The sump of England

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not many people would look back at the 50s and early 60s in the UK and describe them as a period of touching innocence, especially politically.  But compared with Conservative politics in 2021?

     To a pre-teenager like myself, the major political memory of the early 60s was The Profumo Affair, not quite in the way that I know the details now, but sifting through the things said and left unsaid at the time, even for a ten-year-old it was a time when you could tell Something Big Was Going On.

     A Conservative government minister, a Russian attaché, nobility, Great Houses, politicians frothing at the mouth and at the centre of it all Christine Keeler, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the most memorable image of her a photograph by Lewis Morley in 1963 where she is naked, sitting the wrong way round in a Habitat chair.  Heady stuff!

     But the key component in this story is the concept of consequences and responsibility.  The disgraced Conservative minister John Profumo resigned because he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler in a statement to the House of Commons.  People went to jail, there was a suicide, reputations were destroyed, questions were asked which brought into question the foundation of the sort of society that we assumed we were living in. 

     One commentator, Richard Davenport-Hines in his 2013 book An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo said that what was destroyed by the scandal was the sense of deference to the governing institutions, “Authority, however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced, was [after June 1963] increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust.”

     How well the Conservative government has learned that lesson!

     In 2016 as Gove was lying his way through the Brexit campaign, he was asked to cite economists who were actually in favour of leaving the EU.  He named no one, and instead said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.”  He was appealing to populism rather than facts and demonstrating that he could build on the catastrophic lack of trust that the 51-64 Conservative government left as a legacy.

     From Education, the NHS, Covid, Social Care, Immigration to every other aspect of government the ruling ethos is that of post-Trumpian false news.  The Doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 is now the common language of right-wing politics, inconvenient facts are redefined: illegality, bullying, theft, lying, are all given a make-over so that the Conservatives can speak “the thing which was not” as Swift had a Houyhnhnm (a rational talking horse) describe the lies that Yahoos (Humans) tell in the Fourth Voyage of Gulliver.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     If lying to The House were a resigning matter, then Johnson would not have been the PM for a considerable period of time as he has done little else, especially during the farcical PMQs that he signally fails to answer with anything approaching truth.

 

The previous paragraphs were written in the morning.  Now in the evening, it is time to look back over the past few hours in Parliament and consider what the Conservatives have done.

 

Owen Paterson, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the former Conservative minister, who was to be suspended for repeatedly breaking the rules banning paid lobbying, found himself the recipient of the “Get out of Jail free” card, handed to him by a vote of Tory MPs in the commons who basically decided to let him off.  Despite a cross party report of painstakingly detailed damning evidence for his wrongdoing, 250 Conservative MPs voted to shelve Paterson’s punishment, including 22 Conservative MPs who have been investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards and 19 of whom have had complaints against them upheld.  The vote to “overhaul the parliamentary process” was passed by 18 votes, obviously the guilty 19 made sure that this travesty happened!

     Link this sickening piece of partisan favouritism towards an egregiously guilty man with the Conservative party’s willingness to welcome back into the party a man, ex-Conservative MP Rob Roberts, 

 

 

 

who abused his position by sexually harassing one of his staffers and you have a picture of a party rejoicing in its own corruption and putting up two fingers to the rest of the country as a gesture of contempt towards the electorate.

     I feel literally sickened, or at least disturbingly queasy about what these latest scandals say about the state of politics and the country.  Perhaps post-Trump it is impossible to feel the disgusted shock that blatant self-seeking aggrandisement, not only in terms of wealth, but also in terms of power, should actually provoke.

     I am tempted to believe that Johnson has barely considered the feelings of the electorate when it comes to looking after his own.  He has always acted as an entitled egoist and, as with his support (until it wasn’t) of the absurdity of Cummings, or the rapacity of Jenrick, the incompetence of Williamson, the viciousness of Patel, the languorous idiocy of Rees-Mogg and the rest of his dysfunctional crew, he clearly doesn’t give a fig for the optics of any situation because he knows that he will wriggle out, deflect, lie, or blame someone else for whatever fresh disaster his form of “government” brings.

