Read Online Seventy-Two Virgins by Boris Johnson - Free Book Online
Authors: Boris Johnson
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stood up and said, ‘Mr Barlow, do you agree with me that there is far too much gratuitous and offensive sex on TV? And will you’ — the man’s hands were shaking as he read out his question — take steps to ensure that Ofcom protects children from the current tide of filth?’ Barlow had given an intelligent answer, about the difficulties of censorship, and the watershed, and that kind of thing, and then thrown it all away with some flip aside.
‘Of course, I tend to rely on my children to tell me what it’s safe to watch, ha ha ha . .
Cameron felt her stomach contract with irritation. Didn’t he understand that these guys cared about this question? He was their servant, paid with their tax dollars, to represent their views in Parliament.
A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.
At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.
In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.
Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.
By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.
She coped with all that, and she endured his jelly-like answers about censorship and abortion; so she was thrilled when he seemed to take some sort of stand on gay marriage.
His answer was indistinct, no doubt deliberately so, but she heard him say something to the effect that gay marriage was ‘a bit rum when you consider that marriage is normally thought of as taking place between a man and a woman’. Whoopee!
At once it was as though she had chanced upon a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views. He was actually AGAINST something, she thought, almost hugging herself with excitement. He was against a cause espoused by people who might actually VOTE for him. And then, of course, came the disappointment.
She was charged with drafting an answer to a letter from a constituent, who sought the joys of matrimony with his same-sex ‘partner’. She wrote a rather fierce letter, if not exactly consigning the man, an IT consultant, to the licking tongues of hellfire, then at least making it pretty clear what she, or Roger Barlow, whose name and superscription appeared on the letter, thought of the whole project. To her amazement he had crossed it out and written, ‘Good on yer, matey, go right ahead. Frankly I don’t see why the state should object to a union between three men and a dog. Yours sincerely.’
‘But excuse me,’ she said, and her lips grew tight and her eyes larger and more beautiful than ever, ‘I thought you were against it. That’s what you said in the church.’
‘Oh did I?’ said Roger. His own eyes were merry and dark. ‘No, I think what I said, in the interests of total accuracy, was that it was a bit rum, and to say something is a bit rum is a
‘Of course, I tend to rely on my children to tell me what it’s safe to watch, ha ha ha . .
Cameron felt her stomach contract with irritation. Didn’t he understand that these guys cared about this question? He was their servant, paid with their tax dollars, to represent their views in Parliament.
A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.
At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.
In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.
Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.
By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.
She coped with all that, and she endured his jelly-like answers about censorship and abortion; so she was thrilled when he seemed to take some sort of stand on gay marriage.
His answer was indistinct, no doubt deliberately so, but she heard him say something to the effect that gay marriage was ‘a bit rum when you consider that marriage is normally thought of as taking place between a man and a woman’. Whoopee!
At once it was as though she had chanced upon a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views. He was actually AGAINST something, she thought, almost hugging herself with excitement. He was against a cause espoused by people who might actually VOTE for him. And then, of course, came the disappointment.
She was charged with drafting an answer to a letter from a constituent, who sought the joys of matrimony with his same-sex ‘partner’. She wrote a rather fierce letter, if not exactly consigning the man, an IT consultant, to the licking tongues of hellfire, then at least making it pretty clear what she, or Roger Barlow, whose name and superscription appeared on the letter, thought of the whole project. To her amazement he had crossed it out and written, ‘Good on yer, matey, go right ahead. Frankly I don’t see why the state should object to a union between three men and a dog. Yours sincerely.’
‘But excuse me,’ she said, and her lips grew tight and her eyes larger and more beautiful than ever, ‘I thought you were against it. That’s what you said in the church.’
‘Oh did I?’ said Roger. His own eyes were merry and dark. ‘No, I think what I said, in the interests of total accuracy, was that it was a bit rum, and to say something is a bit rum is a
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