Weird World

It's a bloody good job that I inhabit the same skin as Chortley Chuckles and am ensconced in marital bliss with the Groupie. The great triumvirate (that's OG, BFP and CC in case you haven't been paying attention) finds itself wound up in the paradox of modern living, wherein the good things are very good and the bad are frankly dreadful. As we (the triumvirate - for today I am all three at once) sit here typing we are listening to Maddy Prior's heavenly voice. This is a good thing. On the wall are various movie posters and an Aston Old Edwardians club shield. These are good things. Fresh in Pig's memory is yesterday's golf when he actually played quite well. This is a good thing. Rather than play again this morning (my shoes are letting in water and there was a drizzly fug) the Pig went for a gentle run in the rain and felt the better for it. This is a good thing. The OG then took to his keyboard and ordered a new pair of golf shoes (rather an overdue purchase), a new golf bag (zip bust on the old one), and some golf balls (didn't lose any yesterday but supplies are looking a tad thin). Such retail therapy is a good thing.

So we feel quite well. A state of mind that makes me feel a little guilty because the world outside Casa Piggy is going to hell in a handcart. The Labour Party seems intent on self-evisceration as a quite unlovely cast of characters hovers over the near-carcass of the mass of inadequacy that is Keir Starmer, each member betraying a revolting ambition and a lack of political morals. The Conservative Party, well what can we say about them? You're right - nothing. They are a quivering mass of nothingness. Lurking in the shadows is the curious beast of Reform - an inchoate sub-moral sliminess. The Greens? If you're going to tell me that Zac Polanski is a potential PM, well, sorry, you need your bumps feeling. Anarcho-syndicalism anyone? 

The triumviarate is bipolar - does that mean there's six of us? It's getting crowded in here. 

Another Day, Another Film

This blog is in danger of being taken over by my estimations of various films. Sorry about that but I do watch a fair number of movies and I find the political world so tawdry that it is difficult to comment upon it. Difficult, that is, in the pain it affords me to begin thinking about it. But there is, even in my limited world, rather more than films and politics. That is true - I realise this as I type it. So never mind that latest film (of which more anon) here is a scattergun smorgasbord of what is going on in the Pig's mind.

The Conservative Party has been in power too long and its parliamentary party is stuffed full of mediocrities who never seriously thought they were going to win a seat. I once had dealings with a relatively wise man who made the arresting defence of our first-past-the-post electoral system that it produced an inevitable swings and roundabouts effect and that the variety between successive governments acted to our benefit, certainly was more desirable than some sort of proportional representation induced perma-coalition. As I think of it now, the problem has been that we had a highly conservative (note the lower case c) Prime Minister in Blair and, after a brief interlude for the temperamentally unsuited Brown, we then got another smooth indifferentist in the lazy Cameron who might as well, as it turned out, have been wearing a Blair mask. Just to spice things up the Labour Party then followed the comically useless Ed Miliband with the barking mad and unelectable Jeremy Corbyn. All of which condemned us to a succession of useless Tories, prime amongst them the clever but venal Boris. We now have Rishi Sunak who, one has to admit, does give the impression of being a clever chap but who leads the aforesaid bunch of mediocrities. And then I look at bloody Keir Starmer and I despair. We should remember just how loyally Starmer served Corbyn. I've never done it before but I am tempted to spoil my ballot next time around. Or maybe I should transfer my voting domicile to Ynys Mon (where I pen this) so that at least I can be part of a meaningful contest between Plaid and Conservatives.

So that's politics out of the way. You will gather that I might best be described as pissed-off. And I haven't even touched on world politics. Another day. No, let's move on to drink, wine to be exact. We are pleased to announce that the winner of the OG wine variety of the year is, not for the first time, Barolo. This stuff is just bloody fantastic as we oenophiles put it. As with much else (and ironic for a man who has always described himself as having the palate of a stray dog) the Pig has saddled himself with expensive taste. Oh well you can't take it with you - how's that for a tax planning strategy.

I returned to my beloved rugby union in my last post so I won't dwell. Suffice to say that there is a learned treatise to be written (I might be just the man) on the Welsh Rugby Union (and for that matter the English as well) and restraint of trade. I can feel my inner Mr Angry welling up again.

