The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Your life in their hands
Nothing unites two human beings more than the desire to do down a third
Next time I go on holiday, especially if it’s to a destination where I am unfortunate enough to have friends and/ or family, I will add yet another pre-vacation necessity to the already long list of “things to do” that we all try to cover before we leave the country.
You might think that cancelling the papers, packing a capsule wardrobe, finely honing the hand luggage to well under the allowed kilogrammage, getting the cat/dog into cattery/ kennels, organising deep insurance cover, printing out every possible stage of your holiday plan and fitting it all neatly into a perfect, portable polythene file, panic-buying factor 50 and asking the neighbours to put out the bins – no small task these days, with the order and content of our refuse receptacles as complicated and downright dangerous to our individual freedoms as the ingredients and composition of a nuclear warhead – might just be enough to be going on with.
But no. Top of the “must” list next time will be informing Michael Gove of my every move. I’ll make sure he is fully informed about where I’m going, why I’m going, who I’m going with (plus their complete life and employment history to date) and what I’m going to be doing once I get there. And also when, hopefully, I might return.
Heaven forfend that the otherwise all-seeing Mr Gove or any of his colleagues should find themselves having to say: “I don’t know”, when asked about my activities, even when my case had been in the public domain for months and there already existed a stated government “view” that I was simply on holiday and not involved in any kind of nefarious activity, real or imagined. Although obviously, no one told the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who didn’t stop at: “I don’t know”.
After all, wouldn’t you just feel so much better knowing that there is someone back home in good old Blighty who is right on top of his brief and really knows what he’s talking about? Just imagine how much easier you could sleep in your comfy apartment/jail cell at night knowing that Michael has got your back and not just Boris’s.
It’s all very well to be gaily satirical about all this but, in reality, this is about Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe’s life and freedom and the future of her family.
Her husband appears to be a model of articulacy and restraint under the circumstances, even managing to appear gracious in his response to a personal meeting with the Foreign Secretary when the instant reaction of most of us, I fear, would be to want to shake him warmly by the throat.
I hope some good comes of all this and that the Ratcliffe family is reunited safely, sooner rather than later. No thanks, one might think, to those who ought to have their best interests at heart.
I am not alone, I suspect, in hoping that those purporting to guide us safely through the changing place of Britain in this world of interesting times might spend less time wittering on about returning the colour of Her Britannic Majesty’s passport cover to good old patriotic navy blue and make a little more effort to look after its citizens abroad currently in possession of one of the damned things.
All of this, however, also shines a glaring light on that great old concept of public life: a week is a long time in politics. Just an eternity of around 18 months ago, Messrs Gove and Johnson were at daggers drawn, with the dagger wielded by Mr Gove successfully filleting Boris’s chances of bedding in nicely at No 10.
Now you can’t get a bus ticket between them. And in spite of the fact that neither could marshal enough support to propel either into the prime ministerial hot seat, they seem to be running things, anyway, finding time to write letters to the actual Prime Minister about how things ought to be run in the corridors of power, whose basic thread comes down to: “I see what you’ve done wrong now.” Nothing unites two human beings more than the desire to do down a third.
To err is human; to forgive divine. Either Boris has turned into Uxbridge and South Ruislip’s answer to Mother Theresa or, more likely, the Environment Secretary has put the Gove into grovel.
Or perhaps he got an advance preview of a new invention from an American TV presenter, one Greta van Susteren; an apology app. None of this embarrassing face-to-face and face-the music nonsense; oh, no. You get to accept or reject apologies digitally from people you know (I hesitate to call them friends) and in a public forum, you can see the excuses/reasons/unfathomable thought processes of those in the spotlight who might feel it necessary to indulge in a general “mea culpa”.
Was the sorry spectacle of Mr Gove and Mr Johnson to be considered in that light, however, I suspect the digital gesture has already been copyrighted by another, rather greater, politician, Winston Churchill.
In the form of a digital V.