Promises Promises

When I was young and naive
I was taught how to write from the care home
everyone pretended was a boarding school
to my parents as part of my English grammar.
To make us more compliant to write
there was a mildly comic draft letter
we were taught never to imitate. It ran
'Dear Mother I am sending you a pound, but not this week'.

With hindsight the joke was very much on us,
we had insufficient money to send anywhere.
And we were kept at far greater cost
than ever we could have accounted for.

Now British citizens are facing a season
of resprayed/recycled electoral promises
and I remember that prototype letter.
I have to ask, did the men (it is mostly men),
who probably went to a proper boarding school,
now making the present politics of hope-deferred
for those with less ever know about that joke letter home?

It seems to me that they have adapted it,
word for word, in all their manifestos.