Golf. What solace this game is to me notwithstanding my fluctuation from adequacy to incompetence. This fluctuation is not from day to day but from minute to minute. No matter, I have got myself a game at Royal St. David's on Friday with my mate Big Willy. I've loaded a box of new balls into the bag in anticipation.

So at last we come to that film. Effie Gray (2015, available on iPlayer) is a curate's egg of a film. Emma Thompson's screenplay is predictably learned and acute but seems to cut off just as the story threatens a crescendo. What we do have is a neat consideration of the doomed marriage between Gray and John Ruskin. Just as she frees herself of the wretched man and his awful parents, the movie closes without so much as a signal of the later and deserved connubial bliss that the real Effie found with John Everett Millais. Perhaps Thompson had her sights on an unlikely sequel. 63/100. 

Do you know what are nice? I'll tell you: Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits, thats' what. I'm going to have one now. I went for a run this morning so I've earned it. Goodbye.

 

Missing An Open Goal

I tuned into Prime Minister's Questions today in the vain hope of some parliamentary fireworks. Instead what I got was that prize drip Keir Starmer (who let us not forget served Corbyn so loyally) failing to hit the net from six inches out and with the goalkeeper nowhere in sight. Thus the loathsome Johnson survives to pass another political day indulging his trademark political nothingness. Forty-plus percent of his own parliamentary party have signified that they don't trust him/have confidence in him and yet he blunders on. The Conservative Party needs to relocate its vaunted ruthlessness and show this mendacious toad the door pretty bloody pronto. I am fed-up to the back teeth of the SNP being the most efficient Westminster party.

So what's a man to do as his country crumbles around him? Start running again, that's what. The Big Fat Pig has been nursing a sore Achilles since January but yesterday he thought 'sod it' and headed out of the door with the full lycra on and sporting the precious go-faster Oakleys. He shuffled and perspired for a virtuous thirty minutes and thirty-four of your English seconds. Today he is feeling the full muscular tenderness of the short distance runner but the virtuousness has not rubbed off. Pig redux.

I'll tell you who I had in the back of my cab - that Neville Chamberlain. I was reminded of this when watching Munich - the Edge of War the other day. It's adapted from Robert Harris's novel Munich, the title of the film presumably expanded to disambiguate it from Spielberg's dour but worthy movie of that name. In Edge of War, Chamberlain gets off rather more lightly than popular history has allowed. Harris likes playing with history. Jeremy Irons does a more than passable physical imitation of Chamberlain but makes this starchy Tory too avuncular by half. Not a bad film I suppose but it never quite overcomes the fact that we know how it is going to end. 62/100. 

And another reason to be cheerful - golf at Royal Pype Hayes on Monday evening with an ever-expanding band of AOE brothers (fourteen of us this week). Weather: fine (makes a bloody change after two consecutive soakings); golf: moderate but not unpromising; company: matchless; Guinness: lovely.

 

Pop Will Eat Itself (Redux)

One can get to missing these things. The Conservative Party is presently in a dire state - BoJo having lost his mojo but his majority being large enough to preclude any serious rocking of the boat. And boy does the boat need rocking as we continue to sail our way blithely into an economic depression.

Still the good old Labour Party has come to the rescue and given us a nice bit of internecine warfare to warm the cockles on these cold evenings - Corbyn suspended 

This tawdry tale is all part of Kier Starmer's attempt to detoxify his party, or that at least is the way he tells it. What we ought to remember is that (unlike Andy Burnham who may be overplaying his mayoral cards a little but has a clean bill of health hypocrite-wise) Starmer served Corbyn as a loyal lieutenant during the last parliament. Starmer suffers from what we might call Mike Pence Syndrome - wherein an outwardly decent bloke uncomplainingly bows and scrapes at the feet of an utter shit. 

And as if to bring me yet more fun, the infantile SNP is also eviscerating itself with the odious Alex Salmond cast in the unlikely role of avenging angel - Saint Alex of Salmond  

Finally if you want to see how low an Englishman can stoop, track down the clips of Nigel Farage eulogising the shit's shit, the Donald - An Englishman Abroad   

As a wise man said to me only last week - life is like a glass of champagne, drink it while it's fizzy.

Writers Read

The urge to read has remained with me as we go deeper into the coronavirus lockdown. In the last week I went straight from Simon Raven's Friends in Low Places to its successor in the Alms for Oblivion sequence, The Sabre Squadron. To my mind this is the best of the ten novels. It can profitably be read without reference to the other books, but once you have read it I suspect you will want to search out the remainder.

