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Much better than most "Columnist imagines..." pieces.
Johnson can go on about personal responsibility all he likes, but he’s going to have to take some himself. What unfolds over the next few weeks and months must be on the leader, not the people he leads. Individuals can only do so much, and the problem has never been with people’s lack of belief in things the prime minister said. People wanted to believe Johnson’s promise we would “flatten the curve” in 12 weeks; people wanted to believe it would be “back to normal by Christmas”; people wanted to believe Christmas would be “saved” by Johnson; people wanted to believe jabs meant we could be back to normal by Easter; and people quite understandably now want to believe his promise all this is “irreversible” and that 19 July is a “terminus”. So that’s what he tells them.
To adapt Bismarck’s saw about laws being like sausages, if you want to enjoy them, it’s best not to watch them being made; what we’re dealing with here is the cheapest sausage imaginable, comprised only of spinal cord and abattoir shavings, and you’re never going to enjoy it, whether you watch or not.And on the end of lockdown and relaxing of restrictions:
No face masks, no social distancing, no Covid certificates, no more instructing people to work from home. How well it’s going to play instructing them to come back to the office is another matter, but the beauty of that is that it’s not his problem.
The prime minister’s overriding imperative – you could tell by the very many times he said it – is to “move from universal government diktat to relying on people’s personal responsibility”. He’s basically had enough of making all the decisions, and wants someone else to have a go. Absent an obvious single candidate, he’s throwing it on to all of us.
It certainly has been a few days to savour in the story of this septic isle. Consider just this one sequence of events. On Sunday afternoon, a pissed and coked-up England fan put a flare up his arse to delight onlookers and the wider internet. On Sunday evening, THAT guy joined thousands of other ticketless fans in successfully contriving to breach the “security arrangements” – sarcastic airquotes only, please – for the Euros final at Wembley. And on Wednesday the Met chief, Cressida Dick, was not being relieved of her job, but being made a Dame Commander at Buckingham Palace, having long ago been anointed as one of the people in public life who not only cannot fail but must somehow be advanced further, no matter the cock-ups.
What a country. Hello, world! The security operation for a major international tournament final, at 8pm after all-day drinking, was so hopeless that it was outfoxed by arse-flare guy. Worse still, the Met seem both keen to offload this on to the Wembley authorities and to stress that despite people openly organising on social media channels in the days leading up to the final, they had no intelligence about plans to breach security. And yet, the only intelligence you really need is “living in England”, “knowing what some people are like”, “seeing how other countries hosting finals do it” and “having the first clue or foresight about anything”.
“I know how frustrating it all is,” he said in a video urging people to follow the rules, which arguably only confirmed suspicions that he was doing so very reluctantly. Well, what did you expect? His whole life has been one long pilot scheme in seeing how far he can bend the rules and get away with it. He’s not going to change now.
“The problem is we don’t know what to do,” an anonymous minister explained to the Mail on Sunday at the weekend. Well, that much is obvious. But doing nothing, and allowing the self-isolation regime to crumble by default as people take decisions into their own hands, is arguably the worst of all possible options. What is the point of a leader, if it’s not to lead?
“The problem is we don’t know what to do,” an anonymous minister explained to the Mail on Sunday
The mud’s purpose is to promote Oxford Street, where 17% of shops have closed since March 2020. But in the long term, the best way to save shops is to force Amazon to pay proper tax, so it cannot undercut them. Making people pay £8 to go up mud will not do this.
A prime minister who as London mayor allowed £126,000 of public money (£11,500 of which came from a City Hall-funded agency) to go to a pole-dancing businesswoman he was having sex with, and whose ministers routinely appear to have awarded without due process contracts worth millions to cronies, continually escapes imprisonment, while petty offenders will be paraded in fluorescent jackets, like Chinese thought criminals in the Cultural Revolution.
Abernathy wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 7:15 pmSorry about that Abers, but it could be worse.Boiler wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 3:36 pm Yebbut... what will they do? Replace him with someone like Dehenna Davison?
Suffering christ …….
In the case of Prince Andrew, I had always assumed the role was a cover for ferrying HRH between international golf courses, in a manner that stopped dreary little people from asking annoying questions like who was paying for the helicopters.
It is with me now as I type this, pushing my thoughts back yet again to that great question of the age: why do hackers so often go to all the trouble of gaining access to a man’s account, simply to post a single photo of a penis?
I can’t help feeling that the most significant thing about the position will turn out to be the fanfare with which it was announced. Hailing relatively meaningless appointments feels like the precursor to hailing relatively meaningless deals.
To put things into perspective, Raab appears to have tired so completely of the bare-knuckle briefing in Westminster that he’s gone for a mini-break in the Middle East. Or diplomatic mission, as his department officially has it. Alas, that same department has a whole lot more to say unofficially, with a series of hilariously unflattering off-the-record lines reported by the Economist probably the pick of the bunch. According to these, Raab is “tightly wound”, “controlling” and “cold”, and has sidelined ambassadors, diplomats and officials in favour of some kind of spad lads’ army, which has failed to build him any significant relationships with global counterparts. Some Foreign Office officials call him “five Is”, which apparently stands for “insular, imperious, idle, irascible and ignorant”.
Poor HRH. Why must misfortune dog him, when his only crime is a passion for lovely things paid for by other people? Albeit for huge amounts of them. I say his only crime – Fawcett and Charles have this week been reported to police by Republic, the anti-monarchy activists, for suspected breach of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, so we shall see where that goes.
Just kidding! Arguably, the two best things going for Prince Charles these days are that he’s not Prince Andrew (who associated with a known paedophile and is accused of worse); and that his institution is under constant criticism from Prince Harry and Meghan (who many people seem to despise even more than paedophiles). Ultimately, nothing very bad will happen to Charles while his mother remains alive. I’m sure he’ll become king “purely on merit”.
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