Forgive the grammar of the title. I'm referencing the Obama slogan, and "Change in which I no longer believe" wouldn't resonate with it so much. Would that this were the only conundrum for the Tory supporter this morning.
Look, I'm no starry-eyed optimist, I probably have the lowest expectations possible of a Tory government. I'm not expecting white doves of peace to spontaneously circle Westminster on the arrival of DC at no.10, nor gazelles to leap from their wooded shade to nuzzle the laughing faces of happy children, nor, even, for much of the hideous legislation of the last 12 years to be unwound. I don't even expect the relationship with Europe to be sorted. When people get worked up about political issues, I don't. Not because I don't care. Just because I try to keep my expectations somewhere on the achievable part of the Want-Get axis.
About the limits of what I thought possible: (1) some sort of sanity to be returned to public expenditure; (2) no more hate-crime legislation or the associated illiberal changes to the criminal justice system; (3) that we would be governed by people I could respect. Of the three, it was the latter which I thought most certain.
Well, and not this morning.
There's a bloke I talk to most mornings at Liverpool Street, before I buy my coffee and my ticket and continue the 90 minute home-work commute which MPs apparently find impossible (unless it's a commute to their holiday home). He's a rough sleeper, and I'm not a good person; often, through a mixture of embarrassment and inadequacy, I avoid people who might ask me for money, but this man once made me a flower, from wire, which sits on my desk. He fashioned it with his hands and blessed me for the few pounds I gave him and wished me a good and happy day. So now we talk most mornings and I buy him a coffee and he tells me whether he's had a good night or a bad night and of course most often it's a bad night, and I doubt he knows, but while I give him such a small amount of money, he is giving me something much more valuable, he's letting me look at myself in the mirror without blanching, and I never talk with him without realising how lucky I am.
This morning, after a bus journey spent reading about another set of 'flippers', MPs who build property portfolios using our money, after reading about these people who spend our money, who decide how much of our income to cream off for their schemes, their vital schemes, their great missions to end poverty (all of which have failed ever to help this man), this morning my friend said to me I was so cold last night, I thought summer had started, but last night was so cold, and I thought, you're bloody right. Summer hasn't begun. Winter hasn't ended. The news of the Tory expense claims makes me doubt it ever will.
