Does 'the top job' involve sacrifices?

Am still trying to work out an appropriate fantasy 6 year Cultural Revolution experience for our Dear Leader.
I think perhaps just being unemployed lone parent with a few young school-aged children and told that he should "find work" and stop relying on benefits. This mythical work has to fit around school hours and the estate where he will complete this stint of real-life-experience has no obvious employment opportunities closer than a 30 min bus ride.
And our beloved secretary of state for education. Oh Yes! Just allocate him the role of "new teacher" in a school with a high turnover of pupils, on a desirable council estate. One of those not-doing-very-well academies perhaps. The head of department should allocate him all the classes that nobody else wants to teach.

I don't think that friendships need to be put on the back burner as such, but the email from Brooks to Cameron about "looking forward to working together" said it all for me.

Cameron the prime minister, working together with Brooks, the editor of the discredited NoW, who in 2003 admitted during a Commons Select Committee to paying police officers for information, before being shut-up by the equally-discredited Andy Coulson!

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8632906/We-have-paid-police-for-information-Rebekah-Brooks-2003-appearance-at-Commons-Select-Committee.html

There is such a thing as professional behaviour and maintaining boundaries. Rememeber the Archers - Mary and her strange husband - and the insider trading scandal. "I just happened to see her fax..."
When we have chiefs of the met who think it ok to accept a gift of a week in champneys from a "friend" then there is obviously plenty of scope for a wake up in all positions of power. Ok for a humble copper to accept a bottle of whisky from a local businessman who says he is a "mate" - no. Not if there is any chance of a conflict of interest. If you have power and are being paid by the public then you should act responsibly.

Yes I see your point Greatnan. But this happens in all walks of life regardless. In North East local politics it is almost a way of life with husbands, wives, sons, daughters supposed to be acting fairly and objectively when all the time they are tipping each other off or voting each other onto various panels, boards and committees. Are you suggesting they put their marriage or whatever on the back burner too?

I can't agree with you, gillybob. The references to Caesar's wife are not irrelevant and there must be no doubt in anyone's mind that the Prime Minister is not on intimate terms with anybody who could benefit from inside information. To say they could meet and just not discuss the things that would affect the business of the friend is just not believable. I think the friendship should be put on the back burner as long as one party is in a position to offer favours to the other by virtue of their position.
It is bad enough that people can pay to access politicians.

Surely someone who reaches a position of high office in Politics, The Police Force, Army, Navy whatever....... shouldn't be expected to drop any friends that they may have had for years. I agree they should be careful what they say in public but surely not in private?

The funniest part, Jess, was that several other broadcasters then found it almost impossible to avoid calling him Jeremy *unt. And it was so suitable.
Must be something about the name Hunt - I met David, now Lord, Hunt, when I was a member of the Wirral Humanist Group. We wanted to ask him about the fact that if we withdrew out children from RE they were left to sit alone. He told us, quite seriously, that we could not bring up our children to be moral adults if we did not believe in god. He was surprised that we were offended.

absent, if you think 5-year-olds are 'defenceless', I'd love to introduce you to my youngest GS.

I can still never think of Hunt without smirking at the R4 worst ever online gaffe!

Mr Hunt the Culture Secretary as he was known then.

Five year olds, defenceless absent Don't know about that. Faced with an exhausted parent ...

JessM The image of the smirking Health Minister wiping demented bottoms and living in a nasty rented room is, naturally, a pleasing one, but it would be appalling to inflict him upon a defenceless five-year-old.

I think that something needs to be done to ensure that MPs have some connection with the society in which most of us live. Dear God, not National Service Lilygran but perhaps some sort of age restriction and job qualification (i.e. having done a "real" job) as you suggest.

I should also like to see a quota of female ministers in the Cabinet. At the moment 15.6% of the Cabinet is female. If it's left to Old Etonians the balance will never change.

I like the idea, Jess. Perhaps they could raise the age at which you can stand as an MP and require all candidates to have done a real job (not as a political hack) and earned a living for a couple of years at least. Or bring back National Service!

But they wouldn't would they jeni because poverty is an energy draining trap. Our dear leaders are full of pontification about hard working people getting on and improving their lot (as opposed to the lazy sods on benefits) - but if you are struggling along on a very low wage, counting every penny, how are you going to improve your lot? It is an American con - work hard, everyone can make it and get rich. This actually only applies to a small minority who have the resources (emotional, intellectual, family support and financial) to start their own businesses. But how many self made millionaires are there who really started with nothing - having to pay for a roof over their heads, nobody to lend them £100 ?
Ok - I would like to see Hunt the health minister installed into a nasty rented room with a dependent 5 year old and no relations living anywhere near. And a promise of a job wiping the bottoms of people with advanced dementia. And see how he gets on.

They are so conniving the low paid jobs would make them millionaires!

Damn, no one is entertained by my notion of our dear leaders doing 6 years low paid work before they are allowed to become MPs?
Hunt the health secretary anyone? A gift...

Yes. I was being rather general with "in childbirth". What a difference modern medicine would have made at various points in history, or would it all have turned out the same in the end?

I think Charlotte died from postpartum haemorrhage.

Her father was quite old when she was conceived. Could this have been a factor in gene mutation?

Another possibility - there was a race on for the royal dukes to produce a legitimate heir after Princess Charlotte, Prinny's daughter, died in childbirth.
Could Victoria's mother have helped the succession along with a bit of outside assistance? She was ambitious, and certainly did not balk at an unofficial relationship later in her life.

You can get spontaneous mutations. She probably though got it from her mother. It is recessive so only gives the disease in men as it is a lethal gene if inherited from both parents. Remember the high infant mortality in those days may have masked its prescence in former generations. A woman with it couldn't live beyond puberty.
The gene is carried by the female on one of the X chromosomes. It only manifests in males as they are missing a bit of the x giving them a y instead.
This proves women are superior as men are lacking something![hsmile]

Yes but where did Victoria's haemophilia gene come from? Girls get it from their fathers and her father didn't have it!

Back to the points from the classics. I'm reading 'The Prime Minister' by Anthony Trollope ( a tip from GN books thread) and all this corruption and newspaper gossip was going on in his novel written in 1870. Sometimes I feel he must have written it last week.

I don't know what to think about Cameron. He comes over as well meaning and honest but I suppose its the circles he moves in. He can't just cancel them out. But at least his connections are not dangerous for the country.

GN is nothing if not informative. European royals rather fond of keeping it in the family too. Queen Victoria passed on haemophilia gene to a lot of GSs , GGSs etc
Xi Jinping is new top man in China. He spent 6 years in his youth doing physical labour in the countryside - during the Cultural Revolution. Some say this should help him to empathise with the rural poor.
This has led me to wonder if one of the sacrifices we should demand of our cabinet members is prior experience of manual labour on a non-mechanised farm. Or some other job maybe, as there are not too many vacancies as apprentice peasant in the UK right now? Any suggestions or nominations.
I think I would just like to get the ball rolling, how about George Osbornea stint of shelf stacking on the night shift while trying to look after 3 young children in the day time.

Quite correct. His wife was his half sister. Daughter of Nertiti and Akhenaten.
Tuts mother was a lesser queen who seems to have disappeared from history after the birth.

I seem to remember (may be wrong) that buried with/near Tutankhamen were two little newborns or foetuses with his DNA which were deformed and non-viable. Inbreeding was not as good for the dynasty as they thought it would be.

All the Pharaohs did. They married their sisters. They became very inbred. Some people think that was happened with Tutankhamen . His father was very odd!

Most of the Ptolemy family had incestuous marriages - presumably to keep the blood line pure, though that's just a guess.