Just when you think . . .

 

 

 

 

 

You really don’t know whether to laugh or cry or start sharpening the knives for a major bloodletting! 

     Is it the swift volte-face or the fact that this discredited Conservative “government” even tried (with a three-line whip) to force through a sordid piece of legislation designed to defend poor little Owen Paterson MP?  One has to feel something akin to sympathy (or is it utter contempt?) for an MP struggling along on his MP’s salary in addition to more than £100,000 a year from the two companies that he lobbied on behalf of (against the rules) so assiduously. 

     And what has he done today?  Resigned, after his mate Johnson withdrew his support – as Johnson always does.  Johnson, the man who is liked by everybody except those who know him! 

     Well, I hope that poor little Paterson has managed to save something from the more than three hundred thousand a year that he “earned” to cushion his retirement.  Perhaps Johnson will make him a lord, after all our so-called Prime Minister has ennobled characters even less salubrious than Paterson. 

     Then, at least poor little Owen will have the lord’s per diem to try and encourage him forget the “cruel world of politics” (thank you poor little Paterson) that has been so unfair to him, by revealing (thank you The Guardian) his “egregious . . . paid advocacy” (thank you The Commons Standards Committee).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

Meanwhile the farce of this episode is still playing itself out.  Johnson has completed yet another, not U-Turn, more screeching handbrake reversal.  He forced his MPs to support the unsupportable, and to go on the record defending it and then, when the heat was raised by people accusing him of sleaze and blatant corruption, abruptly cancelling what was deemed so important it needed a three-line whip!

     There must be “decent” (they must exist) Tory MPs who reluctantly supported the government against overwhelming evidence, who will now have to explain not only their own questionable judgement in voting to support the government, but also the complete about turn by the same government within less than 24hrs!  I wish them no luck, and I urge their constituents to question them closely.

     This is yet another example of poor leadership.  This whole episode has been so catastrophically managed that heads should roll, with the first aristo into the tumbril being the person who ordered his MPs to vote: Johnson.

 

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 Johnson won’t, of course, resign.  Why?  Because Paterson has.   

     I wonder exactly what incentives he was offered by Johnson to do the "decent "thing?  (See: peerage above!)

 

Enough of the tawdry Conservatives.  I can’t help feeling that some sort of adapted version of my favourite quote from Christopher Marlowe, “Get you away, and strangle the Cardinal” fits this situation!

 

On an altogether more satisfactory note, I am now double vaccinated.  Not for Covid, I had the Johnson & Johnson, Jenssen Jab (so only one needle for me), but double vaccinated in that I had my seasonal flu jab (right arm) and my Covid booster of Pfizer (left arm) in a purpose build portacabin attached to my local health centre.  My booster was given six months to the day from the first Covid injection.  Thank you, health system of Catalonia!

     The only problem I now face is tackling the Byzantine security systems that protect my medical details so that I can download a copy of the vaccination certificate for use, and I have already been informed that proof of vaccination will be needed to participate in a small poetry group in Barcelona.  A sign of things to come perhaps.

 

This evening to Terrassa to celebrate a joint Name Day, with Amazon being an integral part of the way that presents have been sent in situ as another sign of things already conventional!

 

 

 

 

The sump of England

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not many people would look back at the 50s and early 60s in the UK and describe them as a period of touching innocence, especially politically.  But compared with Conservative politics in 2021?

     To a pre-teenager like myself, the major political memory of the early 60s was The Profumo Affair, not quite in the way that I know the details now, but sifting through the things said and left unsaid at the time, even for a ten-year-old it was a time when you could tell Something Big Was Going On.

     A Conservative government minister, a Russian attaché, nobility, Great Houses, politicians frothing at the mouth and at the centre of it all Christine Keeler, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the most memorable image of her a photograph by Lewis Morley in 1963 where she is naked, sitting the wrong way round in a Habitat chair.  Heady stuff!

     But the key component in this story is the concept of consequences and responsibility.  The disgraced Conservative minister John Profumo resigned because he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler in a statement to the House of Commons.  People went to jail, there was a suicide, reputations were destroyed, questions were asked which brought into question the foundation of the sort of society that we assumed we were living in. 

