Life

Mary Kelly: Corbyn's porridge, royal reporting remembered and why Bette Midler is ditching Facebook

I’m delighted to be following in the giant footsteps of my uncle, the late, great James Kelly in writing a column for the Irish News. He started in 1927 and was still producing his lively prose for this paper until his 100th birthday. Er. I’ll be here until Lynette Fay comes back.

Everyone can relax, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a secret weapon for defeating Boris Johnson in the upcoming election – porridge
Everyone can relax, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a secret weapon for defeating Boris Johnson in the upcoming election – porridge Everyone can relax, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a secret weapon for defeating Boris Johnson in the upcoming election – porridge

BEFORE you cry "nepotism", let me just point out that family connections didn’t help with my first attempt to join this august journal way back in the 1970s. Fresh off a journalism course I applied for a vacancy and when I heard nothing I called to the front office to ask gently why I hadn’t been invited for an interview, only to be told: "We’re not taking on any more girls at the moment. The last wee lassie we had was terrible."

I got into print eventually and after a decade or so as a newspaper reporter I joined the BBC where I went on to produce a weekly political programme called Hearts and Minds for 15 years. I started at what now seems to have been a golden age just ahead of the political breakthrough that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Politically it's been steadily downhill ever since.

Now Stormont is mothballed and we’re looking at a pre-Christmas election which pollsters say will be the most unpredictable in living memory. But we needn’t fear the prospect of a Tory victory. The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has revealed he has a secret weapon to help him beat Boris Johnson. Porridge.

Yes, just when you thought things couldn’t get any more surreal than Boris Johnson occupying Downing St and Emma Little Pengelly describing the DUP as a party of compassion, Jezza has told aides he is going to eat more oats to give him strength to campaign for a Labour win. Hopefully it’ll work like Popeye’s spinach.

:: SO, I can’t be the only anti-monarchist to be eagerly looking forward to the next series of The Crown on Netflix. I have a conflicted relationship with royalty, largely forged by growing up in a household where my da used to growl "parasites" every time one of them appeared on TV whereas my mum – just a year younger than the Queen – would remark on how well she looked in her latest Norman Hartnell creation.

Back in the day it was harder to avoid the outward displays of royal flummery. Television programmes ended each night with the British national anthem and HM on horseback inspecting her troops. And in cinemas you had to be quick off the mark to get out of your seat before God Save the Queen rang out in the aisles and you risked getting a thump for not standing to attention. There must have been a whole generation of Catholics in Northern Ireland who never knew the directors of any movie because they fled before the final credits.

My own antipathy grew when I started having to cover royal visits here for a local newspaper (not this one). These trips to reassure the natives were usually treated with the sort of fawning rarely seen outside North Korea and invariably it was considered a job for the girls. How I hated having to ask the crowds waving Union flags how long they’d been waiting, what did the royal visitor say to them etc and crucially, what were they wearing.

The final straw came for me with the visit of Princess Michael of Kent to Hillsborough sometime in the mid 1980s. Austrian born, she was known by the tabloid press as Princess Pushy and largely occupied the position in the popularity charts now filled by Meghan Markle.

Prior to her arrival, the papers had got hold of embarrassing info about her family's history. So, in the middle of the usual reportage about about ecstatic crowds and excited schoolchildren waving flags, I wrote: "The Princess looked calm and relaxed despite recent revelations that her father was a Nazi."

It was the last royal visit I ever covered.

:: I’VE a lot of sympathy for Bette Midler who was so disgusted at Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress she planned to get rid of her Facebook account.

"Apparently it’s only for old people anyway," she said. "So is there anyone out there who knows how to delete Facebook? And my oven clock is wrong too."

:: IF ANYONE doubts the validity of the Back to 60 campaign for fairness over women’s pension rights, they should consider the latest findings by the Office for National Statistics that over a working lifetime, women earn £260,000 less than men with therefore a much lower pension pot. #waspi.