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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!

 

Down, down we go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the creepiest speeches that I have heard delivered was by That Bloody Woman when she quoted Saint Francis on the steps of Downing Street.  Absolutely stomach churning to listen to That Hag try and pretend that selfless generosity and inclusivity was anywhere near the core philosophy of The Conservative Party – even then!

     Now we have a resident of Number 10 who probably regards Saint Francis as a twelfth century enemy of the people leftie.  With all the hesitant charm of a broken reel to reel tape recorder, The Creature Truss gave her acceptance speech to the Conservative faithful and left the rest of us thinking of just how low a country has to sink to ‘welcome’ such an inarticulate cypher as even a titular leader.

     Unless she now (tomorrow) performs a series of policy U-turns that would tax the capabilities of a F1 driver, we are going to be stuck with someone whose ideology driven wrecking will demean, bankrupt, and kill.  Someone who has lauded the concept of NOT redistributing wealth in the face of the greatest cost of living crisis since the banking fiasco; who welcomes tax cuts that benefit the wealthy as a way of EVENTUALLY helping those in dire need now; who has shown less than a scintilla of interest in the realities of Global Warming.

     I will leave it to others to list her self-serving non-achievements; her lies; her ‘flexible’ beliefs – but I am preparing myself for the real moment of truth when she takes centre stage in front of Downing Street (or inside in case of rain) and says something real about what she is going to do.

     I am steeling myself for the list of cabinet appointments, but the fact that commentators have written that Dorries and Braverman are being considered for any post in government, let alone the highest positions, without breaking down into hysterical sobbing at the Ship of Fools that will be sailing under her captaincy, is horrific.

     Let’s get one thing straight – I care about my country, and I would rather see an excrescence like Truss succeed and the country thrive than have her fail and bring the country down further than it already has with twelve years of Tory Misrule, in which, let us not forget, she has been an active and maleficent wrecker.

     Truss went out of her way in her speech to laud her ‘friend’ Johnson, her friend the lying, narcissist, criminal Johnson.  If she takes his approach to honesty and responsibility, then we are in for a very rocky couple of years before the scythe of the next general election can do its long-delayed work!

 

 

 

The Worst Is Yet To Come!

 

 

 

 

Johnson’s “government” has been described as a zombie government because of their almost complete lack of interest in what is going on in the real world where the mass of the population is not taking one holiday after another as a way of forgetting about the various disasters and their pernicious legacy that twelve years of Tory misrule have inflicted on Britain.

     However, the metaphor applied to the non-existent phantom “government” of the liar Johnson is about to become reality as Trivial Truss has, according to newspaper reports, threatened to bring the “real” living dead into government by giving roles to such luminaries (in the same way that rotting meat becomes luminescent) as IDS and Redwood.  I was going to end that sentence with an exclamation mark, but after twelve years of the unthinkable becoming the ordinary it really doesn’t deserve it.

     BBC Wales never tired of showing a short clip of Redwood (they couldn’t find any real Welsh Conservatives of sufficient “presence” [sic.]) when he was Welsh Secretary, trying to sing the Welsh National Anthem.  You can see it here, with other delights of National Anthem disasters:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/sep/16/when-national-anthems-go-wrong-video

 

I am quite prepared to believe that the hapless Welsh Secretary was “ambushed” by the anthem, somebody (anybody) should have told him that the anthem was a possibility and given him a cheat sheet with the words written out phonetically.  I myself have had “a person of power” hiss at me, “Stand in front of me and sing!” when he didn’t know the words when on stage and the anthem was about to start!

     Redwood could have stood and, in spite of his habitual look of crazed alien mania, maintained a stoic stance of motionless respect but, no, the loon had to produce a performance that summed up his character, his policies and his standing in Wales and beyond!

     And now this relic from another age is seriously being considered for any position of power?  As a prominent member of the BFG (Brexit Fascists Group) aka the so-called European Research Group (where every word in their appellation is ironic or a downright lie) that in itself should preclude his admission to any responsibility more onerous than as a part-time Greeter in a failing Wal-Mart in an insalubrious district of downtown Sleezeville.  In government!  It would be a joke if it weren’t a serious possibility.

      I could go through the other putative Truss choices, but that would be far too depressing.  I will just allow one to stand for all.  Coffey is being considered for a “senior role” in the “new” (12 years of Tory Misrule So Far) government. God help us all.  I have yet to see a television interview with that person where she emerges as coherent, articulate and thoughtful.  Or indeed displaying any one of those elements.  If she is the best that we have got in the hundreds of Tory misruling MPs then we are at a depth where the term “scraping of the barrel” doesn’t give any impression of depth of shallowness that is being trawled!

