Some people are thinkers. Some people are doers.
Andy McNabb, Alan Titchmarsh and me: we’re doers. Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain de Botton: they’re thinkers.
Some people are doers and thinkers. These are rare people. Stephen Fry is a doer and a thinker. But there aren’t many. Good thing too: they could be dangerous. Imagine someone who can think and also do. They could be brilliant or they could be a tyrant. And the former’s great, come on in, but we don’t need the latter, please keep your distance. But you don’t know which is which.
However, I have discovered a doer and a thinker.
Step forward, Edward Mitchell MP (pictured).
Ed is the Lib Dem* MP for Sunderland South, where’s he’s been their loyal representative since 1992. Before that, he ran his own business writing travel guides to the English regions and buying and selling antique umbrellas (what did I tell you? A thinker). He won’t mind me saying** that he’s 61 years young, a family man, with his wife Inez, and two daughters, Elaine and Susie; and as of last summer, Ed and Inez became grandparents to little Tom!
He’s a thinker. I’ve been telling you about the Disappeared. When the rest of the world stopped and ignored and passed by on the other side,* Ed stopped and he listened: he thought. He came to a meeting and he heard what I ad to say. He looked at the evidence. And what did he do next?
He did. He’s a doer, so he did something. He knocked on a few doors, made the right phone calls to the right people. He made a nuisance of himself. And lo! He made them listen. I’m going to say more about what’s happening tomorrow, but for now let us all celebrate Edward Mitchell, a doer and a thinker, and a hero to the Disappeared.
* But we don’t hold that against him! (only joking, Ed.) ✝
** I haven’t actually checked this.
*** Biblical reference
✝ I mean ‘only joking, Edward’ not ‘only joking – editor.’
