I HEARD IT ON THE GRAPEVINE: Leader of the House, and Member of Parliament for the Regency Period, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has made his customary irrelevant intervention. As usual, he has taken an issue and missed the point by a country mile. Clearly, the tone of the row about illegal secret Tory parties is the most important matter under consideration.
Rees-Mogg does not seem to have an issue with holding any kind of social gathering during the strictest restrictions. Nor with the cavalier way that ministers appeared on TV speaking gravely, and warning that everyone should stay home and not mix at all, before doing exactly that. After all, infectious diseases were widely misunderstood in the early years of the nineteenth century.
In those times, life was short, hard and brutish. If the sewage-laden water didn’t finish you off, a traditional harsh winter would. And there was no electronic communication in these wonderful days of yore. There was in fact no need for the Lower Orders to talk, so busy were they generating income for their Lord. And the Lords would send elegant messages by way of a footman on horseback. It could take weeks for a message to get through, and more so if one forgot to add a postscript and had to send the exhausted footman on his way again the moment he returned.
Thus the natural rhythm of life as a country squire went by. The most urgent messages would be transmitted by pigeon, and Rees-Mogg sees no reason to change this most excellent method. A message is not worthy of the name, he states, unless it has been inscribed on the finest parchment using a quill, sealed with wax, delivered by the original air mail, and presented to His Lordship upon a silver platter borne by a servile butler.
One may then throw the missive on the fire, and eat the pigeon, and nobody ever needs to be any the wiser.