 

Does anyone remember a time when the present Tory Party (TYofTM) hustings for the next leader of their discredited party was not going on?  The joke has long worn thin, and it is fairly obvious that the real title of the interminable race to confirm the downward spiral since Cameron (that titan of political acumen) should really be known as The Battle of None of the Above.  Who (even in the Conservative (TYofTM) Party actually wants either of the shameless unicorn chasers to win?

     It shows up the goldfish-like memory of Conservative (TYofTM) voters, that giving a straight choice between either of the None of the Above and the Tousled Twat, that they would prefer the lying criminal narcissist.  Says something about the lot of them.

 

 

Having spewed the bile from my body, I can report that the sun is shining, there is a cooling breeze from the fan, I have just had a refreshingly icy drink of tinto de verano and I am prepared to Do My Spanish Lesson!

Cartoon Politics?

 

 

 

 

For what now seems like the last twenty-something years of my life, a political organization, formerly known as The Conservative Party, has been putting on a mind-bendingly boring charade of Right Wing Cosplay to try and influence the miniscule audience of voters who will elect one of two cyphers who will replace the last lying narcissist to hold the role of Prime Minister, who in his turn replaced the previous vicious (yet vacuous) semi-alive failure in the role, who in her turn replaced the toff-boy coward who walked away (whistling) from his responsibilities.  So, the cyphers do not have to do a lot to fit right in with the bar of competence set at a Mariana Trench level of profundity.

     Truss, the ex-Remainer, ex-Lib Dem, and born-again Thatcher act and Unicorn Brexiteer is using the Johnson tried and trusted technique of blatant lying and blaming everything on everyone – apart from her semi-articulate self, while talking up increasingly far right policies (on the hoof) to try and get the old, white, knuckle-draggers of the Home Counties to vote for her.  She is risible and contemptible and is, let us remind ourselves, the favourite (sic.) to gain the keys to Number 10.

     Her perky, richer than Croesus, “I have no working class friends” opponent is also spewing nonsense, trying to balance (and failing) the need to appeal to a Conservative Membership that he must regard with little less than loathing, while attempting to voice policies that make at least some nod towards the fact that the UK is facing crises of an existential nature.

     Not, of course that you would get a sense of that by listening or reading about the various quasi-Surrealistic “hustings” of party members as they question these “candidates” who have to try and pretend that they are offering something new and exciting to combat the difficulties that they themselves have been creating for the last decade.

     The level of unreality is so palpable that I am sure that the majority of people trying to make sense of the “Noddy in Toyland” level of political acumen on display have truly forgotten that we have had a Conservative Government (I use the term in its loosest possible sense) since 2010.  Two thousand and bloody ten!  And they are acting as if Cameron, May, Johnson are all “resets” and therefore nothing can be blamed on the future Prime Minister, as they will have had nothing to do with previous administrations, apart from being slavishly voting MPs and actual Ministers in the actual government!

     As a Welshman, albeit living in Catalonia, I can take some comfort from the fact that the Conservatives do NOT have a majority in Wales and that we do not have the political dregs in power.  But the UK is governed from London and the monetary allocations are decided in Westminster and England has by far the largest population in the constituent countries of the UK so, although government is partially devolved, England is still calling the tunes – or rather the tiny percentage of the population that makes up the membership of the Conservative and Unionist Party is.

     So, as prices and inflation go up (and up!) and wages go down (unless you are in The City) we have weeks more of the farce that is the election of our next Prime Minister.  Embarrassments playing with props from the political Dressing Up Box, vividly illustrating just how far below the ludicrous our country has sunk.

     Perhaps the most depressing element in this whole charade of political game playing was summed by the Daily Mail who (seriously) averred that Johnson had bucked the trend of the political truism that, “All political careers end in failure.”  That is a rewriting of reality on a par with the everyday life of Trump, where there is an unlimited number of “alternative facts” to fit in with whatever deranged rearrangement of life unscrupulous right-wing demagogues demand the ever credulous to accept rather than believe the evidence of their own eyes.

     Another truism is, “This too will pass” – however good or bad things are, they will change.  Wars will end.  Things will resolve themselves.  But it doesn’t mean that things will be better when those “things” have “settled down”.  You can look at history through statistics, but statistics are human stories and have human consequences.  The removal of the twenty-five-pound uplift to Universal Credit is a story of human misery and political viciousness.  Real people suffered; it is not just an “economic detail.”

 

This is a bitter way to start again to add to my neglected blog, perhaps tomorrow I will be mellower and allow myself the luxury of hope!

Buildings take time

 

 

 

Another tortuous milestone in the construction of the Sagrada Família has been reached with the placing of the star light on the top of the Virgin Mary Tower and, this evening, blessing and lighting it.  This is the first of the two filial lights to be achieved, the second will top the central and largest tower in the basilica – the one which will mark the completion of the project and the one on which building has been delayed because of Covid.

