Found this on the Spectator site today. It’s by Petronella Wyatt, daughter of Lord Woodrow Wyatt of Weeford the former journalist and diarist, talking about some things that she found interesting in her diary column.

The first concerns the lady who has become known as ‘Princess Nut Nut’, the Prime Minister’s fiance Carrie Symonds. It’s likely that generations of Britons will end up suffering from the unhinged Malthusian Greenery that she has promoted into Boris Johnson’s government and this description of her and her behaviour is unlikely to endear her much to the long suffering British public. I’m not that bothered about Boris Johnson not liking dogs very much, after all some people are dog people and some people are cat people. However I am concerned, as may others be, by what is plainly a massive and overbearing sense of entitlement on the part of Princess Nut Nut.

Petronella Wyatt said:

I am amused to learn that Carrie Symonds interrupts cabinet meetings to complain about newspaper stories featuring her dog Dilyn. I was surprised that Boris agreed to a rescue dog in Downing Street. In all the years I have known him, he has never seemed very fond of animals; at least he has always shown a rather cavalier attitude towards Mini. Mini is a gentle soul, with the milk of canine kindness bursting from every pore. The only person she has ever attacked is our current Prime Minister. One could plead this was out of self-defence. Boris had just sat on her.

In a separate section of her Diary piece in the Spectator, Ms Wyatt commented on how democracy has ceased to be recognisably democratic. In her comments she drew an unfavourable comparison between how the public has reacted to the oppression caused by our new political and technocratic aristocrats and how the public, or rather the London Mob of the 18^th century behaved. Ms Wyatt said that the political culture of London at the time was one where the aristocracy’s desire to rule was tempered by the propensity of the London Mob to riot in response. She said that the fear of the Mob ie the populace, was a curative for despotic politicians. Whilst I have never been in favour of street violence as a way of solving political problems, I tend to take the view that King Mob is a capricious and unjust leader who crushes both the good and the bad equally and without prior thought, Ms Wyatt is indeed correct when she said that maybe there was more real freedom in the eighteenth century to protest despots than there is today.

Ms Wyatt said on this subject:

What this government needs is a good dose of the London mob, which at its height in the 18th century would express its displeasure in no uncertain terms. In those days, the political system, as I once observed to Boris when he believed in rights, was one of aristocracy tempered by rioting. The mob, whose members ran from tinkers to duchesses, acted as a curative to despotic politicians, whose carriages would be waylaid and their occupants turned upside down. The word ‘liberty’ was then chalked on their shoes. A bystander in 1770 described an apparently good-humoured riot of ‘half-naked men and women, children, chimney-sweepers, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fishwives and females in grand array’. This fills me with nostalgia, as we are less free now than 300 years ago. Our democracy is certainly not democratic. It does nothing but feel our collars and lacks both honesty and courage. There is no body of opinion behind it that is liberated, and its chief exponents are marked by a haunting fear of losing their jobs. Oh, the joy of seeing Matt Hancock hanging upside down with his breeches around his ankles.