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jackFor sunflowerinrain and the nice librarian in the black dress I can't remember the name of.
An elephant, an engineer, and a mathematician walk into a building and the mathematician says "If two people leave, the building will be empty again," and the engineer scratches himself with his tusks and trumpets loudly.
An elephant, an engineer, and a mathematician walk into a building and the mathematician says "If two people leave, the building will be empty again," and the engineer scratches himself with his tusks and trumpets loudly.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-20 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-20 10:35 pm (UTC)Chris Patten was a minister in John Major's first government and seemed like one of the few of them with any sense. So of course he lost his seat at the 1992 election. Rather than hang around waiting for a Tory safe seat to become available however he then went off to be the last governor of Hong Kong, where he massively annoyed the Chinese government by introducing democratic reforms shortly before the handover (and that's while I like him). He then spent a while as an EU commissioner and is Chancellor of the University of Newcastle and of some other university.
He's written several books. The only one I've read is East and West but I hope to read his more recent works too some time.
Anyway the actually relevant point is that during the 1992 election he was associated with a poster campaign warning of "Labour's double whammy", a previously not widely heard phrase which attracted a certain amount of attention from pundits. (At the time I considered it perfectly obvious what it meant but evidently I was better than national journalists at figuring out what previously unfamiliar words might mean. Or something.)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-20 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 05:45 pm (UTC)