A Christmas message to New Labour: give up preaching class hatred

Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. It now includes Scotch announcers on the BBC and radio reporters who use what I call Elementary School Sing-song when reading their (often ungrammatical) dispatches. All footballers and their managers (and mistresses) and football fans. Men who shave their heads; Welshmen (not Welshwomen, far from it); TV producers, and especially their assistants who ring me up and ask me to appear on their beastly programmes and call me ‘Paul’; all New Labour MPs and life peers and, a fortiori, Social Democrats — David Owen, who knew, rightly called them ‘Labour with syphilis’; gossip columnists, whatever paper they work for; newspaper photographers, who waste my time and then connive with picture editors to show close-ups of me looking blind, toothless and senile; writers of Gobble Columns — not cookery writers and especially not Tamasin Day-Lewis, who is not only a brilliant stylist but a cuisinière of extraordinary skill — you should taste her caramel orange ice cream! I dislike Yags and Chromos, Lugs, Voidies and Snagereens; pushy people who are always grabbing the headlines, like Nigella Lawson, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and the Bishop of Oxford), Michael Winner, Richard Branson and Philip Green; anyone connected with the Turner and Booker Prizes, and so dedicated to the destruction of art and literature; nearly all intellectuals, and especially anti-American ones, who curse the United States, all its inhabitants and everything it stands for in one breath while puffing their way across the Atlantic with the next to collect their royalties from the generous Joe Public.