Ah what a week it’s been for country. The governing political party of the United Kingdom, the Conservatives, held its annual party conference earlier this week and, yeah, it didn’t go very well. Now, Society Diary was not in attendance at the conference, but you hardly needed to be. You could hear the funeral bells from London.
The nadir of the conference was, surely, Prime Minister Theresa May’s keynote speech. What was intended to be a brilliant re-affirmation of her right to lead both the Conservatives and the British public at large quickly collapsed into a farce. This column hasn’t seen a more torturous hour of television since the last Christmas special episode of The Office.
Everything is absolutely fine and dandy in the Tories though, at least according to former Civil Society Minister Rob Wilson, who’s taken to the digital pages of the Telegraph to assure everyone that, yes, May’s speech was a disaster but certainly not an unmitigated one. That remains, of course, to be seen with head agitator- (and buffoon) in-chief Boris Johnson hovering menacingly in the background of May’s premiership like Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven. Watch this space, and may God help us all if BoJo is really going to be the next PM.
Anyway, this week in charity sector satire: Michael Fabricant literally becomes a barrier for a guide dog, and Australia is swept by charity bin raiders.
Fabrican't you just move out of the way, Michael?
As discussed above, the Tory Party Conference in Manchester this week wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Between the supposedly red spectre of Jeremy Corbyn and his grass-roots army of Bolsheviks, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists and disaffected youths getting their hands on the on the sticky levers of power, and being completely riven by the ongoing national act of self-harm that is Brexit, the Tories seem a party on the brink of a collective breakdown.
Diary supposes this is what happens when, as a unit, a party manages to massively shoot itself in the foot by calling a totally unnecessary snap election, loses its majority, and literally can't agree about anything to do with Europe.
Still, while the halls of the convention centre were stuffed with nervous Tories – Tories, with their tweed blazers. Tories, with their polite, clipped tones and their dead, staring eyes – there was still the odd bit of humour to be found.
Enter Conservative Member of Parliament for Lichfield, and man most likely to play Charlie Mullins in the Channel 5 straight-to-TV-movie about the founding of Pimlico Plumbers, Michael Fabricant. Fabricant, the one with hair even more ‘magnificent’ than Boris Johnson.
It's MP Michael Fabricant being an obstacle for @guidedogs in the quite literal sense pic.twitter.com/Z6IzAL7THb
— Kirsty Weakley (@KirstyWeakley) October 3, 2017
That’s Michael Fabricant MP there, waving a white stick rather threateningly at a Guide Dogs trainer and his dog, standing in what Diary has on good authority was a small obstacle course highlighting the good work that the dogs can do in helping blind people navigate treacherous paths.
A few things from this. One: the trainer looks to be quite clearly ignoring Fabricant here, and two: Diary could be wrong about this, but it’s pretty sure that Fabricant has literally turned himself into an obstacle here for the dog to navigate.
Needless to say this is not the first, nor indeed the last, time a Conservative MP will be accused of getting in the way of a charity’s work. Yet even for the Tories, Fabricant’s made a dog’s dinner of this.
Raiders of the Lost morals
"'Professional bin raiders' stealing from the needy" and then, the first line: “THEY [the DT’s all caps, not Diary’s] are charity bin raiders with lost morals who have left a Bateau Bay woman “gobsmacked”.
The story here, essentially, is a woman was waiting for her partner to nip into a supermarket for a pint of milk and some industrial strength bug repellent (probably), when she saw some people diving into some charity clothes donation bins. That’s the whole story.
Still, never let the complete lack of a story get in the way of a good story. Props too to the woman in question – one Kate Waygood – for her evocative turn of phrase.
“I was absolutely gobsmacked, they looked like miners,” she said. “My partner had gone in to Woolworths [an Australian supermarket, much like Sainsbury’s, and nothing like, um, Woolworths] about 8.30pm and I was just sitting in the car facing the charity bins.
“I’ve heard of people rummaging through before but they had head torches and a step ladder. They looked like 'miners'."
Whether or not these particular raiders struck gold isn’t mentioned, but Waygood did take an incredibly unhelpful and genuinely terribly grainy photo of the, Diary guesses, bin mining (is that the phrase?) on her phone, which the Telegraph has run.
Waygood and the Telegraph also seem to imply that this bin mining (sticking with it) is actually a pretty lucrative gig to get into. Three people turned up in “nice looking” cars and at least one of these sub-human scumbags even owned their own step ladder! Fancy.
She also said that, as a result of this bin mining activity, prices at the charity shop have “skyrocketed”. Not sure what evidence she’s used to draw that conclusion.
Anyway, if this pointless story from down under teaches you nothing else, Diary reckons a few charity shops should adopt the phrase: ‘If you’d give it to your mate, then it’s good enough to donate”. You've got to admit, it's pretty catchy.
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