I have a soft spot for Lisa Nandy – the Labour MP for Wigan. I think one of my sisters or maybe it was me sat on the lap of her grandfather Lord Byers once upon a time. In what is termed show business for ugly people, Ms Nandy scrubs up fairly well. Above all, she is, by the, admittedly low, standards of her party a voice of sanity and reason. However, I am afraid that her weekend utterances might in today’s Orwellian world be described as misspeaking, you and I might call it lying.
Ms Nandy was interviewed about the bonkers lockdown policies of the Government and how they were being applied to the grim North. Her view was that the anger among the population here in the grim North was greater than she could remember since the 1980s.
I am not in doubt that there were folks in this part of the world, the Grim North being on the other side of the river from our hovel here in Wales, who were indeed angry in the 1980s, particularly the early 1980s in the run up to the miner’s strike of 1984-5.
However, Ms Nandy was born on August 9 1979, just over three months after the blessed Margaret Thatcher swept to power. It just strikes me as somehow unlikely that folks in cloth caps would wander up, whippet in hand, to the doorstep of the very middle class household of the Nandy family, seeking out a six year old girl so that they could download their rage and anger at the antics of the wicked Tories. I may be wrong here but Ms Nandy’s cheap rhetoric rings as untrue to me.