     What is truly worrying is that some of the people in Johnson’s ambit might have encouraged the exoneration of trash like Paterson precisely because his favourable treatment by his mates, re-writing rules to suit themselves, brings MPs and Parliament into contempt.  The more contempt is felt for our ruling classes, the more scope there is for a charismatic leader to emerge and led the gullible to a bright new Jerusalem.

     The fact that the leader has created the morass out of which he can emerge will be lost on most, because populism does not rely on logic or reason or facts – it relies on the exact opposite of those.

     Johnson is a chancer.  He is not guided by ethos or ethics, only by his own narrow self-interest.  He is prepared to sacrifice anyone and everyone, as long as he survives. 

     Covid and Corruption should have been the downfall of this viciously incompetent and deadly prime minister.  The fact that he has survived so far with his breath-taking disregard for those for whom he should have had a duty of care, is chilling.

     American presidents usually end their television chats to the nation by saying “God bless America!” I feel like ending this piece by saying, “God help Britain!”

 

T

 

 

 

 

You can't force imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was a public holiday in Catalonia and today isn’t.  The difference in the café after my swim was marked.  I was virtually alone and, as I sit at a table next to the plate glass windows looking out onto the car park, I had nothing to distract me from adding to the writing in my notebook.  Except, I didn’t much.

     I have found, in the past, that even the most quotidian of reflections about the weather or the strength of a cup of tea can sometimes give rise to more profitable thoughts.  Today, that was not the case, “Overcast, cold, with some hazy sun” remained a description of the state of the day and didn’t progress to profundity.  Still, I had a decent cup of tea at the end of my swim and I had had a lane to myself, so to quote Lewis Carroll, I felt fully justified in marking the day “with a white stone” – which, if my memory serves me right is an old Roman custom, and which I claimed as my own as soon as I read about it in one of the footnotes of Gardner’s Annotated Alice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow is my flu jab, and I think it says something about the way that I fill my days that this has become An Event in my week.  It is a step in the process of defending myself from the vicissitudes of various viruses and, as I have mentioned before, in my age group if you don’t look after yourself you can expect little from the authorities to help you.  Though having said that I did get a message on my mobile phone yesterday telling me that I should be thinking about my flu jab and, if I hadn’t already made arrangements, I should get an appointment via the helpfully supplied link.

     This will be an added layer of protection, especially as many of the Covid restrictions are being lifted. 

     For example, next week is my next visit to the Liceu, not for an opera this time, but rather for a ballet.  If you have a season ticket then a couple of ballets and the odd recital are part of the package, and the package is worth getting because its purchase comes with a discount of 25%.  And 25% off a lot of money is well worth getting!

     During the course of the pandemic, we have had performances cancelled, and sometimes entire productions.  When the Opera House opened up again, it was to a severely reduced seating capacity with various safety aspects enhanced.  Our specified seats were no longer ours, and we season ticket holders were distributed around our chosen price area, to ensure that we could be islanded by empty seats.  The staged production of The War Requiem was the last of the adjusted performances and for the next we should be back in our accustomed places.

     But the pandemic is not over.  Although many young people act as if the Covid Pandemic is an historical event and nothing to do with their immediate lives, this is simply self-delusion, a self-delusion that could be fatal for those that fit into the most vulnerable age and chronic illness categories.  Double vaccinated people can get Covid and be capable of spreading the infection, even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of the illness itself.  The largest age category of new infections is in children.  We are not, in any way, shape or form safe from Covid.

     In Catalonia we longer are required to wear masks in the open air, though it is suggested that in more crowded places like paseos it is advisable to wear a mask and to keep to the social distancing rules.  But no one is entirely sure what, precisely, the rules are – and the mixed messages we get from our so-called political leaders do nothing to make the situation clearer.

     I will continue to wear my mask throughout the winter and well into the spring, and indeed until well after politicians have stopped trying to convince us that everything is back to normal, and we all please spend more money!

     It will be interesting to see exactly how the patrons of the Liceu behave in the new-normal dispensation.  As the vast majority of patrons in the stalls of the opera are people past the first flush of youth, I think it is more than likely that precautions will still be fairly firmly in place as the lights go down!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner this evening, at least for me, was the doggie bag remains of the paella that we had yesterday in the swimming pool restaurant.  I have to admit that the flavour had intensified after the dish had rested for a day and there is still some left for lunch tomorrow.  Though I will perhaps add a dash of curry to make the stuff taste a little different.  Please don’t tell any Catalan cuisine purists what I am doing, as they are easily shocked by the unconventional (or blasphemous, as they would term it) approach to native cooking.