After the scabrous Raven, a change of tack altogether. I fancied a chunk of comfort reading so it was back to a childhood favourite author, Arthur Ransome. I lazily thought I had read all the Swallows and Amazons tracts but I had overlooked Missee Lee. A book which would today have child protectors rushing to condemn it and which might very well also be deemed racist, it rockets along at breakneck pace and is a plain and simple delight.

Politics still intrudes. In America the Democrats have at least stopped fighting each other and will hopefully direct all their energy to defeating the narcissistic sociopath that is Donal Trump. Mind you whether the selection of someone as obviously second-rate as Joe Biden to lead the fight is a good one must be very open to question. Good luck to them in any event. In 1980s America I met Republicans who were very thoroughly decent people but one has to say that the amoral manner in which today's GOP has fallen in behind Trump should leave members thoroughly ashamed.

At home I'm afraid I have to say that I have always found something vaguely unpleasant in the phenomenon of Keir Starmer. Yet another bloody lawyer, he was a good enough prosecutor to attract a knighthood under a Tory regime. Despite his carefully cultivated appearance of moderation he had no problem falling in behind the laughable policies of Corbyn. He started his leadership of the Labour Party by disavowing factional opposition for the sake of opposition and the very next day published a mealy-mouthed attack on the conduct of the coronavirus crisis. When Boris Johnson fell seriously ill Starmer blathered self-serving bollocks about constitutional procedures. Sanctimonious prig.

But hey ho, the sun is shining, the Pig ran five miles this morning and there is one glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape left from last night's bottle (it was a bank holiday so therefore does not count as a weekday) - the recliner in the garden is calling and the Pig is going to read another chapter of John Wilders' The Lost Garden, a consideration of Shakespeare's history plays (including those of Rome) in a lapsarian context. You must be so jealous.

The State Of The Polls

My second alma mater (yes I have two undergraduate degrees, hence the massively witty title of this blog) today played host to the launch of the Labour Party Manifesto. It is Birmingham City University of which I speak. A couple of days ago all post-graduate students (of which I am one) were warned that access to certain buildings would be denied today and that memo seemed to relish informing us that the nature of the event causing such closure could not be revealed 'for security reasons'. What a load of old bollocks - I immediately guessed what it was going to be. After all the Lib Dems had already sounded their pootling fanfare and the Tories presumably have more sense than to show up on a modern university campus. Anyway I just hope we charged Labour through the nose for the privilege.

I've been reading said manifesto this afternoon. It is, on balance, a dire document born of Old Labour shibboleths and bearing the imprimatur not so much of the dreadful Corbyn (or Magic Grandpa as Rod Liddle so aptly styles him) but of the gimlet eyed Most Dangerous Man in Britain, John McDonnell. McDonnell is deadly serious and deadly clever. He hates enterprise with a passion - for him it is the immoral extraction of surplus value created by and belonging to the proletariat. Many years ago I had and kept a copy of the 1983 Labour Manifesto, 'the longest suicide note in political history' as it was described. We could afford to laugh about it because there never was a hope of Michael Foot (another clever man - though more decent than McDonnell) becoming Prime Minister. It is harder to laugh these days because Labour can win. McDonnell's acuity is ranged against a tired Conservative Party led by a dilettante with no moral anchor.

You pays your money and you takes your chance. Last one out, switch the lights off.

All Political Careers End In Failure - But This Is Bloody Ridiculous

So Theresa May has finally admitted defeat and we shall soon have yet another Prime Minister. At her moment of resignation she was dignified and serious - have we ever found her otherwise? But we should not allow our instinctive sympathy for a kind soul to obscure the fact of her ineffectiveness. In my lifetime we have had some bloody awful Prime Ministers (Douglas-Home, Callaghan, Brown all spring to mind) and I'm certain that none of them was saddled with such malign mood music as May. Brexit is a shaming dog's dinner, the Conservative Party is an ungovernable dog's breakfast and, to cap it all, she let that turd Donald Trump hold her hand in public. Notwithstanding such unprepossessing circumstances, it has to be said that she has demonstrated an uncanny knack when faced with a fork in the political road for steering with utter conviction down the wrong way. In all of this she threatens to deliver us into the hands Corbyn and McDonnell, a gruesome pairing which should in any sensible world be unelectable. So, sorry Mrs May, I am not sorry to see you go. Brexit means Brexit indeed.

