From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
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The Tories: the party of Scrooge — minus the redemption…
STEPHEN ARNELL looks at 11 Conservatives who could easily have been villains in the pages of a Dickens novel
An actor from the London Touring Players performs the part of Ebenezer Scrooge during a dress rehearsal for a production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey in Beaulieu, Hampshire, December 13, 2023
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After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
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A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
Scrooge: “And the Union workhouses. Are they still in operation?”
Charity Collector: “Both very busy, sir...”
Scrooge: “Those who are badly off must go there.”
Charity Collector: “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I AM certainly not the first person to mention the similarity, but the Tory Party has increasingly come to resemble Dickens’s famous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. Indeed, some Conservatives appear to revel in the comparison, as we shall see.
Of course, Scrooge did eventually mend his ways, but only when threatened with the prospect of eternal damnation. The Tories appear confident that the warnings laid down by the Three Ghosts of Christmas don’t apply to them. Quelle surprise.
Some would say that many Tory souls were sold long ago or had atrophied to such an extent that an eternity spent in hellfire was always on the cards.
Meet just a few of the gang, to quote National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), the “jolliest bunch of A-holes you’ll see this side of the nut house.” Or alternatively, a meeting of the now infamous “five families” group of hard-right Conservative MPs.
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