That was the Big Society that was.

Apparently it’s time for change. Change being something to do with going back to the good old days when we were ruled by the old Etonians and we all knew our place, and the upper classes were free to enjoy the spectacle of hound dogs ripping stags and foxes to pieces.

I expect it is something to do with the standard of education I received but I’ve been struggling to understand what our would be leader is on about when he talks about the Big Society.

"The What Society?" You may well ask, but I distinctly remember that as long ago as a week last Tuesday it was the Tories Big Idea.

Yet in the leaders debate an entire two days later Cameron never mentioned the concept. (Although he did share with us that he met a 40 year old black man in Plymouth who’d been in the navy for 30 years. ...since he was ten???) Cameron subsequently explained he didn’t mention his Big Society then due to the subjecty subjects that came up during that debate. Clearly they learn a different vocabulary to the rest of us at those posh fee paying schools.

I kind of gathered that this Big Society thingy involved parents having the right to set up and run their own schools, never mind that half of our local schools can’t even find sufficient volunteers to be school governors and attend a meeting once every six weeks, let alone to establish and run an entire school in their spare time. But now I find out – a whole eight days after the Tory manifesto launch that actually there is in fact ‘No such thing as the big society’* according to senior Conservatives including one who says:


"The 'big society' is bollocks. It is boiled vegetables that have been cooked for three minutes too long. It tastes of nothing. What is it?" Answers please on a back of a postcard to Tory Central Office.

So anyways up. Now that we have all apparently fallen for Nick Clegg and are going to vote for him on the basis that we now know who he is, Cameron has a new message to sell but again is not being entirely clear what the bloody hell he actually means. Today we have him declaring that :

"We Brits have an electoral system "that really works".... not one minute after hammering the "Vote Clegg, get Brown" drum again. As my namesake puts it so succinctly in today’s Guardian: How anyone with even pretensions to intellectual adequacy can continue to hold both positions is a mystery, but if 7 May finds a third-place-finishing Labour forming a government, one trusts Cameron will continue to sing the system's praises at every opportunity.

I would add that it is a mystery to me how someone with this level of intellectual inadequacy could be standing in a parish council election let alone standing to be Prime Minister. Although George W Bush did just come to mind.


* A variation on a previous quote by some other senior Tory whose name escapes me that 'There is no such thing as society'.