I love Christmas stories but it does irritate me when people forget how they end. It has happened twice already this year. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, declared in his Autumn Statement that he was going to “play Scrooge” this Christmas. So we had a programme of grim austerity with freezes and cuts and unmitigated gloom. But that is not the point of Dickens’s morality tale. If Hunt is really going to enter into the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge he will be visited in the night by the ghost of Christmas Past looking like George Osborne, and the ghost of Christmas Future looking vaguely like Rachel Reeves. He will then decide that Christmas Present is too miserable, wake up on Christmas Day and announce huge pay increases for clerks, increased benefits for all disabled Tiny persons called Tim, and a free goose for every household in the land. If this hasn’t happened by the time you read this, then he hasn’t “played Scrooge” at all.
Similarly Mick Lynch announced that he was “not the Grinch”, and that he wasn’t going to steal Christmas. But the Grinch doesn’t steal Christmas. He thinks he can ruin the festivities in Whoville but then he realises that Christmas will happen anyway and the Whos will carry on singing merrily whatever he does – so he puts it all back. Therefore, if Lynch is serious about not being the Grinch, he will swap his “sour Grinchy frown” for a big-hearted smile and announce that all the trains are being put back to normal and that he will be personally handing out complimentary turkey sandwiches in the buffet to all small travellers called Cindy Lou.
Content from our partners
