There is a J G Ballad short story entitled, “The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race” that you can read here:
where the title is perhaps more powerful than the actual story itself. The rivalry between Johnson and Kennedy was well known and the reframing of the assassination as a race with winners (Johnson) and losers (Kennedy) is one that resonates.
That title and the competition that it suggests came back to me when I was momentarily able to supress the frothing fury and disgust that have been my overriding passions as I have been following the Surrealistic circus of None Of The Above trying to get 0.03% of the voting population to elect one or other of the wasters to be Prime Minister of a real country.
Truss, with the characteristic malevolent disregard for conventional politics has gone all out for the Neanderthal Home Counties Conservative Vote and has thrown what The Guardian has described as “red-meat right-wing policies” to the ravening hordes of ageing, white, comfortable, English Conservatives who are going to elect her. Her complete lack of effort to try and include the concerns of the rest of the country in her unseemly scramble for power have not held her back from assuming the mantle of The Unicorn and floating ill thought-out and plain wrong “solutions” that, while not working in what might be termed the real world, have all too much “reality” in the closed, petty world of her Conservative electorate.
She has shown no shame in pandering to the lowest possible denominator and has misled and downright lied to get her twisted message across. Her only concern is power and its acquisition; all else is subsidiary. And, let’s be fair, don’t knock it, it’s working. Short of (I won’t say a miracle, because “Rish¡” is just as vile and unpalatable) a huge surprise, the shallow, cosplaying, Thatcher-lite cypher is going to be elected to head the Conservative Party and thus be the Prime Minister.
Both sections of None Of The Above have been playing this election as a game. Given the probable outcome you could say that Truss has been the more adroit politician but (ironically) at the expense of her wider political credibility.
Rish¡ has in my view accepted that he is going to lose, but has decided to play the longer game by attacking Truss and her policies in a fairly trenchant way so that he can be seen as “the voice of reason” (or something!) when Truss assumes power and shows herself and her policies totally incapable of dealing with any and all of the problems facing her and her terrifying possible cabinet of the undead.
Sunak (I can’t stand his twee logo) is obviously prepared to wait for disaster (Please God!) in the next general election and then to shuffle modestly into the limelight and accept the heavy mantle of defeat by pushing Truss into the wilderness and leading the party forward in yet another “delete all and insert” periods pretending that the last years had nothing at all to do with him and that he is untouched by the crass failure of Truss because, look, he had warned about it all from the start!
If a week is a long time in politics, then a couple of years (perhaps on the back benches) look like eons – but Sunak, with his untold millions, will be able to orchestrate his position, and build up his support so that by the time the electoral defeat (Please God!) has sunk in, he will be seen as the natural leader to guide the shaken party towards electability once again.
Sunk has, sort of, made it clear that he would find it difficult to serve in a government led by Truss, but, out of power and out of the cabinet, it is very difficult to maintain a power base on the back benches without appearing to be disloyal. And disloyalty is something the party cannot stand – unless, of course, you are dealing with a person who has always been serially disloyal, like Johnson - when Sunak’s resignation is seen as a “stab in the back” of a person that the 0,03% would still probably like to be “leading” them.
Sunak is playing a dangerous personal game, dangerous in the sense that he could condemn himself to marginality in politics, and I’m not sure, having had a taste of power, that he would be prepared to sideline himself for years in the hope of eventual returns.
What I sincerely hope is that the Conservative Party rips itself to pieces.
I am sick and tired of hearing that the Conservative Party is the most successfully resilient in Europe as it constantly re-invents itself to make itself appear to be electable time after time – while ruthlessly pursuing policies that keep the status quo and its wealthy supporters happy. If only we could have a socialist government that acted with the same passion for the workers of the country rather than the less-than-1%ers!
I look forward to the political future of my country with absolute dread. I have no confidence that my country (including the unemployed, the disabled, the low paid, the sick, the old and all the other groups that are marginalized in some way or other, the arts, culture, education, the Health Service etc etc etc) will be better with a Truss government.
The wrecking ball of the right wing is swinging, ready to destroy!
I am fond, almost on a daily basis, of bringing up the picture of Goya’s etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – but with the alien throwback Redwood poised to enter government at least one of those monsters can be given a recognizable face. The only way is down!
