Top Tory In Pink Pussy Scandal

It's official: David Cameron is a winker.
No, that's not a typo, although a change of vowel would not diminish the veracity of that sentence.
I bring you this exclusive revelation after close study of a film report on Channel 4 News last night.
David Cameron was standing in the foyer of the Blackpool Winter Gardens when someone he knew walked past and Cameron winked at him.


It wasn't one of those histrionic winks that involve a sideways motion of the head. It was a very quick wink, as fast as the shutter action on my Fuji Finepix. Blink and you would have missed it. But it was a wink nonetheless.

I would never vote for someone who was a winker, even if he wasn't a Tory.
I am deeply distrustful of people who acknowledge your presence not by a nod or a smile but by a wink.
You know the scenario: you catch the eye of someone you slightly know in the pub or in the office Team Meeting and they give you a quick wink.
This makes me very uneasy. Are you supposed to wink back? To do so might imply some furtive sexual relationship between you. And what if they weren't winking but had some kind of nervous facial tick? They would then think you were taking the piss.

There's a kind of faux-mateyness about this kind of winking which I resent when it comes from someone I don't know very well.
There's also something inherently conspiratorial about a wink that doesn't exist with a nod or a spoken greeting. It implies that the winker and I have some knowledge that is not shared by the rest of the group. Or that we alone are down-to-earth blokes who know this is all nonsense but we're pretending to take it seriously because in half an hour the PowerPoint presentation will be over and we can sneak off to the smoking room and talk about that bird who got her tits out on last night's Big Brother.

A wink is the body language equivalent of someone I hardly know calling me 'Buddy' or 'Pal' or 'Bruv'.
Someone I knew who wasn't averse to a punch-up, used to reply to such appellations "I'm not your fucking pal!" or "I'm not your fucking brother and if I was I'd shoot myself!" I don't know how he responded to a wink. He probably closed the offending eyelid on a permanent basis. Which probably explains why he spent much of his youth in young offender institutions and demonstrates that one should keep these kind of sensitivities in proportion.

That said, I still reject the old saying that a nod is as good as a wink. A nod is infinitely preferable to a wink. Except of course where the latter has a sexual connotation, although in this age of the more direct approach I suspect the line between a winker and a wanker is considered to be a fine one.

***

Both David Cameron's eyes were wide open at Jeremy Paxman's first question in last night's Newsnight interview. Paxman is famous for his opening questions. Last night's was "Do you know what Pink Pussy is?"
Cameron didn't. And if he didn't actually turn pink, he certainly looked like a pussy that had got its tail caught in the cat flap.

Pink Pussy turned out to be a drink served in the pub chain of which Cameron was until recently a director. These are those 'vertical drinking' pubs that target the youth market and are at the centre of the controversy over binge drinking.

Pink Pussy was a highly potent cocktail that was sold at £8 per bucket. Paxman felt that Cameron's involvement with this company sat uneasily with his opposition to the extension of licensing hours. Cameron said he agreed with extending opening hours. He just felt we shouldn't do it until after Christmas. This is an absurd argument because pubs have always been allowed extensions at Christmas and New Year anyway.

Cameron attacked Paxman for his aggressive style and constant interruptions in what was clearly a pre-planned tactic. But if Paxman hadn't tried to pin Cameron down we would have had even more of the vacuous waffle that is Cameron's trademark.

Unfortunately, Paxman often misses a trick. He didn't challenge Cameron's endless mantra that he will share economic growth between investment in public services and tax cuts.

What does this actually mean, apart from being a way of avoiding any firm commitment to do either?
What does 'share' mean in this context? If I say I'll share a bar of chocolate with you I might give you one segment and eat the rest myself. So far as I know, Cameron has never said in what proportions the proceeds of hypothetical growth will be shared between the public services and tax cuts.

Paxman asked Cameron if he thought gay couples should be allowed to adopt children. He said that he did.
This surprised me because, as I've written here before, Cameron voted against it in the Commons. When Paxman put this to him he said he had abstained and implied this wasn't deliberate but because he was absent from the Commons that day.
After the interview, Newsnight checked with Hansard and found that whilst Cameron had once abstained he had voted against this specific clause on two other occasions.
So there's a surprise: Top Tory Caught Lying Through His Teeth.

But don't worry. I've thought of a suitable punishment for the smoothie-chops Old Etonian. Traditional and Shakespearean but with a contemporary twist.
You may remember that in Richard III the Duke of Clarence was drowned in a butt of Malmsey. I suggest that Tory Boy is frogmarched into one of his binge-drinking pubs and drowned in a bucket of Pink Pussy.

Only the bubbles would be winking then. For as the poet Keats put it:

'With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.'