Don’t tell it how it is – say it so it sounds good

We live in dark times. I got up this morning intending to make this column funny in a bid to lighten the weekend mood, but rain swept in and I thought about the universal frame of mind which seems be dominating world affairs nowadays.

It’s not exactly a happy little planet that’s taking us on its spinning journey through space at this time.

Having said that, things have been a lot, lot worse, even within living memory. Let alone 100 years ago when the last poor foot-soldiers of World War One were being blown to bits as the guns prepared to cease their fouryear shift of creating hell.

“Can lessons be learned from history?” someone asked on the radio this week – the answer to which was a resounding “Yes!”

But one historian added: “But are things learned from history? I’m afraid the answer is – no…”

It’s enough to make a chap want to walk into the big bare beautiful hills with his two trusty lurchers – and then write funny things about their crazy antics in a bid to cheer both himself and his readers up.

But the old dog Monty – so well known to WMN readers – is becoming so crazy, his antics no longer make me laugh. His new trick is to wait until I have entered the realms of deepest sleep, then plod through my bedroom to tap on theFrench-windows that lead into our upper garden. The blighter has been doing this for years – the new thing is that he repeats the process just minutes later once I’ve returned to a state of REM sleep, or whatever it’s called.

I imagine him getting into that cosy bed of his thinking: “Wait a mo’. Give it just a couple more minutes. There! He’s snoring. Let’s wake the old rotter up again…”

Last night I sneaked out to see what he was doing on that second visit to the shadows. Not much, was the answer.

All he did was to stroll to the lawn and stand there sniffing the breeze. With this head held high in the moonlight he looked like some mad, diminutive, giraffe.

Then he got his stopwatch out and a thought-bubble appeared above his head: “I reckon old Hesp’s eyes will be drooping by now. He’ll be reentering the Land of Nod. Better get back and wake him from his slumbers.”

This goes on four or five times a night. I haven’t been this tired since the house contained babies.

The trouble is that, once you’re awake, you tend to lie there thinking about the world’s problems. And then it’s easy to come to the same conclusion as millions of other people. By which I mean – blame the politicians. I say that advisedly after having watched a BBC Question Time in which two politicians really let their profession down. No party bias here, by the way: one was Tory, the other Labour.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that one of them was Diane Abbott. Despite always having leaned to the Left, I wouldn’t want Diane running my parish council, let alone the country.

But she wasn’t the one who made me really choke on my cheese and biscuits. When Kwasi Kwarteng began to speak I thought he seemed like a brisk breezy guy – until I heard him say some of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard a politician declare.

The first was his criticism of London mayor Sadiq Khan who this week stated that the epidemic of knife crime could take 10 years to cure. Mr Kwarteng didn’t seem interested in whether or not this could be true – he was worried that the mayor had openly mouthed such a thing. It was, he said, the wrong message to give out.

That, in a nutshell, is surely one of the things wrong with politics and politicians. They’re not interested in truth, but obsessed by the way in which their words are perceived and with toeing the party line.

Here was an MP openly, without shame or self doubt, supporting spin over substance.

Minutes later he surprised me again after the Canadian clinical psychologist Prof Jordan Peterson had said that the only way to mend knife crime or any other societal malfunction was to first understand its underlying causes. His simple, well-put analysis made sense, but Kwarteng batted it away saying something about how we’ve had enough of people trying to find explanations. Instead we needed action.

Yet another vote for spin. He seemed to say: “It doesn’t matter if we know what we are doing, or how effective it will be. We need to be seen to be doing something.”

Imagine if we taught children such a thing. Civilisation would collapse within a generation. But that’s politicians for you. They’re not interested in long term projects like the next generation – just in the spin that can get them through the next election.

Which does indeed leave a lot of room for humour – in a Yes Minister, In The Thick Of It, kind of way. But does not do much for the efficient running of a country.

‘Here was an MP, without shame or self doubt, supporting spin over substance’