Eric Pickles the TARDIS time-traveller
Conservative Party Chairman Eric Pickles MP is getting more than a little stick for his comments that the former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown is now ‘frail and confused’. Those of us who have seen Paddy recently would know that he is matching neither of those qualities and still looks and sounds as fit and sharp as he did when he first entered politics almost 30 years ago. In fact he probably isn’t far off the levels of fitness that he held when he spend two decades serving his country as a soldier, diplomat and spy.
As Stephen Tall points out, recent television appearances have demonstrated who is the more confused out of Ashdown and Pickles, whilst Cornish LibDem MP Colin Breed challenged Pickles to a ‘yomp across Dartmoor’ with Ashdown.
Pickles reasoning for his comments was Paddy’s attack on the way the Conservatives had treated the south-west when they were last in government. Pickles said:
”You would have thought if they’d brought Paddy back, took him out of mothballs to do this, they would have given him an up-to-date briefing. You can’t really get away with talking about what happened in the 1980s.”
Yet it was only last year that both Pickles and his leader David Cameron were dropping the Winter of Discontent into interviews – the name given to the winter of 1978-79. Can you really get away with talking about the 1970′s, Eric?
Related posts:
- Catching up with Chairman Pickles
- Guardian sniping may prove the coalition’s popularity
- Are you drinking what he’s drinking?
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