Shared Opinion | 21 March 2009

Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a weapon. ‘You can’t go into the lobby because you’re not in the lobby,’ they’ll say, smugly, before telling you that they spend half their life in the lobby with the lobby, but not lobbying, because only lobbyists lobby. God knows what any of it means. I suppose they’re usually pissed.

But anyway. Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. Odd. Chronologically, I mean. It seemed to me, as somebody not in the lobby, who wouldn’t know how to do a proper lobby even if he had the right kind of racket, that there was something quite mysterious there.