Monday
It was unsurprising, to wake up to the news of a thumping election victory for Vladimir Putin, but there were people who did take the risk of voting the wrong way; some incredible footage showed one woman crawling like a marine into a polling booth, to avoid being identified. The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta also alleges widespread vote falsification in Putin’s favour. Why would a citizen take a risk like that, to vote for someone who doesn’t have a hope? Why would the world’s richest kleptocrat rig a vote he’s going to win anyway? There’s something in the futility of both acts that makes a post-Putin future seem, at the very least, thinkable.
Tuesday
The kids had been coughing for at least 100 days, or maybe years, when an email came round from the school about whooping cough. There doesn’t seem to be a lot you can do about it. It’s like nits, they just like you to know it’s going round. Or have I got that right? Maybe there is something you can do about nits, and I was the problem all along. Never mind, that was a problem for the 2010s.
I did, however, call the GP about the coughing. I may have used a few trigger words, like “paroxysmal” and “been going on literally for ever”, with my 16-year-old in the background, shouting “don’t listen to her, it’s not for ever, it’s maximum nine days”. The doctor said it was fine as long as they were vaccinated, which they definitely were, pretty well everyone was then – born in a time when the only people who didn’t vaccinate were maybe a handful of Daily Mail readers, and conspiracy theories were about 9/11 and the moon.
My son backed out of the front door, saying “will you please not start a whooping cough pandemic panic with your big, stupid words”, with some swearing sprinkled in between, which I elected not to hear. “I can’t help it,” I told him. “I like to be in the middle of things.”
I always have this experience, when everything I read about GPs is replaced by the lived experience of speaking to one: how come he is so amazing? Is he magic? Anyway, he called back a couple of hours later, having inexplicably had time to do some reading: the vaccine, which occurred 10 years ago, wanes after 10 years. Huh. We agreed to keep a watching brief and see if they started whooping. He called back again, having spoken to the microbiologists at the local hospital trust. Seriously, is he magic? Turns out ours isn’t the first school to have reported cases. Turns out they hate it when things happen in Lambeth, because as chance would have it, we were also the ground zero borough for Covid. Also, probably nits, if I had anything to do with it. Turns out both the kids have to go for an emergency swab test, except their dad will have to take them, because I have A Thing. There’s a little bit more swearing, now, from many more quarters. I can’t help it. I like to be in the middle of things.
Wednesday
It was the launch of Family Politics, a new novel by John O’Farrell, his sixth in the 30-plus years I’ve known him, but this isn’t some flex about the membership of the media elite and all the cool elitists you meet in it. We met in the Fairfield ward of the Battersea Labour party, in the late 80s. I was 15 and had only just joined; maybe he’d just joined too, but nobody started conversations like that. “Hey, cool that you’ve joined Labour, did you just decide?” Instead, you just had to quickly agree about nuclear disarmament, and say something mean about Michael Heseltine. Making friends in the Labour party used to remind me of that John Hegley poem: “I saw you in the park / I wanted to be your friend/ I tunnelled my snout / up your non-barking end.” Simpler times.
Leftist politics in the late 80s are mainly remembered as the time just before shit got real; Kinnock trying to rid the Labour party of militants, but not yet ready to professionalise, by which I think is meant, “tell everyone to shave their beards off and stop wearing sandals”. At the grassroots, it was just way more fun, more like – no offence – a cross between a Momentum meeting and am dram than a CLP meeting today. Goddam it, if we could only strike the right balance between going on protests and making up songs about the degradation of the local bus service, well, that would obviously be curtains for Margaret Thatcher. Sure, pollsters, things might look rosy for her, but how could that possibly persist when she was so obviously, unremittingly horrible?
The songs were never funny. Then O’Farrell showed up, and did legitimate humour, where previously was only harmonised goodwill and a little bit of rhyming, if the stars aligned. The sudden injection of actual jokes was confusing, like being in a community choir for tone-deaf people and then Judy Garland turns up. This was local politics. It was not-funny by definition. What next? Would someone turn up at the fundraiser bake sale with a cake that was edible?
On he went, being funny in long form (Things Can Only Get Better) about the Blair landslide, which was objectively not funny; then being funny about the catastrophically unamusing coalition years (Things Can Only Get Worse?). Family Politics is about the nightmare scenario that you do everything a parent could do, and your kid still grows up a Conservative. What kind of sick freak would be able to make a joke out of that, let alone so many?
Thursday
The latest government figures on households below average income were horrendous and enraging. 4.3 million children, the highest number ever, are in relative poverty. 3.6 million children are in absolute poverty, a 300,000 increase on last year. Nearly a million kids are living in a household reliant on food banks, and 2022-23 saw a staggering 68% rise in households with very low food security.
The child poverty targets were abandoned by the Conservatives immediately they took office, in 2015. That phrase “when someone shows you who they are, believe them” suggests itself, but I’m not sure the problem was ever that we didn’t believe them. The thing we swallowed, as a population, was the idea that there was ever a more pressing moral imperative than that children weren’t hungry. Plenty of us didn’t believe austerity would work on its own terms, and plenty disputed the justice of the poorest bearing the brunt of every cut, but the overall terms of the debate shifted themselves to accommodate the idea that there were economic considerations more important than “have the kids eaten?”
People arguing for a universal basic income sometimes describe poverty as a form of incarceration, which goes some way towards expressing the totality of it, and the injustice. It’s amazing now to read those child poverty targets, which were signed into law by cross-party consensus and intended to be met by 2020. Fewer than 5% in absolute poverty; fewer than a tenth in relative poverty; there was a measure against persistent poverty, with a target of under 7% in relative poverty for three out of the last four years. All that’s for the birds, with the aspiration having been abandoned four prime ministers ago, but we don’t need a sudden influx of cash to get back to a place where a vision for not-hungry children is the overwhelming priority. We just need to remember how screamingly obvious that was, not all that long ago.
Friday
Every four or six months, I meet a bunch of un-likeminded people to mark some event of politics and discuss probable next developments. Some of us agree on the fundamentals and some of us don’t agree about anything, and some of us hold multiple conflicting opinions, but not as a badge of intellectual sophistication, more because we can’t remember what we said last time, and it is absolutely awesome, given just how many predictions are made, how none of them are ever right. It was never starker than in the Brexit years, when we met a bit more often, always hoping to mark some deal having been done, and the whole nightmare being over. Fair play, there was no guessing how sour that was going to turn. 2019 through 2022, a lot of people thought the Boris Johnson ascendancy was unassailable, would last at least a decade, and would change politics for ever. I knew the decade bit was wrong, but I didn’t realise the degradation of the discourse would be permanent, or at least feel that way. Yet again, everyone was wrong, in the end.
Anyway, it’s rolled around again today, and I just remembered the occasion we were supposed to be marking; this is the last possible day to call the general election, if it was going to happen on 2 May, which it definitely, positively would.
