Diary: Farewell Terry Jones

Michael Palin’s lovely tribute to his friend Terry Jones, who died this week, will linger long in the memory: “Oh I shall miss the sociable Terry… I just miss putting my arm around him and having a drink. He was just a wonderful companion, terrific companion. So I shall miss our trips to the bar. I shall miss our pints.”

Jones had been suffering with a nasty form of dementia for some years. He died at the age of 77. It is often said that dementia tends to strip away precisely the things that give a personality distinctiveness and beauty – it robbed Iris Murdoch of her razor-sharp mind just as this cruel disease took away Jones’s wonderful voice, his eloquence.

A comedian friend of mine, Alexander Fox, paid a fitting tribute to Jones as a performer in Python: “It speaks volumes, reaching for a ‘favourite Terry Jones sketch’, I can’t think of many where he’s the lead. Instead, dozens of sketches spring to mind where he’s selflessly populating their world, intrinsically woven into the fabric of the Python tapestry.”

I shall remember him for all that – and in particular, his less well-known venture with Michael Palin, Ripping Yarns, a wry sending-up of Boy’s Own-style adventure stories and the mythology of Edwardian England.

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The Labour leadership race continues to wend along. Jess Phillips’s run is over. I must admit that her central claim that people “like her” have little chance of becoming PM completely flummoxed me. I can think of several PMs in the post-war era who came from far humbler origins than Phillips. The Chamberlains, of course, were Brummies.

My impression of Starmer and Thornberry is that they suffer from the same malady – a lack of systematic reasoning. Starmer’s opening campaign video featured a highlights reel of “the struggles of the 1980s” and his support for the printworkers in Wapping. He then speaks of his aspiration to “open up power and opportunity” in the economy. But how does romanticising the closed shop, which would never have survived successive waves of equalities legislation, really illustrate progressive values fit for the third decade of the new millennium?

It is incoherent. Emily Thornberry, who opposes selection in schools but sent her children to selective schools, when pressed by Andrew Neil, said: “As a politician… I want to make sure that we have good schools up and down the country but as a mother I will never apologise for doing the best for my kids.” Education is either a collective good or it isn’t. However heartfelt you are, it is simply not possible to maintain that what is in principle good for everyone is somehow defective for you and your family.

Their candidacies reflect a broader crisis in the party’s “moderate” wing – it has been captured by what Reaction contributor Johan Hakelius calls, “anti-elite elitists.”

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England’s overseas tour to South Africa is almost at an end. There has been some gripping play, with the second test in particular proving a classic, a mix of attritional fare, virtuosic episodes and tension on the final day. It is a shame however that the tour is not being covered by BBC’s Test Match Special. Talksport does a decent job with some excellent interventions from expert voices like Gareth Batty and Darren Gough – but the commentary feels careless. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been blindsided by another contextless exclamation: “Oh look… a wicket!”.

As January turns to February, I am already beginning to think of the summer and a new season. Last year ended in a riot of gold. I played for an invitational side at the most beautiful country house-style ground, with vast oak trees set about the boundaries, on a baking September day.

I felt then that our game was truly part of what the cricket writer Neville Cardus saw as cricket’s metaphysic: “Sit on the Mound Stand at Lord’s on midsummer morning at noon, and if the sun be ample and you close your eyes for a while you will see a vision of all the cricket fields in England at that very minute; it is a vision of the game’s rich seasonal yield; a vision of green spaces over our land, of flashing bats, of thudding, convulsive bowlers, and men in white alone in the deep or bent low in the slips.”