The F-Word Secretary

PREZZA shags and fights. Tony and Gordon bitch about each other. And Charles Clarke gets evicted, moans about it to the press and says who he thinks will win. Who needs Big Brother when you have the Houses of Parliament?

And now we read in the Times that Margaret Beckett has taken a leaf from Big Brother Pete’s lexicon. Pete’s the Big Brother housemate with Tourette’s who swears a lot.

But before Margaret lets fly with an expletive or three, let us place things in context.

As a keen caravaner Margaret’s sense of wanderlust would always take her far, whether to a camp sight in Rhyl or to the top table at a Westminster power brunch.

But she was still surprised to learn she had been made Foreign Secretary. She says her reaction to the news is “unprintable in your newspaper”.

Nothing of it. Newspapers have been going down market to meet their readers for some time. Tell it like it is, Margaret, the subs have asterisks and they know how to use them.

“F***,” says Margaret. She says that when she was told she’d be taking her caravan to Washington, Baghdad and the Dordogne in an official capacity she said “f***”.

The paper says that the word “amused” Tony Blair. Of course, he is familiar with the term, having, allegedly, uttered “fucking Welsh!" after hearing about Labour’s losses in the 1999 assembly elections.

The Times’s cartoonist is impressed enough to use Margaret’s reaction in a work entitled “Famous First Words”.

“Dr Livingstone I presume?” says a man looking not unlike David Blunkett to another man with a Saddam Hussein-style moustache. “That’s one small step for man, but one giant leap for mankind,” says a spaceman. “Where there is discord may we bring harmony,” says Maggie Thatcher. “Fuck!” says Margaret.

And Margaret wins. We may never copy her sense of fashion – only the wife of a Romanian tractor seller could do that – but we may yet see Margaret as one of us and ape her language.

Indeed who hasn’t looked at Margaret and said “fuck!”?

Posted: 28th, June 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink