When it was confirmed to Oliver Letwin, the longtime Conservative policy wonk, that he is indeed to be handed one of the highest awards afforded by David Cameron’s resignation honours list, he said ‘One love! One heart!’, and tugging at his surreptitiously braided hair, called on his former boss to offer, ‘Let’s get together and feel alright’.
And Oliver Letwin said ‘Hey! What a wonderful kind of day!’, because after all it is nice to be knighted. Letwin has listened so many times now to the song by Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, he barely remembers those blissfully wasted days when he first heard it as the theme to the popular children’s cartoon Arthur.
Way back before that in 1985, a £10 million communities programme was proposed to aid businesses, improve housing, and train low-income youths in those inner-city areas which had recently been affected by rioting. In the Handsworth district of Birmingham, then in Brixton and Broadwater Farm in London, unemployment and racial tension had underlied a series of riots, which in the case of London had been sparked by the shooting of a black woman by the Metropolitan Police.
Alongside inner cities adviser Hartley Booth, Letwin was the co-author of a paper which successfully dissuaded then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from putting the communities programme into action. The pair concluded that any money offered to black communities would either ‘subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops’, or end up ‘in the disco and drug trade’. When these comments were made public after a thirty-year wait in 2015, they caused a fair bit of consternation, with some accusing Letwin of appearing slightly racist.
Today however Letwin is a changed man, and beyond his taste in music he is a committed Rastafarian. Having worked hard to serve up a fearful batch of Tory policy for the duration of Cameron’s leadership, his knighthood now is surely well deserved. But to prove his worth to those who still doubt him, Letwin is reportedly considering investing in dope or opening up a snazzy new discotheque.
These are two ways in which Letwin might use his knighthood to give back to the community. Now a man of leisure, with his knighthood he has the time and the prestige to really make a change. Perhaps he will open up one of his private tennis courts. Or on the other end of the spectrum, he might simply toss his knighthood into a park bin.
Letwin is fond of tossing typically esteemed items into nondescript park bins. In 2011, it was revealed that on his early-morning walk around St James’s Park in Westminster, he was routinely throwing away piles of documents pertaining to his post. There was no need to worry, because these weren’t important governmental documents, only the concerns raised in letters by his constituents, along with their names, addresses, and other personal details. Letwin duly apologised and promised it would never happen again.
But some of these constituents were no doubt minorities, working class, or both – precisely the sorts of people who surely go scrounging around park bins, looking for a tasty morsel or some other type of licit or not-so-licit treat. Letwin can keep the title, and after all he has little pride. He knows he deserves it, so let the medal go to the bin, where some lucky soul might find it, where after his career of public service it unquestionably belongs.
