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I’ve always felt that Polonius in Hamlet has had a bad press.  He is usually dismissed as a boringly preachy busybody who voices trite truisms and is eventually killed behind the arras, and who cares?

     In my production of Hamlet, Polonius would be a master of state craft and a more intelligently Machiavellian protagonist than the fussy old father that he usually is.  I think that a lot of the advice that he gives is good and has become unattributed aphorism.  It is particularly pleasing to see that our departing Prime Minister has taken one of his homilies to his tiny little heart.

     In what is probably Polonius’s most famous utterance he says, and he prefaces it with a ranking of its importance (“This above all”) “. . . to thine own self be true” – and with his last speech Johnson has personified that dictum, by using his last public performative vomit of words as Prime Minister to lie, lie and lie again!

     His achievement of the first stage of becoming World King (i.e., Prime Minister of Great Britain and The United Kingdom) was through the lies that seeded the victory in the corrupt Brexit campaign.  Throughout his inglorious stewardship of the Government, he has lied to The Queen, Parliament (repeatedly) and The British Public – as well, of course as various lovers, friends, officials, foreigners, wives, colleagues, bosses.  Everyone, in short, with whom he has ever been in contact.

     Everything in his Last Speech was either an out and out lie, a wilful misinterpretation of accepted reality, or a shading of the truth with intent to mislead.  From his false assurance that he would retire to his plough, knowing as he did that his chosen Classical reference was to a man who was called from rusticity to public life again, to his fulsome assurance of his backing of Truss (an assertion of loyalty from a man who made an entire career out of disloyalty) his statements were, one after the other, disingenuous.

     It is remarkable that being Prime Minister during one of the most turbulent post war times has left his character untainted by any scintilla of self-knowledge.  He started the job on a lie, he has lied through his time in office, and his valedictory speech was also a pack of lies.

     His baseness is so profound that nothing, not a near death experience; unnecessary Covid deaths; divorce; marriage; birth of a child; criminality; public disgust; rejection by colleagues; degradation of Britain’s position in the world; breaking draconian rules and being found out; presiding over a cost of living crisis; threatening the destruction of The Union; breaking the law – and so on, NOTHING has been able to dent, nay, scratch his galactic self-esteem.

     His leaving speech reeked of faux humility – lauding his imaginary achievements and parading his equally imaginary victimhood; praising a woman he hopes will fail, so that he can be seen as a Bonnie Prince Charlie character, the king over the water, waiting for the call to take what is rightfully his.

     Johnson should remember that The Young Pretender’s life ended in bitterness, loneliness, drunkenness, and failure and, something that Johnson can all too easily relate to, dependent on the charity of others for his lifestyle!

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

 I am building up my strength to respond to his replacement’s speech in little over an hour or so.  Toni has suggested a coffee in town and perhaps a sugar free ice cream in our favourite gelateria.  Sounds like a good way to separate myself from the political anger that is all too evident in my world view nowadays.

 

Oh, and by the way, the “to thine own self be true” continues:

 

“And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man”

 

And to be fair to Johnson, he has been glaringly true to his debased self from day 1, in his twisted world of alternative facts, the only way in which he could have been false to himself, was to have told the truth occasionally, but he had the strength of character to resist such weakness!

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 28 – Easter Sunday in Holy Week, 12th APRIL

1.              I am glad that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of Intensive Care and is recuperating.

2.              The Prime Minister Boris Johnson should resign immediately for his dereliction of duty in wilfully ignoring his own government’s restrictions for social distancing and becoming infected.

Glad that I have got that out of my system.  Again.  I am still recovering from a few hagiographical pieces that described Johnson’s visit to hospital in existentially catastrophic terms, right down to the “indrawn gasp of horror” at the news.  Get real!  It tells you something about my low expectations from the bunch of deadbeats with which Johnson has stuffed the cabinet that I was actually relieved that the trashy Brexit fanatic Raab turned out to be the deputy for the incapacitated Johnson rather than somebody (sic) of the dubious quality of the Goblin Gove, the pernicious Patel or the unspeakable Rees-Mogg.  Just the bunch you need at a time of crisis!

Talking of worthless political chancers brings us to the situation here in Spain.  Our Prime Minister/President has sent mixed messages to the population that the lockdown should be extended to the 26^th of this month, but that non-essential workers should return to work on Tuesday!  Masks will be provided for those using public transport.  Apparently.

     The figures for deaths and infections are still horrifically high and the President thinks that it will be safe – not, that can’t be true.  He thinks that it will be economically beneficial to open up the economy again.  As usual, the poor bloody infantry of the ordinary citizens can be seen as collateral damage.

     OAPs have been told that they, nay, we will have to isolate ourselves for an unspecified number of months to be safe. 

