There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly? To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?
God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain! Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.
I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally! How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.
How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.
Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain. Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it. Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.
The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival. If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.
Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role. He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.
His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric. Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man. Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed. Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK. Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.
“Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.
Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything. Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.
Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations. Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.
He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants. His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason. There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody. Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody. And he is going to have to own it. And he will not be able to do that.
I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous. And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.
And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.
I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning. Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8. An extra hour in bed? Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit. It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!
But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.
My catalogue raisonnĂ© continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages. Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years. For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde. This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold. It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death.
The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me. There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.
Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.
A worthy addition to the catalogue! And it takes my mind off other things.
