“If I’d said Hitler was a Zionist, I’d have gone straight to my doctor to check I wasn’t in the first stages of dementia,” said Ken Livingstone, for the umpteenth time, as London’s former mayoral conducts his ongoing and utterly bizarre defence against accusations of anti-Semitism against him. In common with other elements of the hard left, Livingstone has a great deal of previous when it comes to the Jewish question, but I want to put that to one side and concentrate on his comment about dementia because it says a great deal about the man himself.
Read the quote again and it is quite clear Livingstone is cracking a joke and he is cracking a joke about dementia. There is no other way of reading it. The aim of the point he makes is to make the viewer, listener and reader smile. He thinks it’s funny. I don’t.
When it comes to sick jokes, I have form. Many of us have. I have shared some pretty unpleasant jokes over the years, including about dementia. No more. And the reasons for that? I have, finally, grown up. I have learned that some subjects are not normally funny.
I say “not normally funny” for a reason because there is humour in everything. I recently saw Ricky Gervais perform and he took on some subjects that were risqué to say the least. But it is personal experience of dementia that has changed my mind.
No one who acquires dementia escapes its consequences and everyone knows someone who has been directly or indirectly affected by it. It’s a truly horrible condition that ruins someone’s life and ruins the lives of everyone around that person. You do not need me to explain how ghastly it is, seeing someone you know and love losing the cognitive ability to communicate. Add to that misery, and then consider losing your family inheritance to pay for that person’s care, the inheritance they worked hard to build all their lives, gone. That is beyond unfair.
Imagine seeing someone one week, taking them out somewhere nice for a coffee and then, the following week, that person, not only failing to remember it but also not knowing who you are. That is the reality of life for something like 800,000 people in this country and their attendant families. I don’t think it is funny, but Ken Livingstone does.
And before you give it the old “You’re overreacting!” malarkey then, once again, read his words. I have known people when they and their families received the news of a devastating diagnosis, the knowledge that your brain is dying and soon things will get so bad you won’t be able to communicate at all. It’s horrible, every bit as bad, maybe even worse, than hearing someone has a terminal illness of a different kind. Dementia not only takes away your life, it takes away everything else, often in the slowest imaginable way. And this was not a one-off slip by Livingstone. I have heard him say it on numerous occasions before. He knew exactly what he was saying.
There are plenty of reasons why Livingstone should be booted out of the Labour Party. Making crude humour out of dementia is not one of them but his crass comments are hardly in keeping with the “gentler politics” promised by his wretched friend Jeremy Corbyn which have never arrived and never will.
