Chubby Dave, more lemon than leader

THE FRIDAY THING: TWO weeks in a fell-top farmhouse in the idyllic Eden Valley in Cumbria and I return, horror of horrors, to discover that chubby Dave is having regular telephone chats with Blair the forever Blighted. What a team!

Let us all pray that the outcome of this phone yapping is not our involvement in wars in Syria and Iran, unless of course the Collision government members were all to be issued with tin hats and water pistols and sent out to protect puzzled Iranian citizens from, well, themselves.

You can see how tempting a war would be to chubby Dave. Nothing is going right for him over here where he is seen as more of a lemon than a leader and where he has been forced into an alliance with the Lib-Dems who he actually hates more than he detests some of those on his own side of the political barbed wire.

And you can see Blair, he of the weapons of mass destruction poised to blow us all to smithereens as we lay in our beds or went about our daily business, reminding Cameron what a good war had done for Maggie while not admitting that a seriously bad war in Iraq had actually done for him politically but had allowed him to escape from the turmoil of politics and become a globe-trotting multi-multi millionaire.

The spoils of war are great indeed. For some.

Cameron, of course, has already won one stripe of conflict, working with allies (remember when we still had allies?) to bomb Muammar Gaddafi and his Libyan thugs into submission but that’s not the same as a proper war where you send young men and women to be killed in a foreign god-forsaken land because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But, on reflection, I doubt that we need to worry about going to war despite what it did for the Blair dynasty.

If Cameron decided to go to war with Iran or Syria or even Scotland today, he’d have changed his mind by Monday and decided to go for a game of tennis with Clegg instead.

Or he might just play a computer game because he actually understands that and can, on odd occasions, actually win.

Now there’s a thing.


FINAL WORD: I have supported Oldham’s push for the Metrolink connection from the start and still do, but reading the stories about the horrendous impact the laying of lines and other works have had on the infrastructure of the town centre and the damaging consequences for local shops and businesses, I can only hope that the besieged businesses can survive long enough to gain some benefit from the trams and that there will still be customers coming into Oldham town centre to keep it viable when the first tram toots its arrival in Union Street.
Patience has surely been tested to the full.


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