     I am reminded of the time when I was charged with buying a melon for a ham and melon starter for a meal, and I returned from the shops with a sandia (a red watermelon) and there was chaos when the assembled company realized what I had done.  We did have sandia and jamon, but it has been a memory which always raises a shocked smile as the misstep is remembered and discussed. 

     Personally, I found the combination excellent and would readily eat it again.  

      I am alone in that determination in this part of the world!

Wither irony?

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, Johnson is flying back to London after COP26 in Glasgow by private plane.  With anyone else of even minimal political credibility this would be a crushing piece of destructive irony – after weeks spent mouthing platitudes about the need to reduce carbon footprints.  But with the charlatan Johnson, it is no more than par for the course for someone who can see no further than himself.

     Add to that the news that the disgraced Conservative MP who sexually harassed a member of his staff is to be allowed back into the Conservative party, and it all fits with the assumption that most Conservatives can do what the hell they like and will be subject to few lasting restraints or consequences. 

     Be grossly incompetent?  Bully your staff?  Lie to the House?  Lobby illegally?  Give your donors preferential public money deals?  Kill people through mismanagement?  No worries with the Conservative equivalent of a perpetual Get out of Jail card ever at the ready to smooth a path for those who have demonstrably done wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     A few days ago, I read a piece about Spike Milligan making the point that if anyone deserved the accolade of King of Satire, it must be him – but the piece also brought up the idea that the last few years have been so bizarre that so-called real life has produced actual event and characters that in their destructive absurdity defy satire.

     Donald Trump and his troupe of grotesques, you would think would be idea fodder for the sort of treatment that was meted out by the latex puppets in Spitting Image – but, when you look at the orange artificiality of Trump’s face and the wispy monstrosity of his hair, and how and what he says, how can any puppet do justice to the abomination that he exemplifies?  

 

 

 

 

 

     Watching Trump at one of his rallies forced you think that you were in a world where Dada, Surrealism and the Black Paintings of Goya were the motivating forces, rather than anything that could be recognized as “normality”.

     In a similar way the continuing car crash of Johnson’s so-called government of Britain would seem to demand that the cries for his instant dismissal and prosecution for wilful dissimulation and corporate manslaughter should by now have reached a crescendo – but still his corrupt and corrupting party had a healthy lead in the polls, and Johnson’s laughable “leadership” is still seen by a remarkable proportion of the population to be something in which they believe.

     And there, I think lies the crux of his popularity.  Facts and figures now mean nothing, or at least very little, to those who think that Brexit was a good idea and that the Conservatives have the interests of the whole of the country at heart.  The Conservative party is now a cult, and belief in Johnson is a core tenet of belief, something beyond mere reality.

     Every time I see Johnson in the newspaper or on the TV, I find that I am now experiencing the same feelings of revulsion that I had for a character like Saville.  Even at the height of his fame, when he was lauded by young and old, rich, and poor, the great and the lowly, I felt a repellence towards Saville.  He was not a person you would want to be near.  I am not, of course, suggesting that there is any similarity in the crimes that Johnson and Saville have committed, but the feeling that they are both wrong ‘uns is compelling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day after tomorrow I get my flu jab, and I hope a specific date for my booster Covid shot.  Although mask wearing is still happening in Spain, young people are more obviously not following the older population where mask wearing in crowded public space is usually the norm.

     I keep remembering the statements from health officials that “until everyone is vaccinated, we are all at risk”, and then I look at the statistics of how many children have been vaccinated and then hear of statistics from Africa and other parts of the world where a tiny proportion has had any sort of protection, and I think that the attitude of “we call all start travelling again in 2022” is blind optimism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today was the last day of my extended birthday.  I like to keep in a birthday mood for at least a week.  So, the excellent paella in the restaurant connected to my swimming pool was a fitting end to the jollifications.  Roll on my Name Day!