On lies, filth, vermin – and Tories

What to do when you inherit a mess

Home, sweet home. (Or something like it.) Credit: Tenra

Rotting food in the fridge. Washing-up in the sink. A floor so encrusted with mouse-shit I had to fight not to gag. Oh, and a shed full of stuff, a loft full of stuff, kitchen cupboards full of crockery and saucepans caked in grease. This is what we found last Monday when we walked through the front door of our new home.

I’d had an hour’s sleep. Not because I was excited, though I was, and sad, though I was, and stressed, though I was, but because it takes a lot of work to pack up and clean a four-bedroom house, and scour every cupboard and dust every corner and Hoover every speck of dust off every floor, and I was running out of time.

I did it when I sold my flat in the summer. I spent two days on my hands and knees scrubbing it to pristine perfection, handed the keys to the estate agent and asked him to repeat his words: “Oh, they’re not in the country at the moment. The builders are going straight in.” The people who didn’t bother to turn up to look at the place they had bought were the people who had demanded an extra £15,000 off because they had “misread” the listing. I can’t say I thought we would ever be best friends, but I made the place perfect for them because that’s what you do.

Or at least I thought that’s what you do.

Just before we exchanged on the house we have just moved into, our solicitor forwarded a plaintive email from the owner. He was feeling stressed, he said. It would help him, he said, if he could leave behind the curtains in the sitting room and “a few” other things. This was not, he said, “a request to leave rubbish in the house”. He did not use the phrase “mental health”, but the implication was clear. My mental health is more fragile than yours. My stress is greater than yours. It’s simple maths. For mine to go down, yours must go up.

At the time, I was just relieved that he wasn’t leaving a human. We had waited more than a week for the tenant to sign the contract saying she would vacate the property. Or at least to tell the estate agent that she had signed it. She did not, she said, have time to take a photograph on her phone of the signed contract because she was too busy working with vulnerable people in the NHS. And no, it would not be possible for the estate agent to pick it up and courier it, but she had put it in the post first class.

And so we waited. And waited. And waited. And then we got an email from the solicitor saying that the tenant had not, in fact, signed the form, and had not, in fact, posted it, and that she would not do either until she had had legal advice. At which point I started Googling the phrase “sitting tenant”.

She moved out the day before we moved in. She told the estate agent she would return to remove the rest of her stuff but didn’t. She left the kitchen in a state I have never seen in a human dwelling. It made me worry about those “vulnerable” people in the NHS. But at the moment, to be honest, I am more worried about the pain in my back.

We said yes to the owner’s request. We felt we didn’t have a choice. We are nice. We are considerate. We are mugs.

Lying down now, with a hot-water bottle pressed against my back, that feels to me like the question of the day. Are we mugs? And is that the great divide? Between people who do as little as they can get away with and people who try to do things well?

Take, for example, Nadine Dorries. Please do take Nadine Dorries. Take her off our screens and out of our newspapers. There was no need to take her out of her constituency since she hadn’t been seen in it for months. There wasn’t much need to take her out of the House of Commons since she hadn’t spoken in it for more than a year. But there was, perhaps, a need to remove her taxpayer-funded salary of £86,584, which she was paid to do things she wasn’t doing. She had resigned, or said she would resign, because a proven liar proved to be a liar. That liar also resigned because he was once again proven to be a liar. Yes, it can be a little bit hard to keep up.

Last week, Dorries’s constituents showed her what they thought of her approach to her job. For the first time in the constituency’s history, they voted for a Labour MP. You might have thought that Dorries would be chastened. But no. It was Sunak’s fault, apparently. Sunak ate her homework. Dorries was as chastened as the man who promised her an honour, as chastened as Chris Pincher, as chastened as Liz Truss.

These people don’t recognise words like “chasten” or “remorse” because whatever goes wrong is always, always someone else’s fault.

Even Sunak, who seemed like quite a nice guy when he took over from Mad Liz, and quite earnest and professional and hard-working, has been bitten by the rabid dog that’s hooked on Tory blood. He has started attacking meat taxes and seven-box recycling schemes that may exist in Mars but not in the UK. He has told us that he is the candidate to rescue us from an apocalyptic nation. He seems to have no idea which party has been in government for the past thirteen years.

This is why I wept when I heard Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer give their speeches at the Labour Party conference. If they get elected, they will inherit the kind of mess they haven’t seen before. It will be as if they have just been handed the keys to a house full of rubbish and old mattresses, a house infested with vermin and encrusted with filth. I wept because this is what you get when you put charlatans and chancers in charge. I wept because it was such a relief to see hard-working, professional people who understand what they are taking on and want to take it on anyway. I wept because I felt a glimmer of something I haven’t felt for a while. I think you could call it hope.

At this terrible time in the world, we all need hope. We can’t control what happens in the Middle East. We can’t control all that much of what happens in our country. What we can do is keep our word, tell the truth and try to do our jobs well. What we can also do is vote for people who will make serious efforts to put our country’s house in order. In spite of the back pain, mouse-shit and sense of being a mug, that’s what we’re going to do with ours.