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It was in May 2015 (see here), that I first accepted David Cameron's unspoken offer to take on the portfolio for Anonymous Grumpy Old Grandads in his new administration. My prime role, as I saw it, was to complain, vociferously and continually, about anything and everything. My lifetime experiences meant I was fully qualified to take up that position.

On and off, through various Tory Prime Ministers, I undertook my role, fulfilled my portfolio and generally made a nuisance of myself. I took a few breaks, briefly toyed with setting up my own party but as so often, the toy soon broke.

At the beginning of 2023 I had experienced enough. By then politics was not worth making fun of, satirising or even commenting on. It was pathetic. We were in the middle of a cost of living crisis, a winter of discontent, a period when a tyrant was causing loss of life and devastation among innocent people and, to my eyes, politicians were incapable of doing anything.

But now we have a new government and I feel compelled to come out of the closet and enter the cabinet again. I will accept the same role as before although this time I have become binary and my portfolio will represent Anonymous Grumpy Old Grandparents. I considered representing Grandparents, Retired, Old, Unemployed, Pensioned, Impatient Eccentrics but decided I was too old to be a Groupie.

Follow me. Don't be ashamed of your unfashionable clothes. We may only have ten years to save our vests.

I will be back, weekly, first thing Monday morning now. Make sure you have your vest on. You can wear it over your surgical truss if you like.

Monday - November 25th - I don't understand.

I condemn, as I'm sure many others do and certainly the western media, the actions of President Putin and Russia in trying to extend its borders into another country. It was wrong when they moved into Crimea but for some reason not much happened.

My problem is that I cannot see why the west, the media and others, do not do the same thing for the way Israel has extended its borders since the state was created in 1948. I have no time for Hamas or any other terrorist organisation or anyone hell bent on destroying innocent lives and making children suffer. I just ask.

Monday - November 18th - Today is an unprecedented day, get me out of here.

I'm fairly certain, no positive, that I have grumped about this before but I think it is important, if we are in power in some way, that we use our words carefully. The word that gets me at the moment is the simple word unprecedented. Many politicians will use it to to describe a certain situation that they did not plan for or could not deal with and calling it unprecedented becomes a get-out.

According to the dictionary, unprecedented means without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled. By that definition tomorrow is unprecedented. In fact the whole future of everything is unprecedented.

The word has become overused by politicians trying to explain their behaviour during the Covid pandemic. They had to cope with an unprecedented event. Obviously. However if they are trying to say that a flu like epidemic which caused about 7 million deaths worldwide had never happened before, a worse one had. The 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic killed about 50 million people in a world with a far lower population. Just to really scare you the population today is about 8 million; the population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion. In other words Covid deaths were 0.09% of the population; Spanish flu killed 2.8.

Please remember, essentially, everything is unprecedented.

And that, sadly, applies to the use of social media. Sixty percent of fraud takes place through social media so I read. X, formerly twitter, formerly talking to people face-to-face, apparently makes no money; it is just a platform to allow everyone and anyone to air their opinions, some not worth airing, some positively abusive, some, in my view, worthy, if that is the right word, of being a hate crime. However we must allow freedom of speech says Elon. I think he is too young to remember a world where we had freedom of speech but were able to, in most cases, avoid bullying and ridiculing others.

Australia and others talk of regulating social media so it is unavailable to under 16s. Apart from uninventing the wheel, it may be thee most impossible task ever. How about we teach people, particularly young people, that it is wrong to humiliate others, wrong to ridicule others and wrong to watch others suffer. There's a start. Wait, forget that idea. I'm a non-entity, make me suffer, humiliate me and let's call it entertainment is back on our screens. Almost in the words of Peter Yarrow, "The childen will be watching".

Friday - November 8th - Democracy is saved, the world less likely.

Two major events this week. Despite the wonderful work that is always done by opinion pollster, who I'm sure all have bits of paper saying they are qualified to do the job they do, they got it wrong. Again. Donald Duck Thrump is the 47th president of the United States, having also been the 45th. He is one of only two men to have convinced the general public in a country that he can do a great job, while frightening the rest of the world. Like him, the other one was a golfer too as I believe he died in a bunker.

I listened to his victory speech. During his "public speaking" lessons I think his tutor must have said that if you randomly, perhaps even occidentally, say something you like just keep saying it again and again, maybe changing the odd word here and there. It amuses me that the American electorate, or college as they call it, I assume because it comprises people who are not yet fully qualified in the field in which they act, made the decision they did. The Democrats were worried that 81 year old Joe Biden was not fully compos mentis and so they persuaded him not to stand. America has now elected the US equivalent of rambling Syd Rumpo (haha being young is not that great is it - you've missed things).

You always felt that the backroom staff at the White House had wound Joe Biden up and hoped his mechanism wouldn't run down until he was back behind closed doors. Interestingly the 84 year old Nancy Pelosi has been highly critical of Biden's slowness, including his slowness to stand aside. US successfully makes me feel a positive youngster. Mitch McDonald, the senate leader so-called because he loves frozen nuggets when speaking, is also 82. Of course the President-elect is no spring chicken either as he is well over 78. Sadly if he too needs winding up before speaking we could soon see a new version of the Clockwork Orange. The comparison is almost too close for comfort.

