Praise from Andrew Marr

Praise from Andrew Marr for Jess Phillips this morning:

It is no disrespect to any of the other candidates to say that the Birmingham Yardley backbencher, Jess Phillips, is one of the most charismatic MPs in Parliament. 

Jess Phillips rivals Puck and puts a girdle round her consituency in 46 minutes

On today's Politics Live Labour MP Jess Phillips, talking about the 2017 general election, said:

It's funny you should say that because obviously we do a lot of polling during election time as politicians. We knock on lots of doors. I knocked on 25,000 doors in that six week period and 12 times somebody mentioned Brexit to me.

Jo Coburn didn't question her maths but, if you work out the averages, that means that Jess knocked on 4,167 doors each week of her campaign.

This also means that if she campaigned seven days a week throughout those six weeks without a single day off she knocked on 595 doors each day.

And if she didn't sleep and knocked on those doors 24/7 (as they say in America), that would result in 25 knocks an hour. 

But, of course, she must have slept - and so must her constituents. 

So let's assume that she only knocked on doors during daytime hours but still did very long days.

Let's say (being very generous) that she campaigned for 13 hours - say from 8am to 9pm.

Well, that would result in an average of 46 doors being knocked per hour...

...giving each voter just about a minute of Jess's time in which not to mention Brexit. 

It's theoretically possible, of course, but given the fact that...

(a) Jess must have had lunch and taken other breaks (such as toilet breaks and mobile phone calls and lots of BBC interviews), and...

(b) Jess surely can't simply have gone door-to-door among 595 very-closely-spaced houses without crossing roads and changing streets or moving areas, and...

(c) Jess surely can't have spent just a minute at each and every property, from leaving one house to reaching next door's door bell and introducing herself and making her pitch and listening to her constituents and saying goodbye,

...then, ergo, she's probably wildly overstating the number of doors she knocked at during the 2017 election.

Unless she's Superwoman or Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman.

(And, even then, it's pushing it.)

On the other hand, if Jess isn't wildly overstating the number of doors she knocked at and really did speak to all of those 25,000 door-opening constituents (from leaving the previous house to leaving the next house, and not one of them being out or ignoring the door bell), then no wonder only 12 people mentioned Brexit to her. 

In fact, if she did speak to all of those 25,000 door-opening constituents then the true miracle (a miracle of miracles) is that even as many as 12 people managed to mention Brexit to her. 

Think about it:  Unless the voter opening to the door to her immediately yelled 'Brexit!' and then slammed the door in her face prompting her to make a very quick exit after her very quick arrival, not one of her 25,000 constituents would have had the time to talk about Brexit to her - or anything else for that matter. They would barely have had time to say 'hello' and 'goodbye'.

So maybe Jess should slow down and actually talk to her constituents rather than trying to cram in 46 separate chats with her voters, all in different houses, every hour during a 13-hour day, 7 days a week throughout a campaign lasting 6 long weeks.

Conclusion: Either Jess's self-promoting stat is massively wrong or she's a terrible constituency MP.

Update: Hmm. I see a sub-species of Twitter folk are also doing the sums too and finding the same results. It's hard to get a proper scoop these days. Woe is me!

Jim-jams, Jess Phillips and ‘bunch’

It’s been a while since I did school gates, but no-one much turned up in PJs back then. A glimpse of the odd granny in slippers might have caused amusement.

Schools in socially diverse areas like ours serve a rich mix. Middle-class kids of, say, school teachers mingle with the smelly ones who walk to school disheveled, wearing no socks.  Their mums and dads might have been up half the night smoking dope or whatever, but if they did manage to get up and get out they’d pull on a shell suit first.

I think the PJ thing that irked headmistress Kate Chisholm is quite recent. These days pyjamas are a fashion statement; nicer than your manky old jogging outfit. I do like a nice pair of baggy PJ bottoms. Tartan or brushed cotton in red with stars on, for example. Slippers are indistinguishable from Ugg boots. 

I would.

Is this the Bugaboo mums with the 4x4s, too posh to get dressed? I don’t think so, guessing at the demographic around the school in question, which is not in your actual Islington but some godforsaken place in the North East. Let’s be snobs and assume the PJ mums in question were more slummy mummy than yummy mummy, and if so there was probably a lot more to the head’s request (that’s all it was) than meets the eye.  

Rachel Johnson came on the Today Programme the other day to dispense her opinion on this matter. She disapproved of PJs  but admitted pulling on the odd pair of jogging bottoms when pushed for time. She observed sorrowfully  “No-one dresses up any more. Not even for the opera or the theatre.”

Just imagine. Not even bothering to put on evening dress for the opera! Kate Chisholm was right to be worried.

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The Jess Phillips thing has caused quite a stir. QT still has the power to enrage. The trouble is, what she said was ambiguous. 

Did she actually mean to it was racist to point out the ethnicity of the men in the Cologne fiasco? Or was she making a purely feminist point, that men are going to take liberties given half a chance, wherever and whoever they are? 

It’s dangerous to point out that drunken half dressed women are giving out mixed signals as that’s the slippery slope towards blaming the victim. But having seen the state of some of the people thronging city centres late of an evening, I can’t help pointing it out. 

I wonder if the feminists would like to make leering illegal. I’m telling ‘im indoors that it is.

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I do wish people would stop wingeing on about “Bunch”. Let it lie. I don’t suppose Giles Coren read my ‘Bunch’ piece, but he seems to agree with me.