Politics column – Saturday

In London, Moscow, and New York, main frame computers are in overdrive.

And the digital archives of the lizards of the Press are toiling away amid countless searches.

Yes, the nominations for Parliamentary candidates are in. And the game begins to see what clangers they have dropped since the digital dawn, and who has been a twit on the Twittersphere.

Every off colour (no pun intended) joke they have ever repeated or liked and out there buried amid the silicon chips will be hunted down and outed.

We will remember them.

There was an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman... Gotcha!

So take the list of candidates to be provisional. A few of those names will be weeded out by this modern vetting process. Those who survive will be those who have groomed themselves to be politicians from an early age, and have not ventured into lives of indiscretion.

A key general election question is, after the cull, whether the candidates who remain can yield a House of Commons which is any worse than the old lot.

You might not think that could be possible, and we can hope that there is some improvement in quality, but the answer has to be yes.

This is a general election called unexpectedly and in a hurry so there has been a lot of scrabbling about to field candidates, some of whom are entering the fray at short notice. I'm guessing that this means that some have not been able to do any local groundwork, and also that local parties and constituents have not had as much chance to examine them as they might have liked.

Perhaps there should be a multiple choice questionnaire, going something like this...

Why do you want to become a Member of Parliament?

a. Because I'm a posh toff and posh toffs were born to rule.

b. The pay – and I've heard that you can really bump that up with all those juicy "outside interests."

c. I wish to represent my constituents and champion their views and their interests in the House of Commons.

d. I wish to represent my constituents and put my views to the House of Commons on their behalf because the issues are too complex for them to grasp.

e. You're looking to tick some sort of box and choosing me as candidate will tick it for you.

f. I'm a show-off and it's a chance to appear on the telly.

Moving on to this week in the general election campaign, and get the buses ready with those money-for-the-NHS slogans on the side.

Because if the Tories win, they will be loading them with cash and taking them to your local hospital. If Labour wins, they will have whole convoys of them loaded with cash heading for your local hospital.

The slogan on each bus will say something like: "Another £10 million for the NHS, brought to you by Jeremy Corbyn/Boris Johnson/Jo Swinson."

If you believe Labour, Donald Trump will also be sending empty buses and hoping to drive off with the entire NHS.

One of the eye-catching promises of the week was Labour's pledge to give everybody free superfast broadband. Don't buy that idea yet – if you hold out they might chuck in free Sky Movies and a discount on the sports channels.

And Non-standing Nigel made a decisive intervention in the campaign.

Jutting out his jaw, he surveyed the battlefield. And the master strategist issued his orders to his troops.

Retreat!

This is typical fighting talk from Non-standing Nigel. Any thoughts that with the Brexit Party low down in the polls he was facing wipeout can be banished. No, indeed, this is a great victory.

You see, Nigel has already won. A humiliated Boris Johnson has bowed to his demands and mumbled something or other about a future free trade arrangement. Boris might even have given his word.

Poor Boris meanwhile tried to do the right thing by visiting flood-hit areas. It's his own fault. If you are going to call an election in the autumn, with the polling to take place in winter, you run the risk of God playing a part in proceedings.

On his arrival he was greeted by calls along the lines of "what took you so long?", but also "we don't need politicians coming here for photo opportunities."

He made a speech in which he didn't use a word to describe Jeremy Corbyn which the media had thought he was going to use.

It is a word I had to look up.

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The remembrance service at my local war memorial was the best attended that I've known.

As anybody who was in the last world war must now be in their 90s, there can be a dwindling few, if any, at these events now who do remember the fallen of that conflict directly.

My late parents were both in the war – my dad was a carrier pilot and my mum was in the Wrens – and lost many friends, including one who was beheaded by the Japanese a few days after the war had ended. Consequently we never had a Japanese car.

Remembrance parades, getting dressed up and putting on medals, were not their bag, and I dare say that they were not atypical among their contemporaries in that. My dad had particular difficulty with the prospect of being addressed at such remembrance events by a man of the cloth.

Instead he remembered the days when the entire nation, including traffic, came to a standstill and everybody quietly remembered in their own way.

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We cannot know how folk 100 years from now will see us. They may well think we were all monsters, who ate animals, destroyed the environment, and inhumanely locked people up for "crimes."

Then there's the fashion. Driving past a bus stop in heavy rain on Thursday it struck me that all those waiting had coats on, but all those coats extended only a short distance below the waist. So the legs get wet, unless you have rubberised trousers.

All my coats are like that as well. The obvious solution is to have a full length coat. You can of course get them, and some people do of course wear them. But we're talking about generalities here, and my impression is that long coats are not "in."

Just as present-day historians use handy labels, such as the Victorians, Roundheads, and so on, so will future historians.

This generation might go down in future history as The Wet Leggers.