The Sussex town certainly knows how to throw a party – and this year the Tories were the guests of honour, albeit in papier-mache form
I was reasonably sure that I could live my whole life without agreeing once with Jacob Rees-Mogg, and I nearly made it; then he said he loved fireworks. Unhappily, I also love fireworks. This year I went to Lewes in Sussex, which is like the Glastonbury of setting fire to things, the pilgrimage of the truly faithful, the place where there are too many firework displays for a firework lover to see them all, although unlike at Glastonbury, you can concurrently hear them all.
I had never been before, and had heard so much about it that I was afraid it might not meet my expectations. It turns out that if your expectation is that a lot of things will explode, it is almost impossible to be disappointed. “Good servant, bad master,” they always say about fire, forgetting all the other jobs it can do: excellent street entertainer, suspense-builder, child-minder. I saw a four-year-old carrying a flare considerably longer than their own leg; that kid was definitely not about to misbehave or take a break to eat raisins.
