The Wintle Blog

“I say you fellows, all the more stickies for us now Wharton’s bagged the top job, eh?” The Fat Owl of the Remove rolled his eyes and rubbed his ample belly with a grubby paw. “What rot are you jawing now, Bunter?” yawned Bob Cherry, momentarily closing his tattered copy of Hillard and Botting’s Latin Primer. The boys of the Greyfriars Remove were enjoying the May sunshine under an oak tree by the old tower, some sprawled on the turf, some perched or sat cross-legged on the fallen pillars that were all that remained of the ancient Franciscan monastery which had given the school its name. “I mean, now Wharton’s been elected head of the National School Assembly, he’ll make sure his chums at the alma mater don’t go short in the jam tart and cake department,” said Bunter. “Sadly I think the tartlessness of the future will be terrific,” murmured Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur. “Neither can I be foreseeing many abundancies of cake.” “Eh?! Ow!!!” Sitting up suddenly, an alarme...

High up in Hampstead live the really rich characters, and that’s where you’ll see most Labour posters. The People’s Soviets of Parliament Hill, and Nassington and Tanza Roads (average house price, £2,000,000) are militant for Gordon. This is a phenomenon which could bear a bit of deconstruction, some time. As might the fact that The Guardian , journal of the left-leaning radical, is the newspaper of choice for lone diners in restaurants serving sushi, the national cuisine of the profoundly conservative Japanese. Anyway, drop down a few contours from Hampstead (as house prices also drop, by more than a half) to Parks Tufnell and Dartmouth, and the Lib Dems predominate. Descend still further, among the bedsits, scruffy flats and sub-prime territory surrounding Kentish Town and Camden, and you’ll see, it’s true, a meagre scattering of Labour red and yellow, but almost all the windows are blank. Conservative posters? I’ve spotted about three (one in Pang’s Kitchen, Kentish Town). But this ...

And so we move to the endgame for Gordon Brown. For a Tent in the French Camp, read a Public Hall in Birmingham. Here was an exhausted man, a prematurely agèd man, grey of face and with red-rimmed eyes, gasping for breath as he spoke, staring with hatred at the young pretender, Cameron, and the younger upstart Clegg, shaking his head and grinning at random his awful, loveless, lifeless grin. “Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish, fond old man, Fourscore and upwards; and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments...” Even were he to win, which now appears impossible, somehow he would still have lost. When one of your own cabinet ministers (the personable Alan Johnson) publicly describes you on the eve of the critical and defining debate as “a politician not of this age,” then surely you’re starting to hear th...

That confrontation between OAP and PM never happened. That’s the important point to grasp. “Happen” derives from an old English verb, “to hap” – “to come about by hap or chance,” where the noun “hap” means “chance or fortune (good or bad).” As in the old rhyme: Were it to hap that we should meet In some poor northern town, Arriving, I would grin and greet, Departing, curse and frown. So the meta-story was that Gordon Brown, touring Rochdale, happened upon 66-year-old Mrs Gillian Duffy, a pensioner and widow with whom he happened to have a happy and lively conversation, but in an unhappy sequel, when he thought he was unobserved in his car, he happened inexplicably to lose his temper and call her a “bigoted woman.” And the real story? Of course, the entire Rochdale excursion was confected for the media, up to and including the meeting with Mrs Duffy, who was propelled into the PM’s presence by his entourage, they having auditioned her on the street and established that she was a salt-o...

A crisis had struck the craft of media training, one which pierced to the very heart of its time-honoured methodologies, and that crisis had dramatically unveiled itself during the first of the UK Party Leaders’ Election Debates, declared the President of the Worshipful Guild of Media Trainers, the Worshipful Bro. A DJING-HACK, at an emergency meeting of the Guild, convened in the snug bar of the Lens & Pen Inn, London EC1. For many years the craft had rested its practice securely upon on coaching clients to observe the celebrated fourfold formula: “IMPACT-ANECDOTE-ARGUMENT-POINT”, memorably described by one of his [The President’s] late and illustrious predecessors as “the unturnable poignard of media engagement”. Sist. KNIB asked to be reminded what exactly a “poignard” was? The President explained that it was a kind of medieval dagger. Sist. KNIB asked why, then, he [the late President] did not simply say “dagger”? The President replied that he did not know Bro GRUB: “What about...