Question Time 14th July 2022
The Panel:
Bim Afolami (Conservative)
Chris Bryant (Labour)
Minette Batters (NFU)
Mary Bousted (NEU)
Olivia Utley (Daily Telegraph)
Venue: Torquay
One of the Berkshire Afolami’s, Bim’s hard-up NHS worker parents (his father was a doctor, his mother a pharmacist) sent him to £46,000 per annum Eton College. After Eton, Mr Afolami read Modern History at University College, Oxford, becoming a corporate lawyer after graduation. A Remainer, the Conservative member for Hitchin and Harpenden was elected to Parliament in 2017, replacing Peter The Lord Lilly (whose father worked for the BBC).
Bim’s wife, and mother of his three children, is the dippy Henrietta Jackson-Stops. Hetti is one of those irritating people who embarrass themselves by making very public consumer complaints on Twitter. If she doesn’t get her own way, she unleashes the threat of every retailer’s nightmare – the dreaded tweet to WhichUK passively aggressively pleading ‘can you help?’
Ms Jackson-Stops has had trouble with her Audi. She bought balloons which, when inflated and floated on a string, spelt ‘Happy Birthday’ but upside down. Despite being an alpha female high-flying lawyer, she doesn’t know how airfare refunds work. You get the fare back, love, not the tax and airport fees. Or travel insurance (damaged buggy).
The £43,000 a year St Mary’s Calne old girl blames the courier when she can’t organise answering her own front door, ‘you are responsible for a very disappointed birthday boy tomorrow.’ The birthday boy may also be disappointed to learn his presents come from Bargain Max, ‘The UK’s number one for cheap kids toys.’
Likewise do clients, engaged in life or death courtroom cases, realise their bigly pounds an hour counsel turns up at the station without her wallet (‘thank you Paddington ticket office for being so helpful), loses her contact lenses (‘thank you Specsavers for the replacement contact lens – 50 miles from home with only one eye) and leaves her possessions behind in EAT?
Worst of all, Ms Jackson-Stops volunteers as a pro bono counsel (ie free legal representation) for an organisation called Bail for Immigration Detainees.
***
Question one. Do you think a change of leadership will be enough to restore trust in the government?
No, said Chris Bryant (Labour). Chris began by expressing surprise Boris had lasted so long and then made the mistake of fighting the last war rather than this by exercising his Borisphobia rather than addressing present issues. Chris was on firmer petty point-scoring ground by asking Bim why he had stayed loyal to the outgoing prime minister for so long?
Bim Afolami (Conservative) did something similar and addressed Boris’s apologies rather than looking to the future. Johnson had a big mandate. These things shouldn’t be trivialised. A Prime Minister deserves a measure of loyalty.
Chris Bryant mentioned support for Owen Pattinson, the Tory who had been caught doing for business what Labour does for the unions. Bim droned on instead of saying Mr Pattinson stood down, is Chris Bryant going to stand down because he’s owned by the union barons?
Mary Bousted (NEU) said the Tories are tarnished but so is politics itself. People say they’re all the same, which is a shame. She called Boris a ‘serial liar’. Yawn. The Boris derangement syndrome was strong. The useless Turkish waiter and his air-head floozy really, really bigly trigger these leftie wastes of space. Is there any way we can keep him on? Some kind of a late entry into the lack-of-beauty contest that is the Conservative Party leadership election?
Mary Winifred Bousted is the joint general secretary of the National Education Union. The NEU being the result of a merger between the old National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. Her co-general secretary is the nutty Marxist Kevin Courtney who writes for the Communist Morning Star. Too male, pale and obviously politically extreme, Kevin can’t be trusted in front of the QT cameras. According to the Taxpayer’s Alliance, in 2019, Dr Bousted’s salary from the union was £187,557. Mr Courtney’s was £217,501.
