Saturday, June 05, 2021

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "I don’t suppose anyone there will thank me"

Alfred, who long ago wandered into these diaries from the pages of Toad of Toad Hall, saves the day.

Saturday

Just as we are despairing over our blocked canal, a saviour appears: it is Alfred, that excellent carthorse. "I’ve been in Oxfordshire,”" he reports. "'Why don’t you stand as a paper candidate?' they said? 'You won’t have to do any work,' they said. 'Just come over and sign your Consent to Nomination,' they said."” It transpires that the poor beast has been delivering Focus in the county’s Liberal Democrat target wards ever since.

I apprise him of our problem with the canal and after pushing his straw hat to the back of his head, he takes a stub of pencil from behind his ear and starts to make calculations in the margin of a back number of the High Leicestershire Radical

Finally, he says: "Hitch me up to the boat, take a turn round that tree and I’ll shift it myself." 

He is as good as his word and the assembled throng cheers him when he trudges off south-westwards back to Oxfordshire. “They want me to deliver thank you leaflets, but I don’t suppose anyone there will thank me.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

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