House Points: 10 years of House Points

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Triumphal 10 years

The first House Points appeared in this newspaper on 23 April 1999. By my calculations, that means I have been writing this column for more than 10 years. To emphasise how long ago it was, the first one dealt with a nasty incident in which Sir Edward Heath almost sat on Robert Maclennan. Since then Ted Heath has gone to a better place and Bob has gone to another place.

Having a day job in Leicester means I have not been to Westminster as I often as I would have liked, but I cherish my memories of seeing departed big beasts there. As well as Ted Heath, there is Tony Benn, Alan Clark and Ken Livingstone. The Reverend Ian Paisley appears to be immortal.

My chief Liberal Democrat memory is of Charles Kennedy’s courage during the debates on Labour’s Iraq war. Don’t forget that much of the poison spat at him came from the Tory benches.

In all these years, there have been disappointingly few letters of complaint. So I cherish the gentleman from Sutton who wrote of me: “Surely he is not Lib Dem – he seems to be a fairly extreme libertarian more at home in the Conservative Party or perhaps New Labour.”

Bob Russell got upset when I invented the Essex MP joke. “Why do Essex MPs support VAT? Because they can spell it.” That sort of thing.

The following week he thundered:

Had Jonathan Calder made reference to people because of their colour, religion, sexual orientation or disability in what he presumably thought were "jokes” in his House Points column in issue 799 there would have been outrage from Liberal Democrats.

Oddly, Bob was silent this year when David Taylor joked about ways of encouraging the people of Essex to become more involved in the 2012 Olympics. The Labour MP for North-West Leicestershire suggested including putting the medallion and throwing the white high heels in the programme.

Come on, Bob. Essex girls look to you to defend their honour.

The best tribute from any reader of Liberal Democrat News came from a respondent to a readers´survey who referred to me as “that man who tries to be funny”. It is a title I am happy to accept.