise guest and star turn was Norman Scott who had to be hidden somewhere as the Jeremy Thorpe scandal broke. At the time, Scott was the alleged victim of an alleged murder attempt allegedly plotted by Liberal Party leader Thorpe.
After leaving school, in the interests of equality of opportunity, Nick’s father got him a job at the Daily Mirror after which he worked his way through London media, via L!ve TV’s ‘Topless Darts’ and ayatollah backed Iranian Press TV, to become a morning radio star on the capital’s LBC.
In 2018, Mr Ferrari won an Independent Radio News award for a ginger-haired disabled children’s away day charter train crash of an interview with Puffin’s favourite Diane Abbott when Hackney’s finest promised to employ an extra ten thousand police officers salaried at £30 a year. Mr Ferrari’s sceptical intervention prompted the then Shadow Home Secretary to immediately up their remuneration to a still unconvincing £150 a week.
In a May 2017 Evening Standard interview with Charlotte Edwardes, the F Type Jaguar driving teeth-capped divorced father of two denied he was having a mid-life crisis. Besides the dental work, a question mark hovers over Mr Ferrari’s impressive bouffant. It may well be real hair, but is it Nick’s?
Cagey about his partner, the interviewee eventually relented with, “I don’t know why I’m being such an arse. Her name’s Clare Patterson.”
Concerned nepotists will be relieved to hear that Clare is part of the London media radio family too, as a sponsorship and promotion account manager and branded content producer. QT Review thinks that might mean she’s in sales.
Misogyny got a lot of mentions. Women are always the recipients of the most punitive of situations, according to an audience member. Hmmm. Is Islam misogynistic? Silence.
Nadim spoke, when he was a schools minister compulsory relationship and sex education had been introduced into the classroom. He was referring to forced LGBT propaganda. Is that not misogynistic too, especially the ‘T’ for trans? More silence.
Nadhim Zahawi has been on QT so many times regular viewers and readers must be bored stupid with his biography. However, he does try his best to keep us interested. One of the Warwickshire Zahawis, Nadhim was privately educated at the £23,000 a year King’s College School, Wimbledon.
As a founder of opinion pollsters YouGov and a middleman between his native Kurdistan’s oil concessions and tax havens in the Caribbean, the MP for Stratford-upon-Avon has built up a £25 million property empire while, via the MP’s expenses scandal, you were paying to heat his country mansion’s stables.
More recently, three months into the coronavirus pandemic, the Zahawi family set up a short-lived healthcare company which, oddly, avoided the use of the name Zahawi on any of its registration documents and didn’t appear on the subsequent Vaccine Minister’s declaration of extra-parliamentary financial interests. Meanwhile, one of Mr Zahawi’s sons, confusingly known as Jaafar Shanshal, had been employed as a researcher by hapless Matt Hancock when he was Secretary of State for Health.
Rosie spoke, right now there was a government enquiry that was no more than a PR stunt. She didn’t feel, as a woman, that the enquires cared about her safety. “Why not?” asked Bruce. Because we have a government where Dominic Raab doesn’t know what misogyny is, she replied, choosing to score points rather than to contribute to the solution of a problem.
As a disabled woman, she didn’t feel safe at night or with police officers and neither did any minorities, be they people of colour or LGBT. What a bigot. Doesn’t she know that Justin Trudeau has pronounced such things 2SLGBTQQIA+ ?
In fairness to the carefully selected uber-woke Rosie, she probably did say 2SLGBTQQIA+ with the subtitles, no doubt invented by a man, unable to keep up.
© Always Worth Saying 2021
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
