Church with Rees-Mogg and Sir Keir Starmer

I’m still in England and still have a lot to do before I come back. My important events are family related, but I am keeping very busy. I had a meeting with a film producer today, who is working on a documentary about various things I was involved in 30 years ago. I’ll be filming my bit in the next couple of weeks. I said I feel like the Rolling Stones, who have just played two nights in Hyde Park, in that people only see our work through a historical lens, even though we still try to stay relevant.

But England is a strange place these days and nostalgia is all the rage (even though it isn’t as good as it used to be). As the comedian Stewart Lee said, when I saw him the other day, we have a window of opportunity between the end of the pandemic and the start of the next world war, so we should try to make the most of it. I went straight from Lee’s show at the Royal Festival Hall to the Rolling Stones gig in Hyde Park. It’s was probably the last time I’ll see them, and they are, after all, living history. I last saw them about 30 years ago, when I was still interesting.

I’m funding my cultural overload by living off unsold Tesco food, which they sell at the end of the day for 25% of the normal price. Like I said, England is a strange place, and my local Tesco Extra, which is utilising half the floor space of a year ago, is still finding itself with piles of unsold fresh and chilled food at the end of each day. Times are hard, but people want to enjoy the post-lockdown summer, so the streets are busy and the supermarkets are empty.

But Church is free, and I was honoured to be invited to the service to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the Falklands conflict. I noticed that, like the Ukraine war, the Falklands war wasn’t actually a war. But 1,000 people died in what was basically a dispute over the principle of self-determination for citizens of overseas territories, so it was another historically significant event. The service was suitably solemn and focussed. I was there with Lord Heseltine, and MPs Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Fabricant, and Sir Keir Starmer, which is a strange mix of people. But they all made time in their busy schedules to attend.

Seeing an aged (but younger than Joan Collins) Michael Heseltine reminded me of his influence on my career. He was the Minister for the Environment in the Thatcher Government, when I was studying politics in 1980. We were covering the funding system for local government in the UK and he was unpicking it as we went along; rewriting our syllabus on a weekly basis. I became fascinated by public finance in the UK, and how funding systems determine behaviour. 13 years after graduating I was Assistant Director of Finance in a London Borough, and under that guise had a very interesting 25 year career as a senior public sector leader. I would have asked for a selfie, but I’m a grown up (almost).

I’ll be back at the end of the month. I can’t write much about Montserrat until then as I have no wi-fi at home, so no radio, and the Government hasn’t published anything that I’d want to download. I hid away in the corner of my deserted Tesco to participate in one of the sessions on the Sustainable Development Plan, but have nothing to say about that yet. I think it should address the priorities set out in the report of the UN mission to Montserrat, but we’ll see. You have to assume the UN delegates know their stuff, and we did invite them.

There is a workshop on the new procurement reforms coming up soon, but that will be at 10.00pm over here, so I’ll watch it on You Tube if its recorded. I bet you can’t wait for that one!