Polly Toynbee, Genius and Intellectual Giant

In a thousand years, the people of the future (or possibly aliens depending on how this climate change thing plays out) will look at the early 21st century and recognise that Polly Toynbee was one of the cleverest and most loved people around*.

Even though she dropped out of uni, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from London South Bank University, one of the best universities in the country with a site in my very own consituency. In your face, swots!

Anyway, today, she analyses our prospects for next week's local elections in an incisive manner and has some good news about us probably winning Slough council! (yay!)
One of the things I love most about her is her ability to write lyrically and without prejudice about those ordinarily beneath her (a skill I am yet to master), teasing out their very essence. She writes:

meet Rob Anderson, local Labour leader and quiet local hero. He devotes his life to what he sees as Labour's municipal values. He is not rare, but an archetype of decent local politics. Son of a Sunderland shipbuilder who came south for work as a dustman and who died of asbestosis, Anderson is a 44-year-old accountant at the Slough Fujitsu offices. He was born and bred on the council estate he now represents, the same estate where Alan Johnson was postman**.

Lovely Stuff coming from one so noble, for as you know, Polly (like me) is related to aristocracy. Descended from an earl, she is!
Wasn't it Kipling who said:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch, ?

True words indeed. Polly makes us all proud.

*In fact, Polly has many admirers, not least of all a certain Tim Worstall who manages to blog about her at least once a day in between the rest of his anti-woman commentary, the pig! It is an open secret in the blogosphere that Tim (who is not very brght) is madly in love with clever Polly but unfortunately his hatred of all that is female causes his love to manifest in a deranged and twisted form.

**I love her dig at Alan Johnson, who thinks because he was a postman and working class, he is the epitome of Labour. Well get stuffed, Alan! The Labour Party has chosen and it chose me, Harriet Harman QC MP and it was my breeding wot done it.