My
favourite part of the ‘lie-abetter for Brexit’ Cummings’ Rose Garden
Explanation was his justification for going to local beauty spot Barnard Castle
on his wife’s birthday: to test his eyes!
Now, even though he is the chief advisor to the dyed in the wool liar
Johnson, I think it is perhaps unreasonable to call that little fantasy a
lie. The justification has obviously
been studiously nurtured over the weeks when Cummings and No 10 steadfastly
refused to give any details about Cummings whereabouts in the period he has now
so splendidly ‘shared’ with we plebs.
The ‘eye testing’ element is a tour-de-force in the ‘with a mighty leap
he was free’ approach to difficult situations in the old Saturday Matinee
serials from which there appeared to be no escape. I also liked the Tom Lehrer, “We’ll all go
together when we go” approach of loading the car with wife and young child to
ensure totality of extinction if an ophthalmic accident happened.
I listened to almost all the Rose Garden
‘Confession’ and was most struck by the fact that Cummings did not
apologise. At any time. He went out of his way to assert that he
considered that he had done nothing wrong.
But, the simple fact is, he did do something
wrong. He did break the lockdown. He did break the rule that says that you
should not go on unnecessary journeys.
As one Guardian commentator, Owen, said, the central reality of what
Cummings did shows that he broke the guidelines, “everything else is just
noise”.
As the focus is now ridiculously on him,
other snippets of duplicity are coming out.
Today we have been told about a doctored blog where his tinkering allows
him to present himself as prescient.
Editing past blogs is not a crime – but if you make reference to the
doctored blog to substantiate a claim, it is at least an academic crime, and reflects
nothing on your character. He is the
Mekon not Doctor Who, the only way he can travel in time is to alter the
records and then pretend.
The numbers of times I have said in the
past, “I do not see how he/she/it can continue, with honour, in post,” have
been uttered with tired exasperation because ‘honour’ usually has nothing
whatsoever to do with it. Whatever ‘it’
was or is, and the defective character defiantly brazens out the storm and
continues in place. Johnson is a perfect
example. He has been caught out lying,
cheating, misrepresenting and philandering, to name just a few of the –ing
words that spring to mind in his case.
He is selfish, disloyal, cowardly, hypocritical, mendacious, lazy, ill
prepared, loutish, vulgar, dishevelled, conceited, arrogant, complacent,
narcissistic and smug. And he is the
Prime Minister. In spite of everything.
Well, Johnson got his wish, he is in post
and is making a true hash of things.
Like a number of people I have known throughout my life, he is a prime
(ha!) example of somebody wanting something, but thinking little about what
achieving that goal will mean. He is
Prime Minister, but he gives little impression either of enjoying his position
or knowing what to do while he is there.
The demands of the pandemic show up all his failings. He is not the leader to bring the UK
together. He does not engender
trust. He does not give the impression
that he has the slightest idea of how to take the country forward. As I fear that we will continue to see with the
whole Brexit project, he fronted a campaign laced with lies, deception and half-truth;
he has ‘achieved’ Brexit, but knows little about how to make it anything
approaching a useful reality. The major
claims of the campaign are all turning out to be fantasy: the money for the
NHS; the lack of a border in the Irish Sea; the ease with which an agreement
could be done and so on. His fantasies
have cost us billions already as we stumble towards the hardest of hard exits
and his lack of management and determination have cost us lives. Tens of thousands of lives.
I am sure that Johnson feels that he has
been hard done by. He did not want to
become Prime Minister in a time of cholera, or worse. He wanted to be the blond haired poster boy
leading a flag waving pack of baying mindless Brexiteers towards the sunny
uplands of whatever their deranged imaginations thought was better than we had. He wanted to be delivering
pseudo-intellectual speeches, full of blokey forthrightness laced with the
soupcon of Classical Learning to impress what he regards as the Great
Unwashed. And it has all unravelled
because of what Mac the Knife called, “Events, dear boy, events!”
Johnson is a diminished man, politician
and Prime Minister. His inability to gauge
the feeling of the nation in their disgust at what Cummings has done will, I
think, be something of a turning point in his frankly disgraceful career.
Or not, of course. To Cummings and Johnson, what we think is
fairly irrelevant. We are not the
wielders of power, we are not the ones ‘born to lead’. We, at a very basic level, do not matter to
them. We are the goldfish, throw us some
titbits of salacious news and our five-second memories will wash away recent
events and return us to the quiescent subservience that they think is their due.
I only hope that the groundswell of
revulsion at Cummings is too big and too powerful to be relegated to the ‘other
country’ of the past and that simple justice might prevail and a man whose
arrogance has become too big for the country to stand is torn away from the
front stage of politics.
It’s time for the toddler Johnson to come
out of his Cummings style Pampers and wear his own grown up underpants with clean
confidence!
As if!