     This cannot be the way to go.  Where is the testing that we have been told about?  Our ‘free’ facemasks are allegedly available from Tuesday.  If nothing is done, then Tuesday is going to be chaos with people doing whatever they feel like.  Any gains that the past period of lockdown have given us are likely to be swept away by a surge in fatalities.  The logic of the position of our government is lost on me.

     And don’t get me started on the madness of Trump’s America where demagoguery is equated with scientific fact and logic.  We live in mad times with mad men dictating the interpretation of events!  Reality will eventually catch up – but what will be the eventual cost in terms of human lives before the lies are rejected?  If they ever are rejected.

What an Easter!  I can’t pretend that the ‘festival’ has ever been something that I have celebrated, apart from my earlier years of faith when I would go to church for communion.

     Here in Catalonia it is very easy to forget that this is a festival at all, let alone a Christian one.  Most of the people I know who might go to church, don’t.  If you see what I mean.  Catalonia is a Roman Catholic country, but the Catholics are generally of the non-church attending, anti-clerical sort that doesn’t go out of its way to show adherence to a particular theology.

     The only celebration was pounding music from neighbours on rooftops in a near street.  It was our version of the balcony concerts and musical episodes that other places had experienced.  It was not really convincing, but I found it quite uplifting it its way.

I think we are going to need many more uplifting moments in the coming weeks!

A sad, bad man

The referendum has come and gone.  The Spanish elections have come and gone.  My response in both cases has been to write poetry and feel thoroughly depressed – something of a literary tradition in times of sadness.  But, there are limits to what even the sublimity of poetry can achieve.  In these cases it is only the rough workaday utility of prose that suffices.

            Boris Johnson (one of the Four Donkey Drivers of the Apocalypse) has declined to be one of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party and the next (God Help Us) Prime Minister.

            I can think of no explanation for his action which reflects anything but badly on him. 

Let us consider the possibilities.

1              Cowardice

Having seen the state of social, political, financial and cultural crisis that his opportunistic and selfish leadership role in the Leave Campaign has delivered to the British people, Bumbling Boris has a clear case of what I am sure he would term, ‘funk’.  He has no intention of accepting responsibility for the chaos that he has caused (why should he?  The philandering liar has no history of doing anything like that) and has offloaded the messy situation for somebody else to deal with.

2              Opportunism

Having decided that there is no personal advantage to be gained by doing the hard work of overturning or mitigating the disaster he has helped cause, he will now bide his time and assiduously work on the myth of ‘The Greatest Prime Minister We Never Had’ and, when the dust has settled and the level of British misery has reached its nadir, Boris can then poke his stylish writing above the parliamentary parapet, wave his illusory political credentials in the Westminster air and shyly shuffle into the limelight that he will have switched on for the occasion.

3              Consolation Prize Status

After taking a leaf out of Cameron’s “I am an abject failure but I am also capable of a pretence of dignity in a self-made defeat” Boris’s chummy statement (which is the equivalent of “It’s a fair cop!”) is an obvious plea for a senior position in the next government.  No Prime Minister in their right mind would want a lazy deadweight like Boris in a real parliamentary role, but the Blue Rinse Hero Worshippers might force his participation, by sheer unthinking adulation, into some meaningless political role.

4              Going back to his real job

No one can accuse Boris of being a competent Mayor of London or MP, but he is a fluent writer.  Perhaps he has realized that being in a situation where he would actually have to turn up on time and do some real work would interfere intolerably with where his real money making opportunities are found: in writing, public appearances and dangling from photo opportunity zip-wires.

5              Deception

It is much more than fair to argue that Boris has done nothing more than he has always done: let people down.  There is only room for one person in Boris’s life and that is Boris himself.  He did pretend over the last few months that he had the interests of the British people at heart, but nothing in his previous career would justify believing him, so, in a way, the heading of this section should be ‘self-deception’ – not by Boris (he, after all thought he knew exactly what he was doing) but by those who actually fooled themselves that they might have a micro space in a totally exclusive ego.

6              Lying

Perhaps it is almost like the last category, but there has to be a separate category to epitomize the character of the charlatan.  He was and is a liar.  He entered the referendum after writing a Brexit and an Remain piece for his highly paid column and then chose the Brexit.  After, we are told, a great amount of heart searching.  Liar!  Why is anything other that mendacity expected from a serial liar?  So, at the end, even his assertion that “I will [ . . . ] give every possible support to the next Conservative administration” can be thought of in terms of how much support he gave his pal Cameron.  Liar!  Once a liar always a liar.  It is my belief that given time and space Boris can, almost in his own words, “win and be better and more wonderful and, yes, a greater liar than ever before.”

Boris is a contemptible person.  He is an opportunistic politician.  He is a disaster.  He is a coward and shirker.

There is one thing that he can do to partially redeem himself.  Apologise.  Give a humble, sincere and abject apology.  Then resign from public life and all public offices.

What chance is there of that?