Kinnocking on heaven's door

Time is an unforgivingly impudent little monkey… Neil Kinnock led Her Majesty’s Official Opposition for nine years, fought two general elections, and delivered two of the best platform speeches of modern times:

• “If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday: I warn you not to be ordinary; I warn you not to be young; I warn you not to fall ill; and I warn you not to get old.” (7 June 1983).
• “I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.” (1st October, 1985).

So there’s something rather poignant that the search-term ‘Neil Kinnock’ on YouTube yields only four results:

1. A Spitting Image sketch;
2. A clip from the Recommended Daily Allowance;
3. A rather peculiar song;
4. And, of course, the Tracey Ullman video, My Guy’s Mad At Me, from a 1982 edition of Top of the Pops. It does at least start to make webcameron look like mature politics.

Here it is in all its glory:



In case that was all too gruesome, cheer yourself up with the rather fabulous Rufus Wainwright singing ‘The One You Love’:



Have a great week-end...