I made a mistake yesterday. I took a black cab from St James’s Street to Tower Bridge. I thought it would take thirty minutes but it took an hour and twenty minutes.
My companion got increasingly frustrated with our doddery driver and said it was costing more than a black cab to Heathrow – £43.60 (no tip, natch) – no, but it would definitely cover a cab ride to RAF Northolt. Most users of this aerodrome do not arrive in taxis, including the Foreign Secretary, Mary Elizabeth Truss – “call me Liz”; maybe “call me Prime Minister” in September.
In the long cab ride my friend talked critically about the Conservative Party rules for electing a new leader. (I have a vote and she doesn’t.) If I may digress, Robert was about to join the party but realised he wouldn’t get a vote for three months. I thought, erroneously, he wanted to vote for his local lass, Penny, and now I don’t know who he would vote for. Perhaps I should let him use my vote? The Tory tombola is far from perfect but it is better than a presidential system. I happen to think that Conservative MPs are a better judge of their peers than the whole electorate or even the 200,000 or so Conservative members.
Liz ticks a lot of Tory boxes. She is ambitious, an adulteress and able to re-set her sails when the wind changes, so a true blue Tory. On the other hand, she has zero spontaneity and seems to talk from a playlist of rehearsed answers, sounding like an old ham treading the boards in rep in Nottingham. She’s just not good enough, which seamlessly leads me on to why we were in that taxi. We were en route to Bridge Theatre to see The Southbury Child.
“Alex Jennings makes his Bridge Theatre debut in this fierce new black comedy from Stephen Beresford, directed by Nicolas Hutner. An exploration of faith, tradition, family, and tolerance, Jennings is David Highland, an unconventional drunk Vicar with a rakish charm, leading his remote parish through a combination of charm and perseverance.
But when he makes a faith-based decision to tell a bereaved parishioner that they can’t have Disney themed ballons at a family funeral, the dominoes in his life begin to fall, beginning with his marriage and spreading quickly to his community, leaving him an outcast, questioning his faith and at the mercy of society’s savagery and rituals that dominate our lives.
Enjoy watching Jennings unravel in this sharply comic exploration of faith and its place in today’s world.”
It’s a good show but, as so often with new plays, it may not become a standard, even in rep in Nottingham. Lunch before the matinee was severely curtailed by turning up an hour late for our table. On the other hand I was awake most of the time in the theatre.
Seeking enlightenment why William Hague had changed the rules to include party members in the choice of leader I came across this anecdote re his first public appearance:
“Writing in his diary at the time Kenneth Rose noted that Peter Carrington told him that “he and several other frontbench Tories were nauseated by the much-heralded speech of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy called William Hague. Peter said to Norman St John Stevas: ‘If he is as priggish and self-assured as that at sixteen, what will he be like in thirty years’ time? Norman replied: ‘Like Michael Heseltine'”.”
Thank you – priceless!