Tory Conference

What Ho Proles

I’m up here in Blackpool at the Tory conference, though I have to confess that things are not going well. I thought I should grab this chance to write to you in case I don’t get another. As I speak, My Man is fighting a rearguard battle to keep the hoards of proles from breaking down my boarding room door. Excuse my typing. I’m writing what might be might despatch from the living side of the great divide.

I don’t honestly know how they spotted that I was an old-style Tory. The day had gone so swimmingly and I would never have expected these new Tories to turn so mean quite so quickly. But that’s the problem with proles when they take the blue rosette. They don’t know their own minds. One minute they’re necking the traditional alcohol and the next they’re taking offence at the merely suggestion that they don’t wash, are poorly educated, and have neither the breeding nor wits to be true Tories. Oh yes, I might have also hinted that they occasionally have sexual relations with members of their immediate family.

But don’t blame me. I say that Dilly Cameron has brought all this on himself. I’m all for modernisation, but it must be the right modernisation. Like the way I’ve allowed my estate managers to modernise the fences around my land by running a bit of electricity through them. That’s modernisation that’s both practical and traditional. Telling people that we’re all equal in the Tory party was a sure recipe for disaster. And who came up with this idea of the poor improving their lot? Who’s lot do you think they’re going to improve it with? My lot. That’s what.

There goes My Man again. His screams are frightening even when heard from the safety of a wardrobe.

In a minute, I’m going to see if I can climb down the drainpipe and get to the Bentley. We parked it a street away in case this sort of thing happened. I know I should never have come north, the moment I caught the scent of fish and chips outside the Watford Gap service station.

For the moment, I remain,