Christmas is coming, and with it the panto season: Jack and his beanstalk, Dick Whittington and his cat, and Cinderella with her entourage of ugly sisters and fairy godmother are coming to a theatre near you. Of these tales of hardship overcome by magical means, Cinderella is perhaps the one that touches us most, for many of us have occasionally felt the toxic compound of rejection, envy and humiliation that comes on learning that our friends are attending an event to which we have not been invited.
As children, we learn the hard lesson that fairy godmothers don’t exist, tantrums don’t result in invitations, and the best remedy for social disappointment is to keep our inner Violet Elizabeth Bott tightly battened down beneath a façade of dignity and good grace.
Which brings us to the current Cabinet Office minister, Sir Gavin Williamson CBE. Sir Gavin, a back-bench MP at the time of the Queen’s death, was peeved not to be invited to the State Funeral, and expressed his disappointment in texts to the then chief whip, Wendy Morton. A queasy mixture of profanity, menace (“don’t puss [sic] me about”) and self-pity (“I am currently with my poorly dog at the vets”), the texts are now the subject of a formal complaint by Morton.
Even in the current coarse political culture, their tone is startling: when did it become a thing for a minister of state to curse like a boorish tech bro? And did it not occur to him that the event about which he complained with such threatening vulgarity was not some kind of Privy Counsellors’ knees-up, but a religious service – the solemn obsequies for a monarch who only a few months previously had been pleased to approve his knighthood?
Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect that a royal tap on the shoulder with a sword should bestow, along with a title, a sense of chivalric courtesy. At any rate, it didn’t for Sir Gavin: less “verray parfit gentil knyght”, more the Violet Elizabeth Bott of the Privy Council.
A royal maverick
The eulogies for the late Queen dwelt on her steadfast sense of duty and stoic readiness to subordinate her personal feelings to the role she embodied. So it is cheering to note that there were some upsides to being Queen: specifically, the power to invite Tom Cruise for tea.
Given her marriage to Prince Philip, it is not surprising that the Queen should have had a fondness for dashing men of action, proving a natural in her 2012 Olympic skit with Daniel Craig as James Bond.
And there is something rather glorious about the idea that in the last summer of her life, having missed meeting Cruise at her Platinum Jubilee pageant because of her mobility problems, the Queen felt able to indulge the royal prerogative to the extent of summoning Top Gun to Windsor for a brew and a fondant fancy.
Pluck and draw
The price of fast food is rocketing: up from 99p to £1.19 for a McDonald’s cheeseburger. Time to consider slow food – of which, hanging in the garage, I have the ultimate example: a brace of pheasant and another of partridge. All I have to do is pluck and draw them.
The waste of shot game birds is a problematic issue. But given the choice between a McDonald’s cheeseburger and the dozen or so free meals to which my birds will eventually contribute, burying my hand in pheasant entrails is a small price to pay.
It’s simply not becoming for a knight to be boorish and rude
Sir Gavin's texts were a queasy mixture of profanity, menace and self-pity. Whatever happened to chivalric courtesy?