Monday
Well, that was one hell of a send-off. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend and Shane MacGowan’s funeral surely set the benchmark for all of us. A procession through Dublin with spontaneous singing and applause followed by a service-cum-carnival in a packed church in Tipperary. It felt like it was almost worth dying just to get the party started. Almost. It almost made me feel that I needed to revisit my own plans and up my game. A couple of years ago, I wrote here that I would like the Webb Sisters to sing Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will and for Ermonela Jaho or Lisette Oropesa to sing Richard Strauss’s Morgen!. A little less rowdy than MacGowan’s Fairytale of New York but still not a dry eye.
I realise now that I need to give more thought to who should do the readings and be on the guest list. I noticed MacGowan had the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, in the front row. So surely it can’t be too much to expect a member of the royal family to come along to mine. I doubt Harry would be too obliging after my digested reads of Spare and the Omid Scobie book, but Prince William should be begging for an invite. It’s not as if he’s that busy. And he wouldn’t have to do anything. Other than sit at the front, wiping away the tears. For one of the readings, I’m definitely going to insist on Keir Starmer. After the queen died, Starmer proved himself to be an excellent professional mourner and gave an exceptional tribute in the Commons. More of that please. I’d also quite like Bono not to turn up. He’s terribly needy and comes to almost everything these days – he was at MacGowan’s funeral making a nuisance of himself – so might get in the way. But if he did come, I wouldn’t turn him away. I’d like my bash to be inclusive. But the person, I absolutely must have is Nick Cave. You couldn’t take your eyes off him at MacGowan’s. I wouldn’t expect him to sing or anything – though he could if he really wanted to – but he was born to go to funerals. The immaculate suit, the jet black hair, the haunted yet vulnerable expression. If his music career stalls, there’s another one waiting as an undertaker.
Tuesday
The second module of the Covid inquiry – core decision making in the UK and political governance – concluded with Boris Johnson giving evidence last week and Rishi Sunak this week. There must be something weird going on with the inquiry building in Paddington, because it seems to have induced near total amnesia in both witnesses. It’s also erased the WhatsApp messages from both their phones. How unlucky can you get. The then prime minister and chancellor had the only two phones in the entire country whose WhatsApps weren’t automatically backed up. Both men looked devastated as they were sure the messages would have shown they always acted with perfect judgment. Johnson remembered almost nothing about his time in office – at least not in the way that previous witnesses had remembered events – but did express great remorse. Primarily for having written on a document “fuck the Daily Mail”. He couldn’t have been more sorry about that as he is now receiving an estimated £1m for a barely readable column from … the Daily Mail. Awks. Sunak meanwhile was so disorientated that he couldn’t actually remember being chancellor and was unsure if the inquiry was even real. Though he had perfect recall that the scientists were right behind his “Eat out to wipe out” scheme and it was the scientists’ memory at fault for suggesting otherwise. Who to believe?
One of the interesting things in recent weeks has been the way so many commentators from the rightwing media, led by William Hague, had been queueing up to rubbish the inquiry ahead of the appearances by Johnson and Sunak. Almost as if they were worried about what might be revealed. They appeared to have forgotten that the inquiry – and its remit – was established by Johnson himself and that it had been a Tory government in power during the pandemic. For the rest of us, the inquiry is doing an invaluable job. Reminding us that we were right at the time when we thought the government didn’t know what it was doing.
Wednesday
It was like 2018 all over again in the Commons on Tuesday night. Those halcyon Brexit days when the Tory party was hell-bent on tearing itself and the country apart. Back then it was the European Research Group, a desperate crew of rightwing MPs who never actually did any research, who repeatedly blocked Theresa May’s hard Brexit deal on the grounds that it wasn’t hard enough. Now we have five different splinter collectives of far-right Tory MPs: the ERG (again; they are like the cockroach after a nuclear holocaust), the Northern Research Group, the Conservative Growth Group, the New Conservatives and the hilariously named Common Sense Group. They all oppose Sunak’s Rwanda policy. Not because it is both mad, unworkable, attempts to rewrite reality and is in breach of international treaties and obligations to which we are signatories. But because it is not deranged enough. They don’t just want parliament to pass a law saying Rwanda is a safe country even though the supreme court says it isn’t; they want this law to go unchallenged by refugees in every court on the entire planet. Intergalactic jurisdiction of the UK government. Obviously, these five groups attract the finest minds of the Tory party. Visionaries like Robert Jenrick. Charmers like Nick Fletcher who told the Commons that Doncaster was full. That no one in the local hospital spoke English. There were just too many foreigners turning it into a no-go ghetto. He also said if this continued he would have to leave. Cue loud cheers from the opposition benches. The bill passed its second reading, as it was always going to do. The trouble will start when all those who either abstained or voted in favour flex their muscles and press for amendments at the third reading. So it’s merely trouble deferred. All to get at most 200 refugees to Rwanda. What a hill for Sunak to die on.
Thursday
The Parisians are planning on naming a new Métro station after the poet, singer and over-indulged bad boy, Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1991. But not altogether surprisingly, not everyone is happy that someone they see as a serial misogynist and promoter of incest should be honoured in this way and have started a petition to get the transport authorities to have a rethink. So far no decision has been made, though Gainsbourg’s daughter, Charlotte, can’t see what all the fuss is about. What’s a bit of everyday sexism between consenting French adults? And people do get so worked up about incest. But it does raise some interesting moral questions. Where would you draw the line on place names? Calling a city after one of the world’s leading mass murderers was too much for the Russians, who in 1961 renamed Stalingrad as Volgograd. Likewise, after the fall of communist rule, Leningrad went back to being St Petersburg. And any number of cities in the UK are taking down statues and renaming public buildings with connections to the slave trade.
When the planners named Trump Street in central London, they can’t have imagined that one day property prices would be depressed once it was blighted by the orange sociopath. Still, as far as I can tell there is no Farage Street or Farage Road anywhere in the UK. Let’s keep it that way. We must have some standards to maintain.
Friday
It’s not often that my job as this paper’s political sketch writer gets truly personal. Obviously I care about what the government is doing to the country – unless satire has a moral purpose it just becomes an exercise in entertaining nihilism – but I don’t feel I am any more the target of the Tories’ cruelty than anyone else. In that sense, we’re all in it together. Just collateral damage for a burnt-out party desperate to hang on to power at all costs. But on one issue I am right in the line of fire. A couple of weeks ago, the government announced it was planning to change the rules on immigration. British nationals who are married to foreigners will now be expected to earn more than £38,000 to bring their partner into this country. This excludes 75% of the working population. Including my daughter, Anna, who five years ago married an American, Robert, and went to live with him in Minneapolis. Where they are both working and are very happy. But if ever they wanted to come back to live in the UK, they would have a problem. Because Anna’s work – she is a theatre director – is freelance. Play by play. So she would probably struggle to prove that she had £38k of work lined up for the next year as few of her job contracts are fixed that far in advance. And if she had children and wanted to take time off to look after them for a few years, she could forget that as well. All because she fell in love with an American and this country now doesn’t trust foreigners. Sunak has presumably forgotten that not all families are made up of billionaires. It would be nice to think Labour would put a stop to this. But on Laura Kuenssberg’s show last Sunday, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, Liz Kendall, suggested she was happy with it. These must be the new UK family values. Keeping everyone apart.
• John Crace’s book Depraved New World (Guardian Faber, £16.99) is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 18 December 2023. An earlier version said that, “after the fall of communism”, Stalingrad had reverted to its “original name of Volgograd”. In fact, Volgograd was a new name for the city, which had originally been called Tsaritsyn, and the change was made during the communist era, under President Khrushchev in 1961.
