interview with a pleasant dinosaur

Runciman x Moore x Thatcher.

Ed Miliband is hoping that it’s 1977 all over again and he can be the one who surfs to power on a sea-change he has initiated in the battle of ideas. He is also, presumably, drawing comfort from the fact that before 1979 no one saw her as prime ministerial material. Cameron and Osborne are hoping it’s 1981 and they can be the ones who hold their nerve at just the point when the economists and intellectuals are all bleating that the austerity experiment has failed and it’s time to try something else. These comparisons are futile: 2013 is a whole new ball game. They also ignore the role that sheer stamina played in her story. Do any of the current lot have that? (Depressingly, I suspect that if any of them does, it’s Osborne.)

I’m not sure about this. Here’s another option: Alternative 1983, without the SDP and the Falklands something-will-turn-up turning up, and perhaps with UKIP playing split the vote on the other side. This would explain why Miliband’s top priority seems to be Labour Party unity and shadow cabinet discipline. Keep buggering on, as someone said.

Meanwhile, here’s a sarcastic piece on the UK’s pro-European campaigns. Which reminded me that when I was a pro-European student doing a degree course designed to make a eurocrat of me, our Eurosoc asked Britain in Europe, then in full tripartisan flight, to send us a speaker.

They sent Sir Anthony Meyer. Obviously it was interesting to shake hands with the stalking horse himself, the man who sacked Thatcher, but it wasn’t the most obviously compelling pick. It got stranger when he explained that his pro-European convictions originated from the influence of Lionel Curtis, who he explained had been one of Lord Milner’s Young Men in the British occupation administration of South Africa immediately after the Boer War and like Milner was convinced of the necessity of federal union with the United States, or at least Germany.

Now I was also taking some British Empire history classes, so this actually meant something to me, but it was still an encounter with a dinosaur.