holidays

Gordon Brown is off on holiday, sensibly showing how in touch with the common man he is by remaining in Britain instead of swanning off to stay at some sun-drenched luxury villa owned by Silvio Burlosconi or Cliff Richard or one of the Bee Gees like Tony Blair used to. Unfortunately this only serves to remind everyone that they are now too poor to be able to holiday overseas and are having to put up with Margate or Bognor Regis. What Gordon doesn't understand is that people in this country want their leaders to be aspirational – even if all they aspire to is to live like a king at someone else's expense.

I discussed this today over lunch with my old friend Ted, a stalwart of the Labour Party in the great days of the seventies when he wouldn't have been seen dead having lunch anywhere other than a greasy spoon which served tea in mugs – this being how one displayed one's connection with the common man in the old days. Luckily, a few years as a New Labour Peer has done wonders for his taste. Incidentally, I once asked him about the irony of an old socialist like him being an unelected member of parliament but he stoutly defended his position, arguing that by replacing the hereditary peerage with a system of patronage for sale the Labour Party had successfully dragged the House of Lords out of the middle ages and into the eighteenth century – an excellent example of modernization! He takes the same position towards outsourcing and PFI. Selling off the right to run prisons and so on worked perfectly well when Walpole was Prime Minister, he says, so why not now? Besides, if you don't let the private sector run things then you have to let ministers do it, and most of them couldn't run a bath. You can't argue with reasoning like that, can you?

I took the opportunity to ask him who he thought would be the next leader of the Labour Party; Milliband, Harman, Johnson or Straw? Once I had reminded him who each of them is, he offered the opinion that it didn't matter who it was so long as the Labour Party won. “After all,” he said, “Labour is the party of the poor and there are a lot more of them about now!”