37. A - Z

Caroline was very excited the other day because 8 out of the 14 women Labour MPs who had stood for election to the shadow cabinet have been elected.  This meant that 57% of those that stood had got in. Galvanised by this fact, she has rejoined the Labour Party.

“Don’t pay your subscription out of our joint account,” I warned her.

“Too late, already done it,” she grinned, “and so now you’re almost a member too.”

“But I don’t want to be,” I said.  And I don’t.

I was once, forty years ago, but I’ve gone off them since.  All this talk about the “democratic process” gets on my nerves.  It was this “democratic process” that ended up with them electing the wrong leader last week.  

Where is the democracy in a process that allows trade union members, the majority of whom are not even members of the Labour Party, to overturn the wishes of Labour MPs and paid up party members?  

In the Labour Party today, democracy too often seems to be accompanied by threats, coercion and bullying.

More interestingly to me, was not the number of women elected but the surnames of the successful candidates.  All 19 elected to the Shadow Cabinet had surnames beginning with the letters A – M.

I’ve maintained for years that there is a conspiracy against those of us in the second half of the alphabet.  I’m a ‘W’ and I suffer particularly badly.  I’m always the last in any queue and I was always the last to be seen at interviews when the panel were tired, bored and irritable.

This fact, the fact I’m going to astound you with now, reinforces the anomaly in the Shadow Cabinet election:

Only 5 of the 57 MPs who stood for election to the Shadow Cabinet were in the N – Z half. Just 9%!

If this pattern is reflected throughout all 258 of the Labour MPs there is something seriously odd going on.  Nationally, the surname split is roughly 60% to 40% A – M, N - Z.

It also goes to show just how unpopular Diane Abbott is among fellow MPs.  Despite being a woman and having a surname that comes first in every alphabetical list except for one with “Jimmy Aardvark” in it, she failed to be elected to the shadow cabinet.

Maybe this clear, obvious and certainly non-democratic process begins right at the start of the selection process.  If I could be bothered, I would find out and try to do something about it - but I can’t so I won’t.

I knew it!  I’m not paranoid after all.  There really has been a conspiracy against me for all these years.  This explains a number of other things too.  
As I told you on May 9th, in “A rose by any other name”, Caroline didn’t change her name when we married.  She came up with some socio-feminist garbage at the time to explain why but I don’t remember what it was as I wasn’t really listening.

Now the truth is out.  She still has a career to think about.  Why would she jeopardise everything by changing her name from Caroline D to Caroline W?  Many things she is but stupid, she ain’t.

Of course, having a surname that starts with a top letter isn’t always a good thing.  When I was at school I was taught biology by Mr Basterd.  We all realised that this was an unusual surname but I never, in the 8 years that I was at that school, heard any student say anything at all about it. We always referred to him as, “Charlie”. 

Maybe that says something about teenagers in Suffolk in the sixties. Actually, I’m sure that it does because there was a boy in my class called Vincent Drury and I cannot remember any comment ever being made when we all had to initial some list or other.

I was told that Charlie Basterd’s father changed his will and left everything to him because, unlike his brothers, he had not altered his name.  Actually, that’s not entirely true because someone told me that he was christened "Cecil.”

My father, who was a colleague of Charlie, told me that when he proposed to Betty Hogg, his line was, “Hogg?  That’s a nasty name. Why don’t we change it?”

I’ve always wished that my surname were “Armitage”.  I remember reading “The Children of the New Forest” when I was about eight and thinking that “Armitage”, the forester’s surname, was really nice.

One of my relatives has done a lot of research into the Wilton name and it appears that my lot were all Egertons until some 250 years ago when one of them did something really awful and changed his name to Wilton to mitigate the resulting scandal.

If my surname were Egerton, I may not have been called Terry.  I think that Eddie Egerton has a good ring to it.  I wonder if my life would have been any different had I been called Eddie Egerton.  I hope not.

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In case you’re wondering whether lion poo works and I know you are, it does!  Since Caroline (I decided that it was a job for a woman) scattered some around our garden, we have had no more fox droppings.