Much more importantly you will need to know that the Overgraduate has been suffering with that most debilitating of illnesses, the summer cold. I have been unspeakably brave about the whole thing as I'm sure the Groupie will confirm. I do just have to make it clear that this was not Man Flu - which as any fule kno is much, much worse.

Mission Impossible - Fallout - a film of sustained and explosive silliness. It has first Paris and then London being trashed in chases and shoot-outs before repairing to Kashmir for a climax that twins a helicopter chase with nuclear threat. Bloody silly. Bloody well done. 6.5/10. For people who like this sort of thing etc.

For a man who is an avid watcher of Gardeners' World Big Fat Pig is not a keen gardener. It seems to him that if you weed regularly this merely stimulates the bloody things to grow back even bigger. The Pig does of course like a well-kept lawn and is pleased to report that the new Precious Mower is doing a great job, both in standard mode and the alternative mulch mode which he uses when doing the Council's job and mowing the verge at the front of Casa Piggy. As for the institutional uselessness of Birmingham City Council, let's leave that for another day.

Remember you heard it here first: Brexit means never having to say you're sorry.



    

I've Been Avoiding The Subject

I went to bed last Thursday with a bad feeling about the whole election farrago. I awoke on Friday to find my unease was fully justified. In surely the most catastrophic act of hubris since Edward Heath had the temerity to ask the unions who governed the country, Theresa May managed to lose the moral high ground to a third rate terrorist apologist and his sidekicks Madame Stupid and the Smiling Larcenist. Apparently the young are to blame - perhaps they will have to live with rampant inflation and a stony-broke Treasury before they realise just how shit a place Britain can be. Perhaps they might like to take a look at how Venezuela has ended up - why it seems only yesterday that Citizen Ken was using taxpayer money to laud the 'achievements'of Hugo Chavez. Corbyn was another cheerleader, natch.

Actually I don't blame the young. I've totted it all up and I blame ... Theresa May and the boneheads who advised her that this was the right time to open the Pandora's Box marked 'Dementia Tax'. Still the good thing about a hung parliament is that the shit-for-brains politicians will find their legislative ambitions stymied and might just leave us alone to order our lives as we see fit. Fat chance. And if I hear one more pudding-brained cretin telling me that all that is required is for the 'rich to pay their fair share' I might swing for someone. I'm not particularly rich (despite rumours to the contrary that I may have started by my irresponsible lifestyle) but I am one of Larcenist McDonnell's target group and I can tell you this, John Boy, I've always paid my due and it has felt like plenty. The problem is the use to which successive politicians of all hues have put it.

When in doubt reach for a quotation from a nineteenth century French economist:

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

All is well in the world - beer is being brewed

But not to worry, ICW and I had a long and liquid lunch on Friday and if we didn't put the world to rights we at least agreed that between us we could do a better job at practically everything - governing, running the Lions tour, and so on and so forth. We were fuelled by Sutton Pale Ale at the Brewhouse and Kitchen in Sutton Coldfield. Politics is only politics but mates are for life.

     

At Last A Glimpse Of Light

The Groupie tells me not to keep watching the cable news coverage of the U.S. presidential election since it only gets me all riled up. I, of course, keep going back and getting angrier and angrier. My angst doesn't just come from the sheer bloody awfulness of the Donald but from the inability (perhaps unwillingness is better) of Clinton to maul him intellectually. However yesterday my patience was rewarded by an impressive platform speech in Ohio by Clinton. In fact beyond impressive, it was genuinely uplifting. Track it down online and compare it to the stilted performance Trump gave via autocue earlier in the week as he outlined the foreign policy he had been given by some misguided slave wonks.

It is not always what Trump says. If you dig beneath the lewdness, the ignorance and the cant, you will find germs of good ideas in what Trump says - given how many unrelated thoughts he throws at a subject the law of averages rather dictates that this will be the case. It is his utter lack of humility that offends and his basic message - "I alone can make America great again." What drivel.

And yesterday it was not always what Clinton said that impressed - for example her instincts on tax are unsound. But the manner and tone of her delivery were, at last, reassuring. How can I put it? I know - she has her faults (they are manifest) but she also has heft and unlike her opponent, she is not a complete twat. There you go, OG has spoken - eat your heart out Charles Moore.

