Dear Aunt Agatha,
People are still making fun of me years after I ceased to matter, and I want it to stop. People should be ridiculing Jeremy Corbyn instead. They mocked me because my dad went from performing in music hall to making garden gnomes. They belittled my hard-earned 3 O-levels at school, forgetting that I added another 3 by correspondence courses. I think my total of 6 O-levels beats Jeremy Corbyn’s 2 Es at A-level, whatever the sneerers say. And it was my correspondence course in banking that lifted me from the Electricity Board to Standard Chartered. All Corbyn did was to drop out of North London Polytechnic – a place I’d have been ashamed even to walk into.
He claims to be a good campaigner, but it was my soapbox that brought me the largest Tory vote ever, and snatched the victory his lot thought it had in the bag. It’s true that in a 1999 BBC poll I was voted 17th worst out of 19 Twentieth Century Prime Ministers, but he has yet to get there at all, and probably never will.
It was sheer bad luck that we crashed out of the ERM on my watch, just as it was sheer bad luck that I had earlier taken us into it. How can I stop this constant belittling of me? How can I reverse history and get the UK public to see that I was right about the EU, and that they were wrong, and need to think and vote again?
(signed) “Minor Thing.”
Dear “Minor Thing,”
I’m afraid you can’t rewrite history. It’s that old moving finger thing. You can no more do that than you can retrospectively legitimize those Maastricht bastards. But you can open a new chapter by going back to your favourite sport, cricket. I don’t mean as a player, of course, but in a whole new career as a commentator. You could have great fun alluding to your past indiscretions, talking in droll tones about “the time I bowled a maiden over,” or saying she had a “deep fine leg,” and “I caught her in the gully.” You’d finally be respected because you’d be doing something you’ve never done before: talking about a subject you know something about.
The good news is that in the list of postwar prime ministers, “Minor thing” will be 18th in a list of 22 soon. T May will be 22nd.
Nonsense! That place is reserved for Brown
I am amazed – who can genuinely believe that Ramsay MacDonald, Wilson and Heath were better? Most believe that Chamberlain was the worst although he actually spent most of his tenure getting the UK ready to fight after Baldwin did zilch because he was occupying the “middle ground” against the pacifist Lansbury, gaining an unnecessarily large majority at the expense of the true national interest.
Actually I think History will be kinder to poor old Minor thing than we realise. Why? Ideas are tested by reality. Sometimes we can see an idea is nonsense by logic but often we have to jump in and try it. So it is with Johnny and the ERM. Many people thought it would give Blighty the financial discipline it seemed to struggle with up to the 80s. Just like early Socialists they didn’t know that it wouldn’t work. After leaving Norman, Ken and Johnny managed to use the devaluation to create a strong economy that Labour took 5 years… Read more »