Cameron, King Kong and a catalogue of confusion

Published: 2nd June, 2011
ILLTYD HARRINGTON: ‘AS I PLEASE’

I WAS assured by an old musical diva Bertha Willmott that Winston Churchill loved to share the vulgarity of the working classes in places such as the Metropolitan music hall in Edgware Road and the Collins in Islington.

Bertha says he always took his teeth out to laugh. 

Why? Don’t ask me. 

Harold Macmillan went to see Beyond the Fringe and laughed as Peter Cook made a parody of him. 

The sounds of caustic sarcasm will not be reflected in the last London music hall opening at the Palace of Westminster. 

Top of the bill will be Dave Cameron singing his hit I Love the NHS. 

He seems to perform best in front of sullen nurses and cynical young doctors who troop into lecture theatres to provide an audience. 

He struck me more as Dracula than Des O’Connor. 

Love demands loyalty and care, not wife-beating. 

A cruel example of this love I saw in Southampton last week. 

A heart clinic for babies and young children is to be closed. Hundreds of petitioners asked that it be allowed not only to answer the obvious need in Southampton and its surrounds but to continue its acclaimed research. 

Andrew Lansley – a man with a medical record – had been there. 

I was dumfounded by a precocious nine-year-old boy, who floored him with his questioning. 

The politician had gone down an orthodox channel and ended up in blood. 

I could not believe that the answer to the reasonable demand is to take the patients to Birmingham or London. This is the policy beloved by Elizabethan England and the world of Oliver Twist. 

Children are being abandoned. 

Old people are thrown into daily uncertainty. The local services are recklessly deprived of funds. 

The New Journal regularly expresses this catalogue of suffering, confusion, and bewilderment in Camden alone. 

All of this to deal with the “deficit”. 

Cameron and Eric Pickles have set out to confuse localism and communities. 

And others are joining in the undermining of the welfare state. 

The abominable Pickles blunders recklessly through civic centres like King Kong heading for the Empire State Building. 

Liam “I love the armed forces” Fox is raiding the chickens’ coop. 

We cannot call upon our crack troops to save the people because they are helping to suppress the Arab spring. 

Yet David has expressed support for these insurgents.

I did have the problem of correcting a very old gentleman as he prepared to sell his war medals and send the money to the cash-strapped Ministry of Defence. 

If you are still with me, or hiding with other dissidents in the disused catacombs of an old church, or about to embark on a fatal cause of self-harm in sympathy with the egregious George Osborne, read on and get a glimpse into the financial ledger that not even Indiana Jones could retrieve.

Here are some figures which sweep away the version of truth from the mouth of quislings like Vince Cable. 

Gordon Brown left us with a debt in public services of £980billion. 

That will rise in 2014 to £1,400billion and the banks and financial houses and the brokers will share £67billion in banks’ charges as they manage the debt. 

Even with the public flagellation of the chancellor and his dog, the Cameron state has grown by 3 per cent. 

Labour is becoming too remote and cautious.

Only one union leader has challenged the fiscal distortion which is the cause of destroying the fabric of society. 

Labour post-war leader Clement Attlee, a wartime major, wrote in 1936 that, in the face of anti-democratic and class driven policies, it was right to use extra-parliamentary action. 

Somehow I can’t see Ed Balls at the barricade or even David Miliband, who picked up £24,000 for a week’s work in his old university. 

My dog George destroyed three rubber dolls of Margaret Thatcher, which said, there was no alternative. 

I refused to buy him another one. 

That forgotten visionary, Jack London, mourned in 1910 of an authoritarian state. His book The Iron Heel is chilling and relevant to reread. 

Another to watch and worry about, as the real genius of the right, is Lord Ashcroft. You could cast him as a real James Bond villain, plotting evil in some luxurious dug-out in the Bahamas. 

Perhaps I can end by recommending some reading for the cabinet on the beach. 

Try Cheap Terminal Surgery by Jack the Ripper; Follow My Example by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; How We Solve the Problem of Old Age by Burke and Hare; but do not take I Did It My Way by Margaret Thatcher, it is too alarming even for this mob.