Used to work for big pharma - nuff said

My current hero Rod Liddle has described Labour leadership contender Owen Smith as a 'smarmy nonentity'. As ever the Boy Liddle done good. I can do no better than repeat it. Mind you, you really ought to read what Liddle says about Corbyn! You could not invent the mess that a once great institution has got itself into. How can Ed Miliband (the man who gave them as his parting gift the electoral system that landed them with Corbyn) hold his head high? He must be so proud.

Decency And An Indecent Stunt

Sir Terry Wogan died overnight. An absolute master of his art and by all accounts a man infected by decency. Decency, the reason Graham Norton is so much better a broadcaster than Jonathan Ross, and the reason that Kevin Bridges is better than Frankie Boyle. Being a shitbag is not of itself admirable.

Someone else who comes across as intrinsically decent is Andy Murray. He lost another Grand Slam final to Novak Djokovic this morning - Ausralian Open - no crime in an age when three of the very greatest players of all time are plying their trade: Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. Murray has won two Grand Slams, an Olympic title and, almost single-handedly, the Davis Cup. Why has he not been knighted? Perhaps just a matter of time but the delay seems churlish.

An indecent stunt - Mcdonnell tax return - John McDonnell has published his tax return, with which I have no problem (it's not very interesting and that, of course, is why he feels safe doing it), but more to the point he has challenged Gorgeous George Osborne to do the same - the mealy-mouthed implication is that not to do so somehow unfits a man for public office. This is bollocks. Any old reader of the OG will know that I don't like George Osborne but the fact that his family has money is of no relevance. It is relevant to question (as the self-flagellating McDonnell does but never out loud) whether it is right for anyone at all to be what he would define as 'rich'. By all means, let's have that discussion if we really must, although it's pretty wearying stuff to those of us who grew up with hyperbolic Marxist jealousy. What is not manly (another word that will upset my old bien-pensant mates, and, yes, I confess that is precisely why I've done it) is to indulge in this sort of low attack.

Tax adviser visits HQ

And since you ask, no I strongly doubt that the Google tax deal is a good one for UK plc but I do understand the massively unbalanced nature of the negotiation that led to it. Being a tax collector used to be a respected trade for the intellectually gifted - now the brightest and best work on the other side of the fence for the shit-bag lawyers and accountants who sponge off the behemoths like Google. They are immensely clever and tragically soulless. It is my generation (God damn us) that has made the world like this. For someone at least trying to shed a little light on the topic, try this as a starting point - Sales Tax?

More cheerfully and, as usual several years behind trend, I have just discovered Pramface on Netflix. Has anything ever been quite so comprehensively well cast?

Feeling Old

I feel old most of the time these days. I lack energy and rather more worryingly I have to search around for optimism. It seems to be a condition of encroaching decrepitude that one feels that the world is, despite best efforts, going to hell in a hand cart. What follows is likely to be a disorganised ramble over the state of my world.

On 11 November I happened to mention the "muderous misogynists of ISIS". I did so disparagingly and perhaps flippantly. Two days later these barbarous scumbags massacred 129 souls in Paris. Less than a week later football fans of England and France together sang La Marseillaise. There is always hope.

On the evening before the Paris atrocity I happened to have watched Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's engrossing procedural on the decade long hunt for Bin Laden. It begs questions about the propriety of "enhanced interrogation" aka torture and, indeed, questions about the value of the whole enterprise to kill Bin Laden. A very good film and proof, as if it were needed, that Bigelow is several times better a director than her over-lauded ex-husband James "Titanic" Cameron. 8/10. America makes films about these issues for commercial release. ISIS (or whatever one must fashionably call them in the post Parisian angst) obliterate ancient monuments. Go figure.

This entry is lacking direction, a product of my malaise. Today we have had the Chancellor's Autumn Statement, notable not so much for Osborne's abandonment of his plans for wretched Tax Credits but for the utter poverty of the Opposition response to it. The Labour Party, author at its best of the post-war welfare consensus, is currently a dangerous joke, led by an intellectul make-weight. This is a bad thing and it rather depresses me.

Traffic in Birmingham. What on earth is going on? This is also a bad thing.

