sawyl | Old school political satire (Reply)

I apologise for this in advance, but the current political nonsense has put me in mind of W.S. Gilbert:

I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

The song, When I was a Lad, was intended to poke fun at one W.H. Smith — yes one of those W.H. Smiths — who, despite knowing nothing about matters naval, had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Thank God such a thing could never happen today...

Which in combination with this, from Geoffrey Wheatcroft's excellent piece in today's Guardian, serves as a reminder that there is nothing new about political stupidity:

One evening about 150 years ago, a busy House of Commons was listening patiently to Sir Robert Inglis, a High Tory and bitter foe of Catholic and Jewish emancipation, or anything with a taint of liberalism, although he happened on this occasion to be complaining about an injustice. A prisoner had been denied visits, known in the legal phrase as "right of egress and ingress". Or, as Inglis unhappily put it, "Things have come to pretty pass when an Englishman may not have his wife backwards and forwards."

We know this scene from a famous pen. "The shout of laughter in the house was electrical," Benjamin Disraeli recorded. "Sir Robert Peel, who was naturally a hearty laughter, lost his habitual self-control and leant down his head in convulsions."

I'd no idea that Victorian prisons were quite so liberal as to allow the "right of egress and ingress" for one's spouse. How deeply shocking!