I spent an enjoyable (honest) couple of hours yesterday evening going through an archive of Labour material from a sadly deceased member, who like me clearly had an insatiable desire to horde everything that ever came across her path.
The archive was genuinely amazing, apart from boring stuff like treasury accounts we found some absolutely amazing things – local election leaflets going back to 1953, an unused sticker from 1980 (‘Peter Ward’s off the Tories coupled with a drawing of a man shooting a fox), an accounts book dating back to 1929 (!) and also some election editions of the local newspaper the Telegraph & Argus.
My favourite one was for the 1987 local elections, as I browsed through and did a huge and genuine double-take when I saw a picture with the words ‘Eric Pickles’ underneath.
In all honesty if I hadn’t seen the words I would never have guessed it was the same man who is now Communities Secretary in the Coalition Government, but of course locally Eric Pickles is famous as the divisive leader of Bradford Council who became so disliked he had to find a Tory safe seat down south as he had no chance of getting elected in his home town of Bradford.
Anyway, you can see for yourself below what Pickles’ looked like way back in 1987 – I showed it to a colleague and he genuinely couldn’t believe it was the same man, judge for yourself:
Eric Pickles in 1987 - more hair, less sweat
Eric Pickles today - less hair, more sweat
Would you believe that the same man prior to this was actually a Communist!
Oh yeah, I always forget that – like Melanie Philips he’s one of those people who has ‘buyers regret’ over initially being a leftie, moving right and now vitriolically hating and misrepresenting the left (or centre-left) and making lots of money out of doing it.
And of course there is that crucial difference between people who call themselves something, and those who actually *are* something. Mind you, I call him plenty of things…
Great historical archive find of the Piemaster General! Be glad you weren’t in the same room as him:
“Last time I interviewed Eric Pickles he had breath like nuclear waste. It was so bad it felt like he was giving me a nose tumour. #Newsnight”
10:52 PM Dec 13th, 2010
and be glad you’re not a constituent attending one of his surgeries:
“@profanityswan @fleetstreetfox remember the woman stalking Pickles for a while? She’d sit outside his office & masturbate in a deckchair.”
10:56 PM Dec 13th, 2010
Ha, brilliant! Never heard of fleetstreetfox before either
Sounds like a great archive. You should see if the People’s History Museum are interested.
What’s the People’s History Museum?
We’re going to have a further delve in a bit and see what we can find, and ideally see if we can put it up for people to view at some point.
That is a very flattering photo of Pickles that the T&A used in 1987! Back then he used to look like Oliver Hardy.