Still, the panto went quite well last week, at least the audiences seemed to enjoy it. I found it pathetically enervating. This may be my malaise or may be the cause of my malaise. Hopefully the latter and a good snooze will prod me out of it.

For a few days I have been out of love with literary theory. This is a bad thing if you're trying to do a PhD. Is the theory industry not in danger of self-indulgence bordering on fraud?

A new series of The Bridge is screening on BBC4. This is a good thing. Saga Noren - what a creation.

Our central heating is playing up. This is a bad thing.

Russia and Turkey, neither terribly sympathetic countries, have been having a stab this week at starting World War III. Kindly get a grip. There are bigger fish to fry than each other.

Time for Grumpy to have that snooze. 

Politics Just Got Interesting Again

As you will have noted (possibly with surprise) I have largely kept my nose out of the Labour leadership election, indeed I described any potential comment as being an intrusion on private grief. But now it's all done and dusted and they've done what would have seemed unimaginable six months ago - Jeremy Corbyn is to be the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And on the whole I have decided that this is a good thing for me as a spectator. The sameness that has afflicted the last two decades of British politics will now be banished and we will encounter a different vision. It would be wrong to deny that I think Corbyn barking but it will be diverting to see in operation a man whose instincts are so deviant - his natural reaction is to favour the Arab over the Jew, unilateralism over multilateralism, Irish Nationalism over Unionism, collectivism over individualism. It all reminds me of my politically charged adolescence. Just don't make me wear flares and high heels, and please don't tax us at 80%.

Oh, if only, if only, there was a credible libertarian voice in British politics. Now that really would be interesting. Bollocks to Cameron and Osborne and their shaming budget deficit. At least Corbyn, the poor deluded darling, is honest about his addiction to government debt - rather like that nice Mr Mugabe, Corbyn's view is that there is no moral imperative to honour national debts, hence they can be taken on with a clear conscience. So far as one can tell the Cameron/Osborne plan is to steal from those few barmy enough to have saved and to hope that interest rates never go up. Fat chance.

Man at C&A

One final problem with Corbyn, actually two. Number one - why does he clearly hate the affluent so much? They don't all hate him- you can trust me on this. Number two - on what one might take to be the biggest day of his political life, why did he not wear a tie? Would he wear one to a wedding? I'm not an habitual tie-wearer myself but there are certain occasions that merit it. The flouting of such conventions in public life is not cool, it is in fact a form of showing-off and an assertion of superiority. Think Gordon Brown in his lounge suit at the Mansion House. Whatever happened to him? He abolished boom and bust you know.

59 Days To Shape Up - An Uncomfortable Yet Comforting Ride

I laughed in the face of ill-fortune and took the Precious Bike out for a spin this morning. Drumroll - no punctures. The discomfort I refer to in the title was from the decrepit state of the roads juddering up through the highly inflated tyres via the frame. Result - sore derriere. The comforting effect comes from the knowledge/hope that I am free of the bane of constant deflation. And I'll tell you this - that final hill is several degrees easier on the Precious. For tomorrow's ride I am going to revert to the mountain bike and get that righteous burn in the thighs.

Here's something I didn't think I'd be saying - I heard that Andy Burnham/Scott Tracy dealing sensibly and illuminatingly with questions on Radio 4 at lunchtime. Instinctively I am not a fan of the franchise being extended to 16 year olds but I have to grant that there is an appeal to Burnham's soundbite "If you're old enough to be exploited by Sports Direct on a zero hours contract then you're old enough to vote." This is that rarity - a crafted soundbite that actually prefaces a serious debate.

Ed explains the voting system

I have avoided any lengthy pondering of the Labour leadership election, comparing interest in the event  to an intrusion into private grief. However it is now getting very arresting. Only now is it becoming clear to the dozy apparatchiks that they have somnambulated themselves into an existential fight for the life of the party as an electable proposition. All of this comes as a parting gift from the disastrous Ed Miliband whose legacy fittingly includes, or possibly comprises nothing other than, the plain daft voting system. So we now have the other candidates piqued into action by the prospect of actually losing to Jeremy Corbyn - a figure notably antediluvian in his policies and his friendships, Hamas, the IRA etc etc. Corbyn is a reminder of the student left of my youth, the sort who would miss an exam rather than miss the chance to throw eggs at Margaret Thatcher. I didn't make that up by the way, it actually happened with one bizarrely admirable loon of my acquaintance. Golden days.