Away from home (pt.2)

+Landing back in Blighty at Gatwick Airport one is treated on the way to passport control to a stand full of free newspapers, not Metro but the likes of the New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, China Daily, Financial Times, Jewish Chronicle and magazines such as The Tatler. What a choice, but there’s only so much one can carry. I picked up a few, since these days I barely ever read newspapers in print, least of all China Daily, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Horror! But actually, that’s not so different to saying that the FT or the Telegraph is owned by the British Capitalist Party. They are, in effect. Anyway one thing they’re all agreed on is that Trump is a disaster, even if such a frank appraisal is delivered in rather more emollient terms. Trump is putting a lot of noses out of joint and the markets (it is said) hate uncertainty. Actually, I think they thrive on it. It’s only going to be a question of who the losers will be. And Trump, as we all know, loves losers, i.e. those whose pockets he can filch.
 
Reading the Jewish Chronicle is a different experience. I gleaned an impression from it that its mission in life is to stoke fears of anti-Semitism rather than dampen them. If after reading it and I were a Jew I might be afraid to step outside my front door. Still, the fear exists and given centuries of persecution it is reasonable for some fear to exist. But the JC indulges itself with columnists like that most hilarious comedienne in British life today, Maureen Lipman. She’s got it in for the BBC and thinks that Jeremy Bowen should be cancelled, not least because he keeps reminding us that journalists are denied access to Gaza by the Israeli government.  She says ’. . . in breach of yet another guideline—[he] fails to mention that Hamas keeps brutal control of reporting from Gaza and inflates casualty figures.’ What might be the solution for that, Maureen? Are you too dim to see it? The JC, including Lipman has some praise for the BBC’s handling of the war, but one misstep, in this case the Beeb’s shortlived broadcast of Gaza sympathetic feature How To Survive a War Zone upends all of that. As usual it’s a case of shoot the messenger and ignore the message, although to her very limited credit Lipman does mention one thing that was actually in the hated film, which was a reference to a family wedding. What propaganda! How dare these people have any hope for the future?!
 
Another familiar name crops up in a JC news report, regarding the demand of Starmer lackey and parachute MP, arch-Zionist Luke Akehurst to revive Tory legislation (which fell at the election) to ban public bodies from supporting BDS. Local councils he believes have a patriotic duty to fall into line with the government of the day’s foreign policy. Of course, ‘Akehurst’ written backwards and upside-down spells ‘arsehole’ and by this arsehole’s reckoning one can only assume that no local councils back in the 70s and 80s should have supported the anti-apartheid movement, named streets and squares after Mandela or for that matter declared themselves nuclear free zones. We’ll see how this one goes, but with today’s Labour Party the concept of shame seems rather outmoded.
 
After all this, what better antidote than to turn to the glossy pages of The Tatler? A fond farewell sort of an article gets to grips with the horrendous suggestion that some beloved hereditary peers of the realm (92 of them) will soon be kicked out of the old club. It seems like the big difference between the House of Lords and, e.g. Boodles or Whites is that the former gives you £362 a day for being there whereas the latter ones charge. Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy (aka Lord Strathclyde) talking of the previous Blair-era cull said ‘there is no doubt in my mind that some people died as a result of it and were horrified by what had happened to them and their family.’ I wonder how many of these families made their historic brass from pit villages (or slaves for that matter). But these great upholders of British traditions will not be short of places to go, as revealed in the pages devoted to the ‘Country House Awards.’ Congratulations should surely go to Hugo Rittson-Thomas, whose well manicured and no doubt sublimely rolled lawns at Walcot House won the Best Croquet Lawn prize (what’s that called I wonder—the Prescott Cup?). Chin chin!
  
+I may have used this quotation before, to illustrate vulture capitalism at work. This week the inevitable cuts and closures have begun:

‘Morrisons has racked up £1.5 billion of losses, a year after being bought by US private equity firm CD&R. The  grocer was acquired by CD&R in October 2021 for £7 billion, in a debt-fuelled deal led by former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy. The deal saw £6.1 billion of debt piled onto Morrisons’ balance sheet, resulting in large interest payments and high exposure to increases in borrowing rates.’ (Retail Gazette 23rd March 2023)