     There was an ambitious plan to have the building complete for the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 2026, but this is looking more and more unlikely.

     In spite of living in Barcelona (the province and metropolitan district) I have visited the Basilica only once, in the summer of 1958 when my father dragged me off the bus tour of the city that we were on and took me to what I understood to be a series of ruins but was informed that I was standing in the unfinished part of an on-going masterpiece by the Catalan architect Gaudi.  I was, generally, unimpressed – though that attitude changed as I found out more about the architect and his buildings.

     Why, you might ask, have I not visited the building again, especially as it now has a roof, and the interior is complete?

     Gaudi is constantly associated with natural forms and the Basilica looks like a growing thing, something more vegetable than stone. 

     Gaudi ‘lived’ his buildings, he was intimately involved in their evolution from design to structure and he was capable of making on-site adjustments to his plans, so that the word ‘evolution’ associated with his buildings is something which is real – that is what happened.  The plans were a starting point and Gaudi was the guide to their development.

     The great cathedrals of the past were always works in progress, and sometimes that progress was glacially slow, as buildings emerged over decades and sometimes centuries.  Gaudi lived on site towards the end of his life, and he was dedicated to seeing his concept of the building rise.  And that’s the point: a Gaudi building needs Gaudi to see it through to completion.  Without Gaudi, the building is something else.  Not worthless and not necessarily inferior, but definitely something else.

     Gaudi was killed in a traffic accident, but his plans survived.  Well, they survived until the Spanish Civil War when they were burnt, but enough survived for projections to be made about what the final form of the building should take.

     Every great building is, of necessity, a collaboration – it is how far that the collaboration should ‘develop’ from the original idea that is in question about the ‘finishing’ of Gaudi’s masterpiece.

     I used to say that I would have preferred to have had some sort of encompassing structure placed around the parts of the Basilica that Gaudi had completed and say, this is what we have, we can imagine the rest.  A building without Gaudi throughout is not a Gaudi building.

     Perhaps that is a little too purist and I have vowed that if and when the building is finished (in my lifetime) I will visit.

     Those visitors from the UK who have visited the Basilica have come away singing its praises.  I have been content to view it from a distance and enjoy the silhouette rather than look too closely at the detail!

     The quick-sketch outline drawing of the Sagrada Família shares a place with similar sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and The Sydney Opera House as being something that is instantly recognized from a few quick lines.

     As I visit Barcelona on a fairly regular basis, I have of course, seen the Sagrada Família close-up from the car and I have to admit that it is an imposing pile, I hope that things come together, and I will be able to visit!

Johnson is a liar.  He is liar who is found out in his lies on a regular basis.  He treats the truth with the same contempt that he reserves for his past wives.  And yet, he preserves his popularity with the voting public.

     Perhaps, the Christmas Party of Christmas Past will be the ghost that drags him down.  With scandal piling onto scandal in the traditional way of Conservative rule over any period of time, it seemed as if each new disgrace was something that could be wafted away with an airy phrase or some cod Latin.

     The joking contempt that his personal spokesperson displayed in laughing about how to deflect difficult questions about a Christmas party held during the height of Covid restrictions might be the thing that finally (finally!) cuts through to the general population and brings about, if not his downfall, then at least some sort of change in the way that we are governed.

     Johnson has tired his usual tactic of smooth sincerity and the sacrifice of an underling to turn away the rightful wrath that should be meted out on his head.  His lies have finally caught up with him and there is a growing groundswell of opinion that he should resign.

     Although I personally think that he should have been sacked rather than given the chance to resign a long time ago, I am still not convinced that the Tory Faithful will give up what they see as an electoral advantage (i.e., Johnson’s skills (!) in campaigning) for any airy concept of honesty or probity.

     This evening, Covid Plan B has been announced by Johnson (in a press conference NOT in The House of Commons) as a necessary part of the regulations to try and keep the Omicron variant in check – but also, and far more importantly from Johnson’s point of view as a “dead cat on the table” distraction to keep prying noses out of the detail of exactly what when on in the Christmas Party Fiasco of last year.

     Why should anyone do anything Johnson says, when he so signally doesn’t feel himself to be bound by the rules that he stipulates for others?

     It will be interesting to see what the media say about all of this, especially as there were pointed questions about the hypocrisy of Johnson and his misfits in the press conference announcing the measures.

     The best Christmas present that we could all have, is that Johnson resigns instantly.  God knows I loathe the deadbeat candidates that are likely to take over, but they (with the possible exception of Goblin Gove) are almost bound to be better and to have at least a shred of something approaching an ethic.   

Please!