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.
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!
