It's not just trying it on with the secretary. It's more of the "please get back to the office because we need the rent". It's whinging about falling birth rates in a faintly creepy way. It's something about house prices, which he had nothing whatsoever to do with, and was just about to sort out when the rotten lefties in his own party forced him out.
When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Mr Darcy, house prices were about four or five times average earnings. They are now double that – and in London they are about 14 times average earnings. No wonder people are having children later and later, and no wonder there has been such a fall in reproduction.
In 2022 this country saw a 3.1 per cent fall in the birth rate – and the number of live births in Britain was down to 605,479 – the smallest number, as a proportion of the overall population total, since records began in the 1930s.
No wonder, given the difficulties and expense, that the younger generation seem so apathetic about the notion of having a family. A recent poll of millennials found 38 per cent of them think having children is too expensive, and 31 per cent are just not interested.
As a tail-end baby-boomer, my heart bleeds for these young people. We should be doing everything in our power to help them. We should, above all, fix this country’s housing market. It was a tragedy that we Conservatives watered down our excellent Planning Bill (after I had gone) in terror of the elderly Lib Dem-leaning Nimbies.
Fuck your ideas, fuck your attempts to rewrite history, fuck your washing your hands of any blame, fuck your fucking anecdotes of sitting lapping up Bill Deedes' fucking tales of the golden fucking age of fucking Fleet Street, fuck your faux-chummy school magazine writing style, and fuck your fucking useless tossbag fucking freeloading family and faintly creepy fascist fucking wife. But most of all, go fuck yourself.