“Phew ! I haven't felt that good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978 !”
- Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton (Ewan McGregor) in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting.
“Maybe it’s just an age thing, but the death of Bob Willis has left me – and, I am sure, a whole generation of cricket lovers – feeling more than usually bereft. Since when has the passing of a sportsperson triggered quite such an outpouring of genuine emotion ? But only now are we seeing quite what an extraordinary figure he was..
“He was a huge, gangling figure with arms like windmills and an awkward ungainly action once described as being like a first world war biplane taking off into a headwind. He bowled very fast and usually seemed to be starting his run-up from beyond the boundary. God knows what it was like to face him: pretty scary, I imagine.”
- Roger Alton, ‘Why Bob Willis means so much’, The Spectator, 14 December 2019.
“Eurosceptic MP Mark Francois compared the collapse of Labour’s “red wall” of northern seats to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The BBC’s Andrew Neil asked if he was hallucinating..
“Meanwhile, in the seat of the shadow chancellor John McDonnell, there was a fist-fight — presumably training for the coming Labour leadership election. Emily Thornberry, re-elected MP for South Islington and Finsbury, gave a speech that sounded like a pitch for the top job. Maybe a third consecutive leader from north London is just what the party needs.”
- Henry Mance, ‘Collapse comes suddenly as Corbynistas’ credit runs dry’, The Financial Times, 14 December 2019.
“God, I love this country. There we were on Thursday afternoon with a sick dread roiling around our stomachs. The worst butterflies since exam results. Clutching at straws – or straw polls anyway. Unable to sleep peacefully until all was well on Friday morning (it’s going to be alright, isn’t it?) Pictures on the news of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband made you nostalgic for a time when a Labour victory might mean you’d be a bit sad not downright terrified..
“We believed in Boris, never doubted he was the one leader who could get us through this. But, so successfully had we been gaslighted into thinking a hung Parliament was likely by liberal-left presenters on the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News, that our faith wobbled. And, in the words of the Christmas story, we were sore afraid.
“This is the luckiest Friday the 13th ever. Those of us who were up to see that glorious, incredible exit poll will never forget the sheer elation of it. Just look at the map of the UK today. A few islets of red in a vast, beautiful sea of blue. The sheer force of the people’s will, like a great tide, swept away the Corbynistas who threatened our way of life, our tolerance, our decency, our everything.
“I hope the Chief Rabbi is pleased. The soul of our nation is intact.”
- Allison Pearson, ‘Boris’ win proves the soul of our country is intact – I am so proud of what our country has done’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 December 2019.
Congratulations, Boris. Now that three years of a referendum, two general elections, countless court cases and a virtue-signalling procession of pointless, endless bickering are finally behind us, we can – with luck – go back to business as usual. For us, that means that our opportunity set has suddenly expanded, in the form of the UK stock market. We had begun to nibble at value investments from the FTSE 350 before the General Election, but now we can really go to town.