Grammar school girl Mary, a graduate of Hull and Durham universities, is humble and doesn’t use her title of doctor. Puffins will be disappointed to hear Dr Bousted’s doctoral thesis hasn’t jockeyed for position on the Amazon best sellers list with The Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, as it is an honorary title awarded by Edge Hill University where she was an employee.
Incidentally, regular readers awaiting the promised review of the Marquis’s dirty book, will be pleased to hear that it is 99% done and should be ready soon. At the moment, while studying the text, I’m trying for a really good finish. (No. Don’t.)
In interview with Further Education Week, Dr Mary confided her favourite book is E M Foster’s A Room With A View. Which reminds me, I was once in a quiz tie-break and the question was, which city is overlooked by E M Foster’s room with a view? The other chap said Leeds. *snarf*
Challenged by an audience member, Chris Bryant said Boris got all the big calls wrong. Boris is responsible for the pandemic, inflation and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. The Boris Derangement Syndrome was even higher. We need an Imperial measure to quantify it. Perhaps the De Sade? The amount of pain exhibited by a panellist because of Boris’s role in Brexit.
Olivia Utley (journalist) was going to be positive. Boris was temperamentally unsuitable for the job. He wanted to please everyone. But Olivia was excited by the race and looked to the future. Bold. Young. Diverse. Interesting. Olivia had a bit of a tan but just a bit. She was wearing the wrong dress and showing not so much tan lines as tan fault lines.
Every single one of us eats, noted the genius that is Minette Batters (NFU). Our trade deals with Australia and New Zealand are going to harm the rich farmer by offering cheaper food to the poor consumer. Gosh. Pigs have been culled, instead of being kept by the million as pets and dying of old age. Fruit is rotting in the fields. Grow less labour-intensive crops, love, or pay higher wages. Up to you.
A man at the back asked Chis about honesty. Is Kier Starmer an honest man? Some more dust was knocked off the De Sade-o-meter. Regarding Beergate, Starmer is better than Boris perhaps in the same way that Durham Police are benter than the Met.
On his website, Mr Bryant is happy to inform fellow proletarian comrades in his South Wales constituency of his graduation from Mansfield College, Oxford, where he read English. However, the ever modest egalitarian omits to tell the Rhonda working classes he is also a privately educated old boy of the exclusive £43,000 a year Cheltenham College. Keen to tell he was once London manager of Common Purpose, he self-defines that fifth column freemasonry for leftie public sector pen-pushers as an ‘educational charity’. *Cough*.
Surprise, surprise, Chris’s mother worked for the BBC as did Chris as Head of European Affairs between 1998 and 2000. Shy Mr Bryant mentions he was brought up in Spain but omits to tell the food-bankers and impoverished nurses that he was there because his father was a senior executive with American gas guzzling and carbon dioxide belching mega-corporation Crysler.
After Oxford, Chris studied Theology and trained to be a priest at Ripon College. Ordained in 1987, the Reverend Bryant is perhaps not as shy and modest as we thought, having been caught posting to the internet a full frontal selfie of himself in nothing but his Y fronts. It could have been worse. In fact, it was worse, as the image was found on Gaydar, a ‘dating’ website on which Fr Bryant (Gaydar name, Alpha 101) described himself as ‘horny as bu**ery’.
A friend tells me the photograph was taken in an expensive-looking bathroom. Which begs a question, which one? The bathroom of the London flat on which he claimed £84,350 in Parliamentary expenses or the London penthouse he owned (including private lift and porter) but rented out for £3,000 a month while you paid his expenses for the other property?
Puffins may, or may not, be relieved to hear that man of the people Comrade Mr Bryant has subsequently sold his penthouse flat for a cool £1.1 million, almost twice what he paid for it. The whole sorry tale can be read here.
Another gentleman said that we’re stuck with a zombie government over the summer until a successor to Johnson is chosen. We’d have one anyway, pal, it’s the summer recess. The House of Liars, Thieves and Perverts are about to start their four-month-long summer holiday.
