Lib Dems = Chaos

I’ve been re-reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the recent translation by David Raeburn. I only mention this because a particular passage from Book One (Creation) reminds me strongly, on a number of levels, of the Liberal Democrats of Lambeth.

This is Ovid’s description of Chaos, the state that came before order was created (think May 2006):

“A crude, unstructured mass,

Nothing but weight without motion, a general conglomeration

Of matter composed of disparate, incompatible elements.”

A few lines later, Ovid continues:

“None of the elements kept its shape,

And all were in conflict inside one body: the cold with the hot,

The wet with the dry, the soft with the hard, and weight with the weightless.”

Talking of Lib Dem chaos, I was surprised to read the other day that Menzies Campbell had visited the Sackville Estate in Streatham several weeks ago, together with an individual called Chris Nicholson, a former Lib Dem councillor in Kingston (“he’s not LOCAL!!!” – will the Lib Dem leaflets be informing anyone of that I wonder…) who is being hawked as the Lib Dem PPC for Streatham, though he appears to live in Furzedown Ward, the part of Streatham that falls into Tory Wandsworth and Labour Tooting.

He seems to have usurped a youngish Clapham Common councillor who stood against Keith Hill last time round. What furious cataclysm has happened in the Lib Dem ranks in Streatham, can we wonder? Just think back to Ovidian Chaos – “a general conglomeration of matter composed of disparate, incompatible elements.”

I passed Menzies Campbell shortly before Christmas, in St Stephen’s Hall in Westminster, where he appeared to bump into a statue. I’m not sure what or who he bumped into in Streatham, but there was a write-up of his visit in the Streatham Guardian, in which he shared a few pearls of Menziesian wisdom about the pressures on social housing, but curiously nothing, on the face of it, about the daggers-drawn, knickers-knotted position of Lambeth Lib Dems on the ALMO that Labour is proposing to bring Lambeth’s housing stock up to Decent Homes standard.

Mr Kingston, or whatever his name is, could have said something about the ALMO but appears to have said nothing – unless the reporter considered it a waste of shorthand.

Instead, we were treated to the following colourful utterance: “I am delighted Menzies decided to come here … I hope it will be the first of many visits to Streatham.”

Yes, Ming, come to Streatham and campaign for Decent Homes, rather than just talking about them, or allowing councillors from your party to seek to withhold them from Lambeth tenants.