I also need to grump about two-faced politicians. DALA, our Foreign Secretary and presumably owner of a Llama farm, has done an about face after some rather rude, though I feel essentially true, comments some 7 years ago. But, the French President must win the award, even if it was accidentally, for the best message to Thrump. His X post said "Congratulations President @realDonaldTrump. Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity." I know Thrump has about 47 convictions but was unaware of any that Macron had. Still you live and learn.

The other big event, but in the UK this time, was the appearance at PMQs of the new leader of the Conservative party KEBE. Many congratulations were given to her, highlighting that she was the first black leader of a major political party. Sadly her performance did not auger well. One question she asked said that she had not seen any mention of defence spending in the budget the week before, The actual fact is that the budget document mentioned it many times, including a section 250 words long. Moreover RARE in her speech said she would set out to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence. Weirdly KEBA mentioned this in her speech saying there was no timescale for this. RARE also mentioned in her speech a £2.9 billion increase to the defence budget for next year. Oh dear KEBA. I know another black female politician who got some figures wrong but she was roundly mocked in the press. Then again, she was a trail blazer not a blue blazer. DIABolical bias by our press.

In another rather foolish moment KEBA told Sir KEST off for just reading out from a script prepared by his advisers. She did this while reading from a piece of paper. To give him credit, Sir KEST noticed and mentioned this. Let's finish on a lighter note. For all my young followers here is a song by rambling Syd Rumpo. Notice how he (a character played by the late Kenneth Williams on an old Sunday lunchtime radio show) makes up words which have no meaning. See, my comparison. Exactly.

Friday - November 1st - A budget to remember, even before the speech

Bit late with any grumping this week as I wanted to see if those leadership-choosing-as-a-hobby conservatives had annoyed me in anyway. Rest assured they did but more later because the big event of this week was the first budget by our new Labour government. As usual, in the modern world, most of it was known, or at least speculated on, before the actual speech.

That was very well delivered in my humble opinion. I will give me opinion on the content shortly. What was the most worrying part was the reply by Rishi Sushi, He had just had a very gentle performance in his final PMQs, almost a love-in with KEST, or Sir KEST as I should maybe call him, but he came out now, almost foaming at the mouth. By the way in this outburst the word now appeared far too many times for anyone giving a civilised, cultured reply.

I suppose he wanted to go out in a blaze of saliva or some other knight of the round table. His problem was that in order to complain about the speech RARE had made, he had to deny fact, ignore his own party's failure and, as happened during so much of their time in office, say a lot and do nothing.

I don't think that most people understand how the exchequer works. Jo Coburn, on Politics Live, may disagree with me as on her post budget show she kept telling members of her panel what most people were thinking or feeling. Dangerous, Jo and on that basis you can almost certainly ignore my first sentence in this piece.

However I would say that, if we want public services that serve the public then someone has to pay for them. To me, that's simple. Of course if we accept what I think is the conservative view that we want less public services serving the public and more private services, serving presumably the privates, things are different. This is the “dismantling the state” view of conservatives, excluding, of course, Lib Truss and dear old Khasi, who tried to dismantle economic sanity.

We can argue for ever about the £22 million black hole. The actual figure matters not. The argument that the Office of Budget Responsibility never mentioned that figure in their report may well be true. What they did say was that when the last Tory budget was produced, they (the OBR) were not made aware of all relevant figures. They said that had they been, their judgement on that budget would have been materially different. To me what matters is that a government did not disclose everything they SHOULD have done which is tantamount to deceit. When you were a member of that government I do not think you have a moral right to make any statement about truth or lie. Sadly, they felt they did.

I'm afraid this inability to tell the public the truth seems to have extended to Sir EDDA. He claimed that the change in inheritance tax for farms announced in the Budget would impact around 70,000 farms. It turns out that that figure is just an estimate of the total number of farms worth enough to pay. The Institute for Fiscal Studies which is an independent economy think-tank says the actual number is remarkably small, probably less than 500. So why do politicians follow the lead of our stupid media and spout out untrue figures just for effect?

One final grump on that point. Our famed media (should that be defamed media) have pounced on the OBR forecast about growth, pointing out it is lower than that predicted after the conservative last budget. One, that budget was based on incomplete figures and secondly it is a forecast. The clue, as Michael Fish will attest, is in the word forecast. As far as this little AGOG could see, the budget is trying to repair our public services in health and education at least. My formal education may well be complete, my need for health care may not be too fay away from seriously beginning. Don't panic. I think my grandson in New Zealand is not that far away.

Let me finish, as I waited till now to upload, on the result of the Tory leadership campaign. The announcement of the result was made by the chairman of the 1922 committee BOBL which I can't help but notice is an anagram of BLOB. He went on a bit, blobby-style. Almost thanked his mum and dad, Oscar-style.

In the end we found out that of an eligible number of voters, 40% picked KEBA and she won. Worryingly, for our opinion of the quality of voters, in a two-horse race, 45 people voted for more than one candidate. Also worryingly BLOB said how great it was to have another female leader, seemingly forgetting the success of at least two of the others. I think two out of three (failures) is actually pretty bad but let's see.

One piece of statistical trivia that I feel you will not see anywhere else is that this is the only time the PM and the opposition leader have been known by a 4-letter first name with 3 letters the same.

I'm having a shot in the dark here but I think next week I may be grumping about events across the pond, sometimes known as duckweed or blanket weed. These are dense (oh yes) growths of hair-like strands which can be invasive.