Thinking of indexes, quantifications and coefficients, Chris Bryant’s twelve square inches of faded, worn carpet scores 6.1 on the QT Review Elton John bad toupe scale.
In the interest of diversity and equality of opportunity, Olivia Utley is a hereditary journalist. Olivia’s mother is at the BBC World Service. Her uncle, Tom Utley, is at the Daily Mail. Ms Utley’s grandfather was the impressive High Tory TE Utley of The Times who was a speech writer to Mrs Thatcher and an Ulster Unionist parliamentary candidate. One of Olivia’s great-grandparents was Dermot Morrah, also of The Times and the Daily Mail. An old girl of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London’s posh Holland Park, Livvy was raised by her mother and an aunt who wrote some headlines themselves when they tried to become civil partners as part of an inheritance tax dodge on their multi-million pound South London home.
The next question was about a high wage, high skills economy. Dr Mary, who earns £187,000 a year, said all these promised tax cuts can only be paid for by ‘decimating’ the public services. We’re running out of teachers, she said. Lowering the school leaving age, one suggests, would solve both the teaching crisis and labour shortage.
Boris promised too much, Olivia reminded us. The economy is in massive trouble. We need someone who will have difficult conversations. Did she suggest Liz Truss? I didn’t catch what she said. Ms Utley referenced the train line, whatever that is. There are 20 job applications for every vacancy on the train line but not so in schools. Therefore, teachers should get a pay rise.
A teacher spoke from the audience. Her colleagues are leaving the profession. She called the children ‘leaners’. Yuk. And then said ‘mental health’. Groan. A university student noted there had been a lot of strikes in higher education. It is striking that is so damaging to students. Another pubic sector worker spoke – surprise, surprise. This time a ‘support worker’. If teachers are so good, why do they need support workers?
The government promised cheaper everything but higher pay, noted Minette. It is economically illiterate. Minette had never got into the Home Office despite all those pigs taken too early and the rotting food in the fields. The government door needs to be opened so these things can be sorted out.
Ms Batters farms a 300-acre mixed farm near Salisbury in Wiltshire that includes a herd of 300 pedigree Hereford cattle. She also runs a catering business cum wedding barn. Silly Minette has committed to net zero greenhouse emission farming by 2040. The mother of twins is also the Deputy Lieutenant of Wiltshire. Privately educated at the Godolphin School, Ms Batters, a one-time jockey with 30 winners under her belt, took over over the tenancy of the farm when her father retired.
Wages can be higher and products cheaper simultaneously if productivity increases, this reviewer notes. Work harder and stop bringing in cheap labour from abroad.
Chris blamed himself. Politicians are out of touch with the public. We have NHS hospitals running food banks for their own fat nurses. If Chris had been reading my prep instead of Gaydar, he would know NHS workers can afford to send their sons to Eton.
Final question. Chris Bryant look away now. Should there be legislation to restrict second homes?
Affordable housing is a big problem, said Minette, but offered no solution. Olivia wanted more house building and the deregulation of planning to allow nice homes that nimbies won’t complain about. She suggested building on golf courses. Mary comes from London. Rich people (those on £187,000 a year?) buy properties as an investment that are never lived in. She wanted that to stop. We need a Labour government she concluded.
Bim didn’t want legislation but more latitude for local councils to tax us to death. We need more devolution, said Chris. Housing can be a postcode lottery. He conceded the Labour Party had failed to build enough council houses when in power. Missing the irony, he wanted legislation to prevent second homes.
As every Puffin knows, there are three reasons for the housing crisis. Immigration, immigration and immigration. Yet another truism unmentionable to the perverts, liars and thieves (each with their own numerous properties) who inhabit the sewage-drenched overcrowded slum that is the toxic media-political House of Shame in Londonistan’s Westminster traitor’s ghetto.
© Always Worth Saying 2022
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