Actually, I’d happily pay Boris’s wallpaper bill...
OVER many years I have learned to despise most politicians. I’m not here to defend any of them. They are, for the most part, shallow careerists, ignorant of history, utterly uninterested in facts and clueless about the results of their actions. I really have no sympathy with them, and listen with despair to their dim speeches and interviews.
Most of those who report their doings ( with some honourable exceptions) are much like them. Politics is portrayed as showbusiness for ugly people, tedious gossip about who is up or down, in or out.
But honestly, this last week’s stuff about Boris Johnson was exceptionally wretched.
Remember, the politicians and media who have flung themselves on this story with energy and glee were mainly silent and supine about the recent huge assault on Parliament, on personal liberty and on our economy. Yet here they are, going on and on about the wallpaper and the furniture in the Prime Minister’s flat in Downing Street.
I have never visited this place, but I know people who have and I am told it is not especially nice. Nobody would live there by choice. Premiers are forced to dwell in it by stone-faced security chiefs who insist they cannot protect them if they live anywhere else.
So I’d be quite happy if some of my taxes (so much of them already wasted on really bad things) went on making it reasonably comfortable. And if that means paying someone called Lulu a bit over the odds for the wallpaper, I really do not mind.
Actually, a state allowance would be much better than putting the Queen’s First Minister in the hands of donors, the curse of politics who will always want something in return for their generosity.
As for whether Johnson said that thing about piles of bodies, it is of course interesting, but can we think about it for just a moment?
We all say things in private that we would not say in public, especially when we are tired and angry. Prime Ministers are entitled to assume that those who work closely with them have, in the American phrase, ‘come inside’ – that is, they have exchanged their freedom to blab for access to real power.
No serious organisation could work without such a rule.
Do we actually want surveillance and disclosure of everything our l eaders say i n private? Think hard about that before you say that you would.
It is a weary thing to have to say this again, but most of the few truly distinguished people who have headed the Government of this country would have been destroyed if the media of the time had told the world what they were really like –their private opinions, their sex lives or their financial secrets – including the one who everybody admires, Winston Churchill.