Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Hal and the Little Sods

Westminster politics is in danger of becoming amusing. Since Hal's crash and only partially successful reboot - he kept saying 'vision' over and over again at the press conference, it's plainly a hardware problem - the members of the junta have been madly stabbing each other in the back. They are fighting, Rachel Sylvester informs us, 'like ferrets in sack' and people are talking about the'cack-handedness of these arrogant little sods'. On the other hand, Polly Toynbee thinks Hal 'faced down the braying press for an hour without flinching and with good humour'. Sylvester thinks these are the beginnings of a leadership battle. This might, with a little luck, recreate the good old days of the Blair-Hal feud. Tee-hee. Toynbee, however, thinks that Hal's best bet is to go for incompetence, though her reasoning is a little odd - 'The accident of flood, bombs, bank run and animal pestilence may have established his competence - but, in truth, what does a Prime Minister do about any of those except hope they go away? Competence is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.' But I thought you just said he didn't need competence for those things..... He needs, apparently, to be courageous and competence can be forgotten. I think she underestimates what a novelty competence would be in Hal's career. But, anyway, there's blood on the ferret sack, the little sods are trying to kill each other, it's the seventies and Hal's hardware is still playing up. Oh and City are still winning. It's going to be a fun winter.

7 comments:

  1. My daughter plays with teeny weeny little dollies who inhabit a land called 'Pollyworld'. I have no desire to investigate further.

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  2. beginning to feel gratitude to Blair for hanging on so long....

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  3. Quite, Ian. We should have a Blair years themed party in memory. By the way, what has happened to him? Gone to Pollywordl probbaly.

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  4. If you want to know what happened to Blair, look in the lavatory bowl: Gone to the beach...

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  5. you asking me? I have no idea - I'm just wondering what happened to The Darkness at the moment, having just found an old radio show from 2003 on my mp3 jukebox... the news from Basra isn't good (oh, but it's 2003, isn't it?)

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  6. So our PM is a visionary? The cautious and prudent son of the Manse has had a revelation bestowed? Martin Luther King only claimed to have a dream, which is oratorically okay, being subjective, but the roster of visionary politicos includes Hitler, Stalin, Mao, not to mention the present and recent incumbents of the US presidency and the UK premiership. Haven't politicians learned that the last thing we want to hear about is their visions? It's not the seventies that Gordon harks back to, but the forties, and the appalling Attlee hijacking of Blake's 'Jerusalem' in his triumphalist speech to endorse his 'vision'. The word should be banned from the hustings, together with 'to be honest with you', which Gordon also used a couple of times, a phrase that suggests the parenthesis 'for a change' or 'just this once'. Emerson's 'the more he spoke of his honesty the faster we counted our spoons' applies, as does 'the more he spoke of his vision, the higher we counted its potential casualties.'

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  7. Il Gordo looks like a man who sees visions; he has that half-crazed wild-eyed look and it's not only from having been kicked in the head when he was a youth:

    'And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
    His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
    Weave a circle round him thrice,
    And close your eyes with holy dread,
    For he on honey-dew hath fed,
    And drunk the milk of Paradise.'

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