Saturday, September 14, 2019

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "My message to everyone who sits on the sofa and shoots at the television"

It's not just Tim Farron and pews Lord Bonkers goes on about: he is always telling us the reasons for his remarkable longevity.

There have always been readers who worry about his age, but it has never troubled me. What does trouble me these days is my own age.

I still find it natural to refer to Wallace Lawler, Nesta Wyn Ellis and the Great Torrington by-election in these diaries, but how many Liberator subscribers or Liberal England readers have heard of them?

Tuesday

I am, as my more attentive readers will have realised, more than 75 years in age. I put my longevity down to my annual excursion to bathe in the Spring of Eternal Life that bursts from the hillside above the former home of the Association of Liberal Councillors in Hebden Bridge – that and the cordial sold to me, at rather a stiff price, by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

Where was I? Oh yes. Being of mature years I am entitled to a free television licence, which is a bit of a nonsense when you consider that I own a Landed Estate, oil wells on Rutland Water and Europe’s second-largest Stilton mine.

However, I have to say that I get very poor value from that licence, because (like any red-blooded  Englishman) I keep a loaded shotgun by my chair and let fly at the screen whenever one of an increasingly long list of politicians or a member of the Dimbleby family appears. The result, of course, is that the set rarely works.

It was with this in mind that I ghosted the following passage in an article by Jo Swinson: “And my message to everyone who sits on the sofa and shoots at the television when watching Johnson’s blustering bravado is clear: politics is not a spectator sport.”

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

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