Conservative leadership contest should make contenders prove capabilities – Zella Compton

It’s already started with a number of MPs declaring their position in the running order.

But beware the platitudes which we’re about to sit through.

I laughed out loud the other morning listening to Matt Hancock happily declare his position on Brexit: ‘I will deliver it.’

Great, so that solves everything with that one sentence.

No plan, no proposal, no allowance of all the incredible mess which Theresa May has been wading through, trying to get to an outcome without being hijacked by her own party sides, her bought support or the opposition.

The thing is about Theresa, as much as I didn’t agree with her policy of destruction as Home Secretary or the significant swathes of her Tory policy, and as much as I was aggravated by her constant inability to sloganise yet dogged determination to carry-on, I did believe that she genuinely thought she was acting for the good of the country. 

Can we say that about the rest of the contenders?

Matt Hancock’s already lost my vote – not that we have one as the country gets another unelected-by-the-electorate prime minister. He’s lost my support for being glib and having a trotting-on-by attitude to Brexit. 

Then we’ve got Boris who is so entirely self-centred around his own agenda.

He wrote two columns: one remain and one leave prior to the referendum, hedging his bets before working out which stance would suit his objectives best.

And that’s after all the lies he’s laughed away over the years – even though he’s been fired for his untruths.

The rest of them will be stating their positions to anyone who’ll listen. 

Let’s hope that among them we can find a prime minister who is devolved from personal power vanity, who isn’t held ransom by party politicking and who is genuinely searching for what it best for the country.

Maybe it’s time for Lord Buckethead?

I’d be so terrified if I found a badger in my kitchen . . .!

You might have read in the paper last week that a badger has regularly been breaking into a house in Gosport and pilfering the contents of the kitchen cupboards and the freezer.

Yikes. I’ve had foxes in the house before, but the thought of a badger is pretty scary as they’re pretty scary.

I know of multiple people who’ve been chased by badgers, and even one who claims he was ‘jumped’ by one on a cycle path. Personally I think that’s a slight exaggeration and it probably ran out after his bike as, and please correct me if I’m wrong, badgers aren’t known for their leaping credentials. It is exciting to see one though, and hear the ominous clipping of their nails on concrete.

Check your facts once and then check them again…

Imagine how truly gutting it must be for Naomi Wolf who was on a BBC radio show with Matthew Sweet to publicise her new book – Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love – only to have some content taken down live on air for being incorrect.

Seemingly Naomi’s book talks about the death penalty being handed out to homosexuals and looks at the records from the Old Bailey in Victorian Britain and the term ‘death recorded’.

Except that didn’t mean death, and her book is about to come out filled with potential inaccuracies. What a hole in your research. I think there’s a lesson there for all of us about checking facts, and checking them again.