Why the public can’t resist a PINOCCHIO Prime Minister
Gentlemen … ’ said Groucho marx, ‘…those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I’ve got others.’ Groucho was one of the greatest comedians of the last century. One of the wisest, too.
Hard not to think of him this week when Boris Johnson took his seat in the House of Commons after delivering a speech that echoed the bitter reality of Groucho’s words.
nothing new there, you say. Haven’t we known for donkey’s years that Boris’s grasp of the truth and that old-fashioned word ‘principle’ is about as secure as a trapeze artist with greasy hands.
His many enemies tell us that all you need to know about the scoundrel is that he’s incorrigibly, opportunistically untrustworthy. Whether it’s his journalism, his relationships with women, or the way he conducts his political life, he cannot see a principle without eventually trampling all over it.
What’s more, he keeps getting caught out. And that might explain why the nation does not trust him. But, perhaps, I should rephrase that. It might explain why the nation should not trust him.
On tuesday, he delivered a speech that demonstrated, yet again, the value of a Boris Johnson ‘pledge’. In this case it was one he’d made more than two years ago in Downing Street. He promised us that he had a plan to ‘fix the crisis in social care once and for all’.
If that was true, why didn’t he set about implementing it pronto?
He could hardly lay the blame at the door of the pandemic. the vicious virus had yet to make its appearance on these shores. What many millions were suffering from — and had been for
decades — was the disgraceful shambles of a care system that punished the thrifty and
failed to deliver the care so many desperately needed.
By the time the Prime minister got around to delivering his plan on tuesday, he did have the pandemic as an excuse and, boy, did he milk it.
YES, billions more would be spent, but almost all of it would go to the nHS. A huge proportion of it to deal with waiting lists. no acknowledgement, incidentally, that one of the reasons those waiting lists are so obscenely long is that many people had stayed away from their GP surgeries right from the start of the pandemic even though they were genuinely worried about their health.
they didn’t want to trouble their doctor because we were being ordered day after relentless day to ‘protect the nHS’.
What a catastrophically idiotic piece of propaganda that was, if only for the obvious reason that
the nHS exists to protect us. And what a huge price so many selfless people are paying for their sacrifices now. But don’t expect any recognition of that. that’s not how the system works.
Instead, we were invited to believe that the Great Boris
Johnson Plan would deliver us from the shambles of our care system and restore the nHS to its former glory.
All it would take was a couple of trifling tax increases. never mind that this was yet another Boris pledge being broken.
Remember that one? no more tax increases on his watch?
economists say our tax burden is now at its highest sustained level in history. But at least the money will be well spent. Or will it?
let’s just say the jury is out on that one. All we know so far is that the nHS bureaucratic gravy train is rolling along nicely. the great plan will require 42 ‘integrated care systems’ each of which will have its own Fat Controller on a very fat salary.
my fag packet calculation says there won’t be much change from £10 million. And that’s just for the chiefs. I wonder how many visits to all those lonely old folk who can’t get out £10 million would pay for.
Still convinced, are we, that Boris Johnson ever had a plan?
even more to the point, does he deserve credit for belatedly tackling the social care crisis?
that is the question the mail put to the public in a poll this week and the answer was yes. By a majority of 50 per cent to 41 per cent. So what does that say about us, given that as a nation we’re a pretty sceptical bunch.
I’ve spent a lifetime doing my damnedest to hold politicians to account and the audience reaction has invariably been: why aren’t you tougher on them?
the north london intelligentsia and the Hilary mantels of this world are baffled that we can’t see the man for the bounder that he patently is. He breaks election promises, signs international treaties and promptly disowns
them, keeps a Cabinet of duds just so that he can throw them to the wolves and so on ad nauseam.
And yet so many are prepared to cut Boris so much slack. maybe they’re too thick to see what seems obvious to the intelligentsia.
Or maybe they see it in a different light. they don’t want the unvarnished truth. they know he tells lies, but they say: show me a politician who doesn’t. they know he’s a bit of a used car salesman for all his eton education but, they say, you’ve got to get your car from somewhere.
If we live in a post-truth age, it’s not because politicians were ever paragons of virtue, it’s that they are infinitely more exposed in this digital world than they have ever been.
Disraeli was a bit of a chancer who often outraged the superior figures in his party by swapping one principle for another, but he emerged as one of the reforming giants of his age.
One of the great illusions about politics is that our leaders can control events. We choose those who will shape the world according to our convictions. But it rarely works quite like that.
King Canute was maybe the first to demonstrate the limits of political power when he took his court
to the beach to prove that the tide would swamp his throne however much he ordered it not to.
A modern Canute might take a surfboard to the beach.
All effective leaders know they cannot control the direction of the waves but, like a skilful surfer, they can ride them, swerving and weaving and creating the illusion that it is they who are in control.
It would be patronising and wrong to paint Boris’s supporters as gullible idiots. many of them sussed him out a long time ago. But what matters for them is results and he is still balanced on that surfboard. So far.