One of the great bugbears of modern discourse is the sense that people of power and influence – politicians, journalists – are exactly the wrong people to have opinions about motoring offences such as speeding. I’ve long felt that certain driver behaviours are as anti-social as anything captured under the old ASBO legislation (noise, public drunkenness, pissing in fountains, littering, graffiti), but the usual “steal a little and they throw you in jail / steal a lot and they make you king” rules always apply. 

Journalists reporting about politicians doing things that journalists also often do is the perfect storm of Metropolitan Elites. Talk about your Westminster Bubble.

People who park wherever they please because it suits them: on pavements, close to junctions, on double yellows – are doing more damage to the environment in which we live than litterers and drunks and paint sprayers — as are people who drive at 30 in a 20 zone or 40 in a 30 zone etc. Cars ruin cities. Cars ruin towns. Cars ruin villages.

But the tenor of the coverage of Useful Idiot Suella Braverman’s attempts to weasel out of her speed awareness course has been along the lines of, why all the fuss? Or, worse, we’ve all done it, nobody would care.

I say worse because I hate being lumped in with all those people who clearly routinely break the speed limit and accept the punishment as the cost of doing business. Even Zoe Williams in the Guardian, a writer I have a lot of time for, blithely describes the hell-is-other-people nature of the speed awareness course and does indeed suggest that ‘everyone’ has been in one, and that because everyone is lost inside their own personal hell, nobody would have clocked Braverman, had she attended. Williams writes,

I’m convinced that everyone with a driving licence has done one but nobody admits it because of the shame, though not of the speeding itself, which people find pretty easy to forgive themselves for.

Ugh. Here’s where we part company. Because in 40 years of driving – touch wood, white rabbits – I’ve never had a speeding ticket. Or a parking ticket. Because I don’t need a speed awareness course to inform me that speeding doesn’t get you “there” any faster. And because – crucially – I am always aware of my speed when I drive.

But now the world is full of opinion columnists telling us that Braverman’s weaselling is the least of our problems, that her speeding is no big deal. Everybody does it, nobody cares. And, as always, I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness because I always think this stuff – like the expenses claims for biscuits, like the purloined dressing gown – says more about the true character of our politicians than any number of speeches ripped from the pages of Mein Kampf for Dummies.

We’re back in the territory of journalists who are guilty of the same thing a politician has been caught doing telling us that we’ve all done it and it’s no big deal.

I’ve written before about how exasperated I get when I see people drive up to the school gates next to us because they are blindly following the sat nav directions in Waze or Apple maps. First of all, why is nobody (nobody else, I mean) telling the fucking app that the road into the school – where the school buses come to drop kids off – is not a through road, a short cut, to the main road on the other side? And, second of all, why do people think it is at all acceptable to follow a “rat run” route through a neighbourhood where people live with their children and pets? To save – wait for it – three minutes. And why on earth is software programmed to suggest a saving of three minutes, which is neither here nor there?

It’s that kind of magical thinking – you could save three minutes if you drive through this neighbourhood and don’t kill a pet – that sits behind the tailgaters and the speeders on the road. It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and you’re trying to get to work four minutes quicker? Please.

And I know there’s other stuff going on there. People like driving fast, like the feeling of mastery they get, fancy themselves as good drivers. All that ego stuff is going on too. Christ, just read a column in a motoring magazine to get a sense of how these people think.

But all of that, wrapped up in a bow, is why I think a politician’s speeding does matter – before you get to the weaselling part. There’s the irrationality of speeding: a failure of reason which goes along with irrational political and economic views. Capitalism! Brexit! Talk about your magical thinking. Then there’s my favourite human trait: the I’m-too-busy-and-important person who puts their immediate needs ahead of all others and will therefore park in a disabled spot, on a pavement, in front of the school gates, and drive too fast because they’re always running late and always in a hurry. Sociopathy, in other words.

And then there’s the ego. The kind of people who think it’s okay for them to drive fast because they’re good at it. Or because (as an ex-friend said to me once) “It was a clear road on a dry night”. There aren’t enough eye-roll emojis in the world. The world is not your race track. There’s a reason Boris Johnson is sometimes compared to Toad of Toad Hall.

And then there are the angry people. The people who have such an inner rage at their life and the world that they press the foot down and drive like a cartoon character because it’s the only time they feel like they have control. Ha! Take back control! Why does that ring a bell?

