How lucky we are to be British, as I always say!.
We have a got ourself a shed load of new parliamentarians without any fuss at all: they didn't have to bother with all this campaigning malarkey and we didn't even have to get off our backsides and vote for them.
How lucky are we?
But, to be honest, they are a sorry lot. Well come on, you don't get much for nothing these days.
Of course several of the names have been trailed for sometime by the media. Among those, Darling (who appears to have got his for making a cock up of running the Better Together Campaign, so much so that they had to get Gordon Brown to rescue him at the 11th hour) is my favourite.
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| Eh Alistair???? |
I mean, Darling the firebrand socialist republican who ends up in ermine... what can you say?
And then there's Mone. Mone by name and moan by nature. The woman who was hounded out of Scotland by social media (because presumably you don't get Twitter in London!)
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| Is she living in the Tower of London? |
She becomes an aristocrat and gets a blue blood transfusion for...erm...well that's a hard one, but suffice to say that she's going to be working with Iain Duncan Smith (who has managed to kill off 4000 people within six weeks of them being found fit for work), so that should tell you all you need to know. She is to be some sort of entrepreneur coach... (no, me neither!).
Although I'm sure that she can show the neds and chavs how to trash a car, give a recalcitrant partner a dose of the trots, outsource to China, and all whilst getting a dodgy uneven tan.
Then there's the Noble Baron Ming the Merciless, presumably for his sense of irony. He and said today that he doesn't approve of the way the House of Lords is appointed, at the same time as he accepted a seat in it.
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| Thank Ming the Merciful Lord |
However, my favourite is someone whose name was not trailed, probably for obvious reasons.
Douglas Hogg (Hogg by name; hog by nature)...or to the likes of you and me, the Noble Viscount HailSHAM.
Readers of Munguin's Republic will recall him being mentioned here before.
He's a pathetically laughable little man, who is clearly absolutely determined to get his scrawny backside on a red bench no matter what it takes, and totally oblivious to the humiliation that trying over and over again and being rejected each time, would be caused in normal people.
Let's remind ourselves of his history. Hoggy the Hogg became the 3rd Viscount Hailsham upon the death of his father in 2001. His father had disclaimed the title for life in 1963, but young Douglas clearly wanted it badly. He was an MP at the time, but as this was after the Lords reforms of 1999, despite inheriting the title he did not inherit a seat and could stay on in the lower house.
He remained in the Commons until 2010 when he stood down having been ridiculed for his ridiculous expenses claims by the Tory Daily Telegraph. He had claimed for, amongst other items...
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Château Hogg; You should see it,
after all you seem to have paid for a lot of it |
- £2,000
moat cleaning;
- £18,000
for a gardener;
- £40
piano tuning;
- £200
annual Aga cooker maintenance;
- £4,500
for ‘machines and fuel’;
- £1,000 for
lawn mowing;
- £700
fees for a ‘mole man’;
- The
costs of running his housekeeper’s car;
- Thousands
in repairs, including for his stables; and
- £93
for tongs!!!
It is said that Cameron made a deal with him then. If he would decline to stand as an MP (and save the Conservatives the embarrassment of having to campaign for a trougher), he (Cameron) would put him (Hoggy) forward as a life peer. That would mean that as well as holding his hereditary Viscount title, he would be able to actually sit in the House of Lords as a Baron...or life peer. Well, I did say he was greedy!
Unfortunately for him the House of Lords' Appointment Commission, not unreasonably, found him an unsuitable person for elevation to the peerage.
Now that would have been embarrassment enough for most people, but not for our dear Hog!
Oh no.
As a Viscount he was entitled to stand for election to the Lords upon the death of a sitting peer. He did this early in 2013, and once again he was thwarted as his fellow noblemen also didn't think him suitable material and voted for someone else.
So, he had now been rejected twice...once by the Appointments people and once by his fellow peers. It seemed that no one wanted him in the Lords...
Most decent people would have gone and hidden under a stone.
But nope, not our little piggy. Within a few months another Lord had gone to the big trough in the sky and the good Viscount put his name forward again.
Desperation or what?
Once again his fellow peers rejected him as unsuitable and elected another peer.
But give Hoggy his due. He's a trier, and you know what they say about triers!
It probably helps that he's an Old Etonian and an Oxford man, but somehow he persuaded Cameron to put him forward again. And this time he's done it.
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| Hoggy the Hogg |
He's managed to get himself through the selection committee and on to the gravy train. Either they are getting slacker about suitability criteria or they are just fed up with his name coming up again and again.
So he's made it, and ermine shall be his (and £300 a day tax free to help pay for the moat and the cook's car).
What a pathetic little man he is.
Welcome to Britain, the country that goes around the world lecturing non royal heads of government of smaller states on democracy. Welcome to the laughing stock of the world.