     One commentator, Richard Davenport-Hines in his 2013 book An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo said that what was destroyed by the scandal was the sense of deference to the governing institutions, “Authority, however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced, was [after June 1963] increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust.”

     How well the Conservative government has learned that lesson!

     In 2016 as Gove was lying his way through the Brexit campaign, he was asked to cite economists who were actually in favour of leaving the EU.  He named no one, and instead said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.”  He was appealing to populism rather than facts and demonstrating that he could build on the catastrophic lack of trust that the 51-64 Conservative government left as a legacy.

     From Education, the NHS, Covid, Social Care, Immigration to every other aspect of government the ruling ethos is that of post-Trumpian false news.  The Doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 is now the common language of right-wing politics, inconvenient facts are redefined: illegality, bullying, theft, lying, are all given a make-over so that the Conservatives can speak “the thing which was not” as Swift had a Houyhnhnm (a rational talking horse) describe the lies that Yahoos (Humans) tell in the Fourth Voyage of Gulliver.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     If lying to The House were a resigning matter, then Johnson would not have been the PM for a considerable period of time as he has done little else, especially during the farcical PMQs that he signally fails to answer with anything approaching truth.

 

The previous paragraphs were written in the morning.  Now in the evening, it is time to look back over the past few hours in Parliament and consider what the Conservatives have done.

 

Owen Paterson, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the former Conservative minister, who was to be suspended for repeatedly breaking the rules banning paid lobbying, found himself the recipient of the “Get out of Jail free” card, handed to him by a vote of Tory MPs in the commons who basically decided to let him off.  Despite a cross party report of painstakingly detailed damning evidence for his wrongdoing, 250 Conservative MPs voted to shelve Paterson’s punishment, including 22 Conservative MPs who have been investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards and 19 of whom have had complaints against them upheld.  The vote to “overhaul the parliamentary process” was passed by 18 votes, obviously the guilty 19 made sure that this travesty happened!

     Link this sickening piece of partisan favouritism towards an egregiously guilty man with the Conservative party’s willingness to welcome back into the party a man, ex-Conservative MP Rob Roberts, 

 

 

 

who abused his position by sexually harassing one of his staffers and you have a picture of a party rejoicing in its own corruption and putting up two fingers to the rest of the country as a gesture of contempt towards the electorate.

     I feel literally sickened, or at least disturbingly queasy about what these latest scandals say about the state of politics and the country.  Perhaps post-Trump it is impossible to feel the disgusted shock that blatant self-seeking aggrandisement, not only in terms of wealth, but also in terms of power, should actually provoke.

     I am tempted to believe that Johnson has barely considered the feelings of the electorate when it comes to looking after his own.  He has always acted as an entitled egoist and, as with his support (until it wasn’t) of the absurdity of Cummings, or the rapacity of Jenrick, the incompetence of Williamson, the viciousness of Patel, the languorous idiocy of Rees-Mogg and the rest of his dysfunctional crew, he clearly doesn’t give a fig for the optics of any situation because he knows that he will wriggle out, deflect, lie, or blame someone else for whatever fresh disaster his form of “government” brings.

     What is truly worrying is that some of the people in Johnson’s ambit might have encouraged the exoneration of trash like Paterson precisely because his favourable treatment by his mates, re-writing rules to suit themselves, brings MPs and Parliament into contempt.  The more contempt is felt for our ruling classes, the more scope there is for a charismatic leader to emerge and led the gullible to a bright new Jerusalem.

     The fact that the leader has created the morass out of which he can emerge will be lost on most, because populism does not rely on logic or reason or facts – it relies on the exact opposite of those.

     Johnson is a chancer.  He is not guided by ethos or ethics, only by his own narrow self-interest.  He is prepared to sacrifice anyone and everyone, as long as he survives. 

     Covid and Corruption should have been the downfall of this viciously incompetent and deadly prime minister.  The fact that he has survived so far with his breath-taking disregard for those for whom he should have had a duty of care, is chilling.

     American presidents usually end their television chats to the nation by saying “God bless America!” I feel like ending this piece by saying, “God help Britain!”

 

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