Reality Check

Today’s big event? Packs of peppers are half price at Asda!

Uh? What? But there’s still an email row!

So what? Riddle me this: how many shoppers, on average, pass through Crewe Asda on a weekday? Now, how many of this non-trivial number of people give a flying foxtrot about Damian McBride, Tom Watson (allegedly), or any of the rest of this particular dramatis personae? Then, how many of them are watching their pennies and up for a bargain? The latter number might be significantly larger. So they might just prefer their politicians to be concentrating their efforts in that direction.

It might also be that your average voter is rapidly getting turned off the whole sordid business. Does anyone outside the Westminster village or that particular corner of the blogosphere care whether Gordon Brown expresses regret or says sorry? Worse, we all know that, even if he did say sorry, there would be a queue of Tory MPs ready to shout him down and say something along the lines of “that’s not good enough – we want bigger and better sorry and he’s also got to jump through all these hoops that we just thought up”.

The “hoops” would include the sacking of anyone linked to the emails that have been trailed in the Screws this weekend. So who was copied in? You don’t know? Never mind, make it up. A game of between two and two hundred players, no need to score a six to start, hours of harmless fun. Harmless because the number of folk not switching off and going over to Asda to do the shopping rapidly diminishes. Those left may then blame the BBC, the Guardian, and any other convenient media target, while failing to realise that some folk in this world have a life.

Anyway, back to the peppers. Thai chicken curry tomorrow evening, made of course with coconut milk, and with Thai sticky rice on the side. There’s more to life than politics. Hint.

[No, I’m still not mentioning Derek Draper. So there]