Monday
The Location, Location, Location presenter Kirstie Allsopp has some advice for young people wanting to buy their first home. Think twice about going to university and racking up student debt. Move back in with your parents for three years if you can. Stop going to the gym, watching Netflix, buying coffee from Starbucks and taking a couple of easyJet flights abroad each year. And be prepared to move to a cheaper part of the country if necessary. For someone who has made a living out of telling people how to get the best value for money out of their property, Allsopp’s maths is a little suspect. Assuming you are paying your parents no rent, you are probably saving yourself about £7,000 a year. Given that the average deposit, according to Halifax, is £59,000, you are going to have to stay with your parents for eight and a half years – assuming house prices don’t rise during that period. And if staying with your parents isn’t an option, it will take you 37 years to save for a deposit if you’re relying on cutting out coffee, the gym, streaming TV and overseas holidays. Nor does Allsopp seem to have thought through how moving to a cheaper part of the country might work if your job is in the south-east. Then there is the knock-on effect. If young people from London all move to the north to find affordable housing, where are those living in the north supposed to buy? There will always be someone who loses out. Though not Kirstie. She walked to work, went without a foreign holiday or two and soon had cash spare to buy her own house. That was in 1981, when the average house price was £51,000. And she was helped out by her parents.
Tuesday
The Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have been publishing extracts of Michael Ashcroft’s biography of Carrie Johnson. It’s been hard to keep track of her apparent crimes against humanity but they include using her husband’s phone to send messages rubbishing MPs she doesn’t like and getting Boris to change his mind about decisions he has made. Then there are the friends she insisted be given important jobs in Downing Street and the enemies she tried to have fired. However, Carrie’s greatest offence appears to be that she isn’t his second wife, Marina, who was considered a steadying influence and would put up with any old shit – up until the moment she decided she had had enough, of course. One colleague of Boris was quoted as saying: “He’s fallen out with his children, he’s lost Marina, and since he became prime minister so many of the problems he’s had have been because of Carrie … His potential to transform the country has been squandered. It’s like a toxic relationship. He’s isolated. It’s very sad.” To which any sane person would say: “What a load of sexist crap.” Boris isn’t some passive receptacle in all this. He is responsible for his own choices. Carrie can do or say what she likes but it’s Johnson who should have the final say on what goes on in government. If he can’t manage that, it’s not his wife’s fault. After all, it isn’t as if his back catalogue of malice, infidelities, incompetence and bad faith don’t predate his marriage to Carrie by many decades. The clues were all there and it’s just the country’s bad luck that the Tories chose to ignore them when they elected him as their leader.
Wednesday
RIP Bamber Gascoigne. The original and – for me at least – the best presenter of University Challenge. Call me chippy, but I still think I detect a pro-Oxbridge bias in Jeremy Paxman, something you never used to get with Gascoigne. I first started watching University Challenge back in the 60s with my dad and I’ve scarcely missed an episode since. My best years were when my children were in their teens and I could get them to sit in silence and score for me while I concentrated on the answers. I didn’t differentiate between starter and bonus questions: I just awarded myself one point for each answer I got right. And I had some handy cheats. Any maths ones I didn’t know, I just shouted out 0 or -1. While pre-impressionist French painters came up a lot and were invariably Delacroix or David. Now the kids have left home, I have to score myself, which wrecks my concentration. I did also once get invited on to the show to represent Exeter in a Christmas special edition about 10 years ago and I thought it would be a dream come true. Far from it. Not only did our team not have anyone who could answer the science questions, we were up against one man on the Glasgow team who was lightning-quick on the buzzer. Come the halfway mark we were losing by something like 100 points to 20 and I had humiliated myself by misspelling mozzarella. We then decided to change tactics and start pressing the buzzer even if we weren’t wholly certain of the answer; by the end we had managed to claw things back so we only lost by about 160 to 125. Hardly a triumph, though. Hubris, thy name is Crace.
Thursday
There may well be many benefits to the UK leaving the EU – Boris Johnson is curiously reluctant to implement one, the cutting of 5% VAT on domestic fuel bills, that would make an immediate difference to everyone – but the government appears loth to tell us what they are. During the Brexit referendum we were promised the country would be far better off, that we could carve out more advantageous trade deals and that deregulation would reduce bureaucracy and cut prices. Six years on, even the low-hanging Brexit fruits have remained tantalisingly out of reach. So much so that Johnson used his largely cosmetic reshuffle this week to demote Jacob Rees-Mogg to the newly created role of minister for Brexit opportunities. If you think Jakey has a plan and is about to spoil us with treats, then think again. For today Rees-Mogg has written an open letter in the Sun asking readers to tell him exactly what these Brexit opportunities are. Though some might think twice before replying, as Rees-Mogg compares himself to Lord Kitchener putting out the all-persons “Your Country Needs You” poster. You might remember that what the country needed men for in 1914 was to die in their hundreds of thousands in a bloodbath of futile gestures. Rees-Mogg also appears confused as the only example of a Brexit benefit he can cite is the Johnson lie that being outside the European Medicines Agency allowed the UK to be the first to implement a Covid vaccine programme. This is simply untrue. And presumably we are expected to look on the extra 215m customs declaration forms that HMRC predicts are heading our way each year as exciting Brexit red tape gains. In the meantime we can only hope the country hasn’t run out of ideas for a bright Brexit future. Even if the government has.
Friday
New research by a team from Cambridge University, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has found that people from around the world with the same personality types tend to like the same types of music. Neurotics, it seems, are universally fond of David Bowie. Something I am happy to confirm. Though I can’t say I’m also a big fan of punk and heavy metal, which also appeal to neurotics. My mosh pit days are well behind me. Not that they ever really started. Nowadays you’re more likely to find me at the opera or classical music gigs – which apparently makes me open and agreeable, according to the research. Not words my wife often associates with me. Then, I don’t listen to Journey and Coldplay, so there are clearly limits to my openness and agreeability. Still, I am open and agreeable enough to be enjoying the feeling of the world slowly returning to normal after two years living under the shadow of Covid. When I travel on public transport, go into work or go to the opera – I went to Theodora at the Royal Opera this week and it was sensational, get a ticket if you can – I no longer feel like I am taking my life into my hands. Though perhaps I have just – like the government – become demob happy, as Covid infections still remain stubbornly high. In his race to appease the libertarians in the Tory party and make the UK free from all restrictions, Boris Johnson does appear to have abandoned any pretence of following the science. It can’t be a good idea to do away with self-isolation requirements for people who have Covid when there are no plans to protect the immunosuppressed and other vulnerable groups. Perhaps we’d all be better off waiting until Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance are willing to endorse the government’s plan at a Downing Street press conference. Their absence from our screens perhaps tells its own story.
Digested week, digested: One Dick resigns. Just one more to go.
• This article was amended on 11 February 2022 because an earlier version referred to “the cutting of 20% VAT on domestic fuel bills”. That should have said 5%.
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