Rule breaker - rule suggester!

 

 We are building up to yet another Johnsonian U-Turn, in which department he is something of an expert!  And he is being aided and abetted in his Ballet of Deception by the President of the EC who keeps to the script of “some progress” and “real differences” so that the final agreement (at the last possible moment) makes it appear as if Johnson has actually mastered his way to something real and acceptable.

     Let’s face it, any agreement will be better than none.  But when the final Johnson scrap of paper makes its appearance, I will be looking to informed commentators to explain when in the last four years we could have had something similar, or exactly the same or better! 

     In truth Johnson is no negotiator: he lacks the patience, application, wisdom, detail, ethos and everything else that a true champion of British interests needs. 

     Yes, he can trumpet meaningless three-word slogans and he can jumble metaphor and simile in a lurid word salad; but do the hard, detailed work for complex negotiations?  Not a chance. 

     And his opposite numbers in the EU know him for what he is (a lazy chancer and liar) and know that they have to act as stooges to his stand-up to get anything done.

     The professionals in the EU must shrug with weary resignation as they accept yet another session of baby minding as the nappy-wearing infant wiffles into view tousling his hair as he goes.  They can’t treat him with the contempt that he deserves because they recognize (as he can’t) that there is more at stake in the negotiations than individual reputations. 

     It is indeed sad to realize that the only people with the interests of the United Kingdom at heart are the people that the Brexiteers have caricatured and rejected!

     Ah well, I hope that the adults in the room are able to convince the baby that an agreement is there for the taking, by giving the crowd-pleaser enough belief that he has managed to achieve something of moment that will keep the rabid sections of his carnivorous party away from his all too solid flesh!

     It is obvious from the latest news broadcast that this farce of negotiation is going to be drawn out until we are all bored with it and won’t look too closely at what Johnson will actually have achieved. 

     Well, on with the comedy, I’m still waiting for my first laugh!

 

 

 

On a more positive literary note, Tim Harford’s new book now shares a place with my first Peter Gabriel record.  I heard a snatch of Jeux sans frontieres on the radio years ago and immediately went into town and bought the Gabriel LP; a couple of days ago I heard a snatch of Tim Harford reading his book and immediately went to my computer and ordered a copy from Amazon – which arrived the next day. 

     I am sure that there is an historical lesson to be learned from the different approaches of the two purchases which are 40 years apart!

     Tim Harford is the presenter of the quintessentially Radio 4 programme, More or Less, a programme that studies and discusses the statistics and other assorted mathematical claims made in the media and gives a reasoned evaluation of the value of the numbers and how they have been arrived at.  His voice has an undemonstrative yet compelling quality to it, as witness my immediate order for his book  The book I purchased is called How to Make the World Add Up and is subtitled Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers.  His style is conversational, authoritative with being preachy; it’s full of examples and reads like a novel.

     The title might suggest a top-down sort of approach, but Harford writes as if he genuinely wants to inform and facilitate.  He is fair and gently provocative and uses his considerable experience to explain and expand.

     This is a book worth buying, not just reading!  I recommend it without hesitation!

     It is, by the way, exactly the sort of book that those in government should be forced to read and then be made to sign that they have done so and promise to let the Ten Rules guide their thinking!  We would live in a much better world if they did!

Gusty times ahead!

 

 

High winds meant that I declined to use my bike and took the car instead – and everyone else appeared to have made the same decision and so the car park was relatively full within a couple of minutes of the opening of the centre.

     As the pool is enclosed with a retractable roof (I am not insane!) we are fairly well protected from the surrounding weather, but I noted as I gained the end of my first length that a door to the outside world had been opened and one could experience the cool gusts of a thoroughly unpleasant wind.

     It was only at the end of the swim when you have to go from the pool area via a short flight of steps and a linking corridor to the changing rooms that you see the weather clearly.  Not pleasant, and I was grateful to have a hot cup of tea and sturdy plate glass to give me an acceptable climate.

     But, by the time I came to leave, the wind had dropped and the sky was showing a little more blue.  In the afternoon we had sunshine, but not enough sunshine to tempt me to go on the bike ride that is the usual end of my morning of exercise.

     As ever, another cup of tea and my mobile phone with The Guardian were enough to keep me stationary in my armchair until it was time for lunch.

     From my reading of the actions of what one might laughingly refer to as ‘my government’ in the UK, it really does look as though, after four years of the bloody Conservatives saying that a deal was easy and oven-ready and all the other lying descriptions given, we are headed for a no-deal Brexit.

 

      

 

     The latest piece of ill-judged, crass, idiocy by Johnson is to flaunt four Royal Navy gunboats to patrol our fishing waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit and foreigners attempting to do what they have been doing for the past umpteen years.  Four ships for the entire coastal waters of Britain, that’s about 11,000 miles, divided by four, that means that each of the Royal Navy ships will have to patrol about 2,700 miles of coast each.  And what is the speed of these ships?

     So, the threat of these ships is purely, but not entirely, cosmetic, harking back to Britannia Rules the Waves and all that.  In other words, an empty gesture, that the EU must have been expecting from the empty vessel that they have had to deal with.  For years.  And years.

     I am still hoping that Johnson is going to have some appreciation of what he is about to do and realize that he will have to take a hit (however he spins it) in the interest of the nation.  As the seconds tick away, my hope is getting more and more hysterical, especially when I remember that no matter how cataclysmically stupid a decision appears to be, people still make it.  Brexit did win the referendum and the USA elected Trump.  However stupid and unthinkable, it could happen.

