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Like an arthritic, mangy old bear arising from its winter slumbers, the traditional wing of the Conservative Party stretches, yawns, scratches its wide backside, wipes the sleep from its blurred eyes and, in the same automatic way that a normal entity would reach for the kettle, starts coughing clichés.

“Foreigners!” and “scroungers!” and “Europe!” start spewing from sleep-rimed mouths; shortly, the beast will be fully awake and verbs will start being bandied about in no particular order; then, the running around, headless-chicken style, will commence.

There is no sight more profoundly hilarious in British politics than a Conservative Party scenting defeat. It is so addicted to its potent, heady, power brew of self-interest and prejudice that the very thought of losing its grip provokes a sort of muscle-memory jerk back to the most comfortable of grounds, the far right homeland.

There they stand, blue rinses quivering erect, Norman Tebbit muttering his peevish, envy-filled  rallying calls through thin lips that never part, all of them, back to back, clutching icons of the Blessed Margaret, on guard against all the workshy scroungers and thieving foreigners who are going to reduce their property prices, all the lefty unionists who are going to ruin their Tory lives by being paid a decent wage (the sort of money they themselves have because lefties won it for them).

They go to that far right homeland because there, no facts can penetrate; their prejudices are serene, unchanging, unalterable. Facts are not welcome here.

For example, it is no good to say to these people that their own Department of Work and Pensions tells us that the largest element of social security expenditure (42 per cent) goes to pensioners. Housing benefit accounts for 20 per cent (and about one fifth of these claimants are in work); 15 per cent goes on children, through child benefit and child tax credit; 8 per cent on disability living allowance, which helps disabled people (both in and out of work) with extra costs; 4 per cent on employment and support allowance to those who cannot work due to sickness or disability; 4 per cent on income support, mainly for single parents, carers and some disabled people; 3 per cent on jobseeker’s allowance; and 2 per cent on carer’s allowance and maternity pay, leaving 3 per cent on other benefits.

It is no good to tell them that the latest Department for Work and Pensions estimates show that in 2011/12 just 0.7 per cent of benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, including a 2.8 per cent fraud rate for jobseeker’s allowance and a mere 0.3 per cent for incapacity benefits.

It is no good to tell them that their heroes, the rich, are the greatest beneficiaries of the welfare system they hate so much: without an educated workforce that is kept healthy, where would businessmen and women be? How would they make their millions?

No, in these circumstances those traditional Bufton Tuftons of the shires genuinely believe the sop they are being thrown, that workshy people are going to be prevented from scrounging by benefit cuts, is going to make a difference to their lives, this country, this economy, other than to hurt poor people.

The Tuftons believe that you make work pay not by paying people good wages for their work, but by the very tangential route of denying them and their helpless children help when they need it. It’s like saying you can only make your car go by beating it with a branch, Fawlty-style, rather than filling it with petrol. But the Tuftons do not care to think about this.

In these circumstances they genuinely do not care that Duncan Smith’s benefits cap will hurt the most vulnerable. Which families claim most? Large families with lots of children. They will now lose money. Who will be most affected? The children. Is any of this the fault of those children? No, of course not. Did they ask to be born? Do they deserve to be abandoned for the sake of a cliché? But do Tories care if children suffer? Take a wild guess.

It is no good: the traditional wing of the Tory Party is frightened. These are simple, selfish people and they are frightened that what they have, their things, their possessions, are in danger. They do not care about anybody else. They do not want to hear the truth. They are scared.

And so they will carry on – and those of us with an eye to the long run must hope they do, for what these blue-rinsed dullards forget is that since 1992, every time they have dragged their reluctant party to the right a repelled electorate has rejected them and their peevish selfishness utterly.

Fingers crossed, then, for the continued rise of UKIP.

None of you is to point out to anybody any of the truths mentioned today. Do not, under any circumstances, point out that the Neanderthal wing of the Tory Party is running scared because these UKIP fruitcakes and loonies gathered only about 25% of only about 33% of the electorate in only the shire counties, traditionally the most right-wing part of the UK electorate.

Let’s let the truth be our little secret. It is our best weapon.

Me and my window

What are friends for? In times of difficulty, friends rally round, and when news reached us all that Brother Hamster was having great difficulty with his erection, a large team sped to the scene.

It was with some relief that the emergency party found the problem was a polytunnel. The good Brother had decided his life was incomplete without a polytunnel, and therefore many of us were needed to make his life complete. A polytunnel is not a job to tackle alone.

A scurrilous rumour does the rounds in Cornish parts, promulgated by the Brother Who Must Not Be Named, that I do nothing all day but stare through a window.

Brother Hamster and Brother Bertie had taken this to heart, and in their concern for my welfare, provided, at the scene of the erection-to-be, a small desk table containing a laptop at which they urged me to sit while they held a window in front of me. It was just like being at home. Here’s the evidence, supplied by Brother Doney:

 

And may your god go with you

What a beautiful film about a beautiful man was the recently screened documentary about the comedian Dave Allen. I adored him, his witty observational style, his dryness, his iconoclastic style. When I read years ago, in a newspaper questionnaire-style interview about loves and hates, that the thing he hated most in life was Margaret Thatcher, I knew he’d always be a hero.