Peter Rhodes on fake accents, delayed justice and finding the buck on your desk
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says “smashing the criminal gangs” will end illegal migration across the Channel. We will presumably know when the gangs have been smashed because the flood of small boats will cease.
When will that be? Before or after anyone is prosecuted over Grenfell Tower? Before or after anyone is jailed for sewage pollution? Before or after we get all the answers about the 1974 Birmingham Pub Bombings? Under successive governments this country has become a world leader on kicking things into the long grass.
Don't expect things to change. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner's dithering interview on Today (Radio 4) was just what you'd expect from someone who has spent all their life in opposition where politics is based on slagging off those in power rather than coming up with any practical solutions. Suddenly, the buck stops on your own desk and people are looking to you for action. Scary, isn't it?
Would-be US president Kamala Harris stands accused of feigning an accent in a campaign speech in order to impress blue-collar workers. There's no denying she sounds a few steps down the social ladder as she urges folk to “thank a union member” for everything from decent wages to paid holidays. But then, own up, don't we all try to speak to fit in?
In the summer holidays of my youth, I worked on the building sites in the grand company of Irish navvies. At the start of the holidays I spoke as you'd expect a grammar-school boy from Leamington Spa to speak. Come September, sure and begorrah. I was fluent Kerry.
My mother was horrified and yet she herself possessed several accents including the posh one for answering the phone. She'd left Yorkshire in the 1950s but within hours of revisiting Oop Home, as she called it, Mum would slip into the broadest of Dales-talk with lots of yonders, sithees and reet gradelies, and bizarre allusions to the weaving industry (“Tony Blair? He's nobbut a thrupenny bobbin”) which puzzled even her own aunts who had spent their lives down t'mill.
Truth is, Kamala is not the only faker. We all have our phoney stand-by accents. Top of the mornin', y'all.
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