We’ve had enough of chaos at the top
IHAVE studied the British people these many years, both from at home and abroad. There are advantages in travelling far away then turning to look back at the land you came from and the people who live there – your ain folk, as the Scots say. One can see the British from a different angle.
It has long struck me that we are a strange folk, usually immensely patient with the inadequacies and incompetences of those who govern us. Scan the world and note the attempts to run a democracy. The elections that were clearly rigged, the opposition party refusing to accept the result, the rioting, the tear gas. And there are we with the loser plodding up to the podium to shake the hand of the winner. You think that’s normal? Travel more – and not just for a suntan.
But eventually British tolerance of the cavorting egos at the top runs out. Enough is enough, let’s have some mature, grown-up government for all that money we pay you, for all those grandiose titles, for all those references to our thousandyear-old Parliament. Some serious statesmen went before you, please live up to them. I suspect we may be moving into that mood by the autumn if the twin farces of Westminster and Whitehall do not get their act together.
HAVING mentioned our own governmental ship as an unseaworthy pedalo we can at least take some comfort from what is going on elsewhere, if schadenfreude is allowed. Rather as I thought the honeymoon between the French people and the very pleased-withhimself Emmanuel Macron seems to be merging into the first marital disillusionment. Not to worry – no one can please the French for long.
In Germany the tubby and even more pleased-with-himself Martin Schulz thought he was surging up to challenge Mutti Merkel for the chancellorship. Er… no, he seems to have disappeared according to the polls. So, as you were!
But in the States things are making the internecine feuding in Westminster look stately. Hardly has the last blink-and-youmiss-him press secretary resigned (or was he fired?) than the new one Scaramucci is effing and blinding to the New Yorker about his colleagues in the entourage of the Big Blowdry. (Oops. Just slipped out for a cuppa and when I got back he had been fired as well!)
Senator John McCain, the one who flew fighters in Vietnam and spent five years in a Vietcong jail, comes back from medical leave to reveal he has brain cancer. President Trump welcomes him and his crucial vote to the skies. Then McCain votes against him on Obamacare and the motion to abolish it is defeated. The biter bit. Monty Python could not script this.
What we journos call the silly season is upon us. Actually it hasn’t stopped for weeks. Let us pray that Mrs May, back en poste in September, can get a grip, banish the feuding, impose Cabinet discipline and get us an advantageous Brexit. I suspect it is what the huge majority of the people, however they vote, really want to see.