You couldn't make it up

Despite being older than the Leader of the Opposition, I am prepared to concede that the boy Cameron may have some ability. Enough to make his lot a decent Opposition party, anyway. I'm not sure I would actually want them in government, but then, I don't particularly want the current lot either. I'm just undecided and vacillating and my views should not be taken seriously by any politician.

Besides, one can make over-confident assertions before all the facts are in. I have a newspaper cutting which I found behind the mirror of my wardrobe -- you really couldn't make this kind of thing up; can you imagine a plot device like that being taken seriously in a story? -- from, I think, the Daily Express of 1925. One of the stories, "Sir T. Beecham as Politician", tells how the previous night Sir Thomas Beecham had made a speech at Queen's Hall. He was angry about the Locarno Pact (which is how I know this was 1925, possibly early 1926) and also about Mr Stanley Baldwin's appointment in 1924 of a new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Baldwin came to power, he said, with "a considerable wealth of youthful talent, enthusiastic talent burning to work." He goes on: "Whom did he take? The despised and rejected of another political party ... [Ben tantalisingly cuts the name of the individual] ... I regarded his appointment as one of the tragic circumstances of English politics."

Sadly, he was right in that the gent in question was a rubbish Chancellor ... but I believe he enjoyed some success in the next job up the greasy pole a few years later. And the name of the gent was, of course, Mr Winston S. Churchill.