In other words, speeding = Tories, Brexit, capitalism, racism… all the bad things. 

And getting caught speeding and trying to weasel out of the consequences? Yeah.

I’ve been thinking about Liz Truss and the Case of the Purloined Dressing Gown. Quite a few column inches have been expended on this story. The £12000 expenses bill presented to Liz Truss after she clearly partied hard at Chevening House in Kent while she was campaigning to be Prime Minister For A Day.

An awful lot of said column inches have the sympathetic tenor of “Who hasn’t done this kind of thing?” and “We’ve all done a bit of hospitality lifting…”

Except me. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But there is a class of person who feels entitled to a long list of things that aren’t theirs. They live in that rarified world of privilege gifted to mediocre white people by mediocre (“elite”) universities and family connections forged at posh country house weekends. I always think this kind of thing – and I’m really thinking here of the £120 bathrobes rather than the £12000 excessive partying – is symptomatic. Of what? As Arwa Mahdawi points out, it’s grubbiness and greed, but it’s something else too. It’s glee, and it’s contempt.

It reminds me of what I considered to be the most emblematic of all the MPs’ expenses claims exposed by the Telegraph in 2009. It wasn’t the duck house island or the moat cleaning, or whatever. It was a packet of ginger crinkle biscuits, costing 67 pence. I believe there were also claims (made by other MPs) for a Kit Kat and a chocolate santa (59p).

Austin Mitchell laughed off the biscuit claim, among many other things, but it speaks more loudly than anything else of the absolute contempt these politicians hold for the people and institutions they’re meant to serve. Only the little people pay for their own biscuits.

Truss behaved like a first year Oxford undergraduate at her first posh house party, running up a bill she clearly thought somebody else would pay. (Alternatively, a just-signed talent show winner who doesn’t realise that all the expenses are coming out of her advance.) It feels like there was a kind of gleeful rampage at Chevening, an echo of the atmosphere of hysterical entitlement that occupied Downing Street during the Johnson era.

And I’m afraid that amused newspaper columns about how “we’ve all” nicked things from hotel rooms are coming from the same place and the same rarified social class. They’re all parasites, aren’t they?

While the Labour party continues to be in don’t-frighten-the-horsy-people mode and therefore utterly useless, it occurs to me that there really needs to be a rejoin-the-EU movement that campaigns for as long and as hard as the ‘Kippers did. The entity known as UKIP may have existed in some form before 1993, but let’s take that as its origin date. Essentially, then, those fucking bastards whittled away at UK politics until 2016, when fuckwit Cameron held the referendum that led us to our current disaster. So 23 years.

And therein lies the problem, because the thought that it might require another 20+ years of campaigning to get us back in the EU just makes me (and everyone else, I’m sure) feel tired. Britain first applied to join the EU in 1961, and it took 10 years to get in. But what would it take to even get us to the position where we’re applying.

For a start, a lot of the people who voted to leave will have to die — and not be replaced by a new generation of racists/idiots. I read the other day that the movement in public opinion over Brexit isn’t about people changing their minds, but about people who voted to leave dying off, and younger people reaching voting age. Which ought to give us hope, I suppose. But merely holding an opinion isn’t enough. It needs a movement. And it needs people with an obsessive energy, entirely focused on one issue, to make it happen.

Which is where I lose hope. Because the so-called culture wars have proved to be an excellent way of diffusing progressive politics into a series of arguments over personal identity and – even worse – personalities. And if there is one big issue that is going to unite the young and energetic for the next ten years or so, then it’s not going to be rejoining the EU. It’s going to be climate change. And even that issue has been successfully incorporated into the culture wars so that people end up arguing about tactics.

Like the left always has! If there’s a universal truth about leftwing politics its that they put more energy into opposing each other than they do into opposing their actual opponents. Which is not to say that internecine warfare is confined to the Labour party.

The Moderate Flank claims that it is going to try to reframe the argument on climate, away from counterproductive grand gestures towards more conciliatory and level headed discussions. Fingers crossed for that. Meanwhile, none of this helps me with my burning desire to be back in the EU.

In the end, I think my only option is to physically go there and seek citizenship. There really ought to be an exchange programme. For every boatload of refugees coming to this blighted island, they ought to let the same number of British citizens escape. I volunteer. There may not be a Movement, but perhaps I can move.