People have complained forever that he hasn’t a word to throw to a dog but the bright side of the road is shadowed now.
Noel Gallagher you wouldn’t mind since even his brother doesn’t, but Van the Man definitively morphing into Van the A**e is woeful timing.
For the sake of our health and headspace, we’ll tour the horizon before coming back to him. This feels like wartime slog now, duration unknown. Much of the tension as in traditional war, the kind with guns and bombs, contrarily tightened up with the easing of lockdown. Lifting it was always likely to be harder to organise, harder than asking people first time around to isolate themselves. Trying to ignore what smells like panic among what used to be called ‘the authorities’ is now a major challenge for ‘ordinary people’.
At Stormont the biggest interest is Sinn Féin’s finest helping police with their inquiries. Leaders stumble and fall out among themselves while behind them rivals sharpen elbows. Coy Jim O’Callaghan, brother of Miriam and Margaret, is too predictable to be intriguing, Eamon Ó Cuív having at poor Micheál Martin is a creaky business. Nothing about the ordeals of the taoiseach or this coalition is remotely funny or educational, any more than studying who’s in and out around Downing Street.
So thank the stars for Sasha Swire, energetic diary-writer, snob of snobs, and surely now ex-friend of Dave, Sam Cam, Boy George, and the lesser, poorer, not so cool Goves. Though it’s all a laugh, says Sasha, especially the sex. Well, what do we know who live beyond storied manors in Devon, the chocolate boxes of the Cotswolds, Notting Hill. As Sasha’s tales fan out to the plebs, some of the players may be a little pink around the ears. A heartless chuckle in the midst of bleakness, is anyone too pure for that? As long as the cast is spoiled and entitled and supposedly running a country, indeed several countries, romping along at the top of the leading British political party on gallons of wine with spirit chasers.
When the diaries got their first mentions something about her husband’s name rang a tiny bell. And sure enough, Hillsborough apparently gets a couple of walk-ons, more or less as talking wallpaper. Sir Hugo Swire or ‘H’ (lots of see-through nicknames and initials) was briefly a Northern Ireland Office nonentity.
But most settings are clearly over there with the merest mention of ‘Old Ma May’. It’s Dave Time and Boris Time. ‘H’ is disappointed at a No. 10 dinner that First Lady Carrie Symonds has cleared off to Greece.
He’d refused to wear his blood pressure monitor, his fond wife notes, because ‘he thought he might get to sit next to her which would send his reading off the Richter scale.’ Sasha gets ‘the best placement’ beside Boris. ‘We have a good laugh.’ She does not stoop to flattery; ‘thick, creased neck, pale sweaty face...’ He may be eyeing her as ‘sha**able : he’d probably do the same if a sheep walked in the room.’
Delicate readers may flinch, but it beats dwelling on what public health specialist Dr Gabriel Scally calls the ‘grumpy old man syndrome’ of Sir Van. We were warned. The Covid message-songs are paused and sequenced for maximum effect. The first tantrum about social distancing was coordinated with Baron Lloyd Webber, longtime Tory. You don’t have to see the British honour system as a relic of empire to wonder if it inflates egos.
Genius is often dislikeable. It’s still sad that the man who wrote ‘Oh the smell of the bakery from across the street/Got in my nose’ and ‘I heard Leadbelly and Blind Lemon on the street where I was born’ is now in the same basket as Sammy Wilson. But when he hears that Sammy’s praising him...? Van might see the light before this piece does.