     But I will relax into the remaining hours of the weekend, yea! even unto the last minute to midnight on Sunday in the weary hope of sanity (at least partial) governing our 'government'.

 

Meanwhile to get my mind away from events that I cannot influence, we had a decent menu del dia in our usual Saturday restaurant and even felt buoyed up enough to do a little light domestic shopping.

     On the cultural front, I have re-discovered my tidied-up notebook and am working on the structure and content.  I am reasonably confident that the concept is workable, but the rest of this weekend should give me a clearer idea of the direction and, more importantly, whether that direction is worth taking!

Who counts the cost?

 

Just when you thought that Trump could not sink any lower in the human degradation scale, he is now, a lame duck president rushing to kill judicially as many death row inmates as his federal powers allow him.  The fact that no lame duck president has sanctioned judicial killing for over a century is of course not a deterrent to this sick joke of an incumbent.  Trump knows (I assume, though that is an assumption which credits Trump with a little too much knowledge or interest) that Biden is an abolitionist as far as capital punishment is concerned and so he is deliberately taunting the president-elect with a fatally childish display of time-limited residual power.

     I had thought that I was inured to shock from the antics of the most powerful man in the world, but as always, Trump confounds what you thought were the profoundest depths of his depravity.  In a way there is a certain consistency in his approach; his mismanagement of the response to the Covid catastrophe in the USA though his light touch indolence was at the expense of the death of Others, and his display of judicial slaughter is also at the expense of Others.  His presidency has been marked by misery and death, but he has survived and prospered, and that of course shows that he has been right all along.

     To use lethal injection or whatever barbaric means capital punishment is administered in the USA as a sign of your own power is disgusting and is a travesty of justice.  I do feel for the victims of the actions of those on Death Row, but judicial murder can never compensate for another death.

 

     Meanwhile our own pale reflection of Trump parades on the international stage as if he has a shred of credibility.  Marina Hyde summed it up beautifully in today’s Guardian:

 

“Received wisdom seems to be that this is all theatre – designed to show that the UK, which has rapidly ceased to be a serious country, is serious about its threats. If there is a flaw to this plan – and really, it’s such a tiny cavil – it’s that our prime minister is a liar of international repute. Possibly even intergalactic. For Boris Johnson, lying is not second nature: it is nature. Even on the occasions he wants to tell the truth – a rarity, but imagine it momentarily aligning with his self-interest – he has to make a vast, almost physical effort to override his psychiatric biology. It’s like watching a cat try to bring up a six-kilo hairball.”

 

Do read the rest of her piece in The Guardian, and indeed anything else she writes, it is one way to stay sane!  The link is here:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/11/boris-johnson-charm-prime-minister-england-dover

 

And it rained today as well.  It’s just one damn thing after another!

Tell me you are kidding!

 

 

 

 

 

The question that I keep asking myself is, “All Johnson is doing at the moment, it’s all just theatrics?  Right?”

     No one in their right minds would accept a no-deal Brexit as anything other than a disaster.  A disaster on so many different levels that it will take an age just to work out the detail of the disaster, as every day will bring new revelations of extra dimensions of “shotinthefootery” that we had not previously anticipated.

     Seeing that ungainly scruff represent the safety of my future in Brussels was a true low point.  How has it come to this, that an entitled chancer is ‘leading’ negotiations for an agreement in the dying days of our membership of the EU?  Johnson puts himself forward as a spokesman for the people of Britain, a concept he neither understands nor believes in.  He is a spokesman only for himself.  He cares nothing for the ‘people of Britain’ because they are, clearly, not him.  And he is his universe.

     I would love to believe that the charade of negotiation that is going on at the moment is nothing more than window dressing for the final capitulation to economic reality as some sort of agreement (any bloody sort of agreement) is signed.  He can then bask in the excitement of pushing the EU to the limit and managing to extract something that he will display as a triumph of his steely determination.

 

   Johnson has already displayed his linguistic ‘imagination’ in redefining what “oven ready deal” meant; his explanation/clarification that he was referring to the withdrawal agreement and not to anything more is puerile in its mendacity and laughable in its believability.  But if it works for him and allows him to redefine a few other realities to get an agreement signed, I will settle for the gibbering word soup that he uses for communication and be relieved.

     But, if Johnson’s character is as nakedly, narcissistically, opportunistic as we have had ample proof of in his actions since he landed in Number 10, then we could be looking at someone who judges that a hard Brexit of no agreement could be something that he could get away with.  Whatever that means in his insular world view.

     I am more worried today than I have been since the awful result of the referendum.  All my worst imaginings could be crawling (it has been four and a half years of negotiation, after all) to reality.

     I am, by nature, an optimist, but my essential cheeriness is being stretched to the limit.

 

I usually try and find something of a lighter nature to end my piece of writing, but I do not feel that it would be appropriate.  I remember watching an excellent TV drama during the time of a previous Conservative regime which showed a mother bringing a tray with tea making things on it, which she dropped, and then shouted, “Look what that bloody woman has made me do now!”  We could still laugh at such an overreaction, even as Thatcher’s malign premiership poisoned so many aspects of British life – but what is threatened by a no-deal on Brexit will make what Thatcher did look like the “sunlit uplands” compared to the all-encompassing, unfolding misery of the reality of Brexit.