Society

Some years ago I heard a moving story about Roy Jenkins. An unpromising start to any anecdote but stay with me. It involved a croquet match during the late period of his life – as Chancellor of the University of Oxford – when Jenkins had become one of the grander, not to say more pompous, figures in Britain's public life. According to someone playing with him, his Lordship had appalling luck. Although he wielded his mallet with all requisite skill, his ball would not go through the hoops. Eventually the grand old man stormed off the pitch in a great huff. Only after he had left did the other players discover that the ball Lord Jenkins had been working was from a different croquet set, and too big to fit through the hoops.

As controversy continues to rage about the “he said/he said” dynamic in Earl Spencer’s damning memoir – and whether Prince Harry knew (and, crucially approved) of the allegations in the book – there is, at least, the opportunity to draw light relief from something rather less consequential. It might seem strange to remember this, given the various other disasters in the world today, but Meghan Markle – now, of course, a resident in Britain once again – is continuing to run her As Ever brand. Even though she no longer has the backing of Netflix and her cursed With Love, Meghan television specials to promote it, it continues to be a going concern. Now, we have been treated to Meghan's dinner party hosting tips. They are neither profound nor revelatory.

“Journaling” is now a good thing, which we know because it’s part of Bryan Johnson’s morning routine, sandwiched between eating algae and sauna-ing with a Bryan Johnson-trademarked ice pack on his crotch. It’s nice to check in with Johnson – the tech millionaire who wants to “defeat death” – every few hours. This week I embarked on my biggest ever stand-up tour, a tour whose scale makes it seem like a culmination of everything to this point. Venues you dream of playing, ones which seem so distant in the mud and piss of the UK’s comedy circuit. Twelve hundred people tonight, 1,500 the night before. “Only 680 tonight is it?” I shrug from the back seat of my tour manager’s Skoda, like a man used to four-figure wine rolling his eyes at a mere Château Lafite.

On Monday and Tuesday, a so-called “mega dinghy” made its way across the English Channel from the coast of Normandy. Originating from the town of Vierville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach, the inflatable represented what many Brits would see as a direct reversal of Operation Overlord, which began on D-Day. The prospect of around 60 illegal migrants landing on England's shores, many of whom will likely come from countries with much higher rates of violent crime, was not exactly welcomed in the area. Hundreds of people poured out onto the streets of Gosport, where the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was expected to bring its passengers ashore after scooping them up in English waters.

It was 1937, an age away, when JRR Tolkien's book The Hobbit was first released. There are people alive who remember that year, but not many. The Hobbit was published by George Allen & Unwin after Stanley Unwin commissioned a review of the typescript (standard fee, one shilling) from his ten-year-old son, Rayner. When he reviewed The Hobbit, CS Lewis said it was a children’s book “only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery.” “Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit,” it read, complete with a ten-year-old’s errors, “who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins...

The natural coalition of rural people which was forged 25 years ago, before the hunting ban, is forming once more. In Westminster, we recently gathered under the Countryside Alliance banner to hear David Blunkett, David Cameron and others set out the issues. Poor Andy Burnham had inadvertently stoked our feelings by joking feebly about how he hardly ever visits farms and considers DEFRA the least important government department (would it were so!). There are strong current individual issues – the proposed trail-hunting ban being the most egregious and the inheritance taxes for farms the most economically damaging – but the sheer number of government-inspired rural harms is astonishing. The Alliance counts 27 of them.