Schadenfreude and your heart of stone

Schadenfreude is an awful indulgence but so terribly hard to resist. Imagine the many woes of everyone’s blogging chum Iain Dale: His favourite football team hasn’t scored for ages and is languishing third from bottom in the Premiership. Dubbing him “the mastermind behind the David Davis leadership campaign” (eek), Recess Monkey alleges that CCHQ is pulling his strings (yuk). His favourite political party is struggling to keep a lead over an allegedly unpopular government halfway through its third term. He lives in Tunbridge Wells.

In its post conference analysis, the UK Polling Report reckons that “The Conservatives ... saw very little rise in their figures ... there was no boost at all to the party’s image (in fact the proportion of people thinking the Conservatives had made it clear what they stood for fell by 4 points)” Thanks to elephunt at Impossible Promises for directing me there.

As the much-plagiarised Oscar Wilde quipped, when referring to the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, 'you would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh’.