The Wintle Blog

It wasn’t the elevation of the younger Milliband which surprised me. Given the choice between Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, the extra-parliamentary party, smarting from years during which powerful leaders had been out of its control, opted perhaps inevitably for the more manipulable of the brothers. No – what stopped me short was a line on the radio in the run-up to the coronation. We were told that the five candidates, before being placed in purdah and told who’d won, had been obliged to surrender all Blackberries, mobiles, pagers and any other electronic means of communication. The precaution – if this commentary was true – must have been taken in case one or more of them chose to leak the news. Aren’t decency and trustworthiness necessary qualities if one is to be eligible to lead a party, a parliament, and a country? In other words, shouldn’t it have been sufficient to say, “look, we don’t want to rob our lady chairperson, the conference, the media and the country of their moment of thea...

It’s January 22, 1942. Six years to the day since Edward VIII was proclaimed King, and now the proclamation is to be repeated. Beside Edward is his Queen, Wallis, née Simpson. His brother, described these days by the State-run Press as “the usurper Albert,” is in hiding (Canada? New Zealand?) with his wife and their two daughters. The honour guard at St James’s Palace consists of Royal Horse Artillery and Waffen SS. There is jubilation among the people – at least the bombs have stopped falling and the boys are home – but there’s also fear, loathing and anxiety. Winston Churchill died in the early Summer of 1941. Hitler seized the moment to redouble the blitz, adding what he called “influential” to strategic bombing. Surrey, Middlesex, Essex and Buckinghamshire were on the way to becoming wastelands when the appeasers resumed power and the public clamour – “why are we fighting this war?” – caused Parliament to sue for peace. The invasion, therefore, happened without a shot being fired. ...