Sunday 16 October 2022

Peter Hitchens today in the Mail

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"Yes, Liz Truss is perhaps the most woefully unconvincing Prime Minister we have ever seen, but it is unfair to concentrate on her. Sir Anthony Blair is at least as dim, but is a better actor and had much better handlers. David Cameron was unable to cover up the fact he believed in nothing, but like the great actor George Sanders, he played the part of likeable bounder to perfection. Poor Theresa May should never have risen above the level of Chairman of the Policy and Resources Committee of Trumpton Borough Council.

"But you will look in vain for another Margaret Thatcher or Denis Healey, a new Michael Heseltine or even a new Neil Kinnock, because all the parties have been captured by the deadly dogmas of equality and diversity. All live in fear of the BBC, which – like the medieval church – decides which ideas are acceptable and which are heretical, and will seek to destroy anyone who steps outside its chosen limits.

"You cannot now discuss whether the sexual revolution was a good thing. Parents must surrender their children to the power and ideas of the state. You cannot oppose multiculturalism or mass immigration.

"....I don't think Liz Truss has any consistent beliefs. So instead she bought some opinions on eBay. She posed as a free-market liberal (probably out of nothing more than ambition, since we know how easily she changes her mind). This is not an especially conservative view, but some people think it is. The trouble is that our economy, loaded with debt and taxes, is far too decrepit to cope with such measures. You can say you are going to stimulate it back to health, but you might as well try to turn a hobbling pensioner into an Olympic athlete by giving him a handful of amphetamines, an electric shock and a can of Red Bull."


Slightly unfair about David Cameron who never looked like a bounder (think Jonathan Aitken or Alan Clark, though both of them were not bounders but cads). Boris Johnson had the measure of Mr Cameron when he called him "girly swot" in the margin of a civil service memo and later tried to make it illegible. Sir A. Blair has animal cunning, which is the only intelligence a politician needs, to an amazing degree. 

Peter Hitchens points out that all three parties have lost their meaning and deceives himself that they can therefore be replaced. They can't. It's the same in the USA but parties there can reconstitute themselves because of the primary system,  which let Donald Trump become president.

The article is here.

11 comments:

  1. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all is that it seems to have left no humans standing. Hunt, Sunak and Starmer – and indeed La Truss – are clearly CGI simulations, as are most of those around them. I have a suspicion Kwarteng might possibly be a human (at least he was a classicist rather than yet another PPE product), but now we'll never know. It could well be that Boris Johnson, for all his only too evident faults, was the last human in British politics. Which is why his lot were elected with such a thumping majority, and why they'll lose next time, and why no one really cares any more...

    https://nigeness.blogspot.com/

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    Replies
    1. Nige is wise to be anonymous. I shall start a new anonymous blog.

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    2. Arthur_S@allanholloway
      Liz Truss' father predicted she would be a disaster as PM. It's a wise parent that knows his own child.

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    3. Politicians who go far tend to be 2 dimensional. Charles Moore gave Heseltine as an example, likening him to a gingerbread man, I recall. I have measured out my life reading political analyses. One rejoices when opening a book to find not a book but a man and the same goes for politicians, using the word man in its old-fashioned sense to mean man or woman. The public loves the human beings like George Brown, Enoch Powell (though he was a very odd human being indeed) Shirley Williams, Boris, etc

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    4. Kemi is a human being, Sir Keir Starmer obviously not.

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    5. 'I shall start a new anonymous blog'

      Autumn in Bucharest: An East Anglian Refugee La Curtea Veche

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    6. Starmer, Keir. A statesman of the future. Thought to have been designed by Elon Musk. An early prototype, not able to drink beer easily.

      The Woke Dictionary
      By Dr James Alexander
      https://dailysceptic.org/2022/10/16/more-from-the-woke-dictionary/

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  2. Paul Goodman:
    "The day will come on which to pin down why – after winning the leadership election less convincingly among the members than was expected. and not among her fellow Conservative MPs at all – she played a hand of twos and threes as though all of them were aces."
    The explanation is obvious - because she is very stupid.

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  3. Peter Hitchens@ClarkeMicah
    1/2 Fascinating propaganda tweeted by .
    @Alfred_wickham
    . Needs deep analysis but one key message is that doubt itself about the war is a pro-enemy action. Neutrality or silence are blameworthy. As in 1984, the citizen must shout for victory,or be considered disloyal. Sinister.
    2/2 Key quote :'The goal of Russian propaganda is not to render you 'pro-Putin' but to make you doubt sufficiently not to take an openly pro-Ukrainian stance',. So it embodies the appalling idea that doubt is a thought-crime, which places you in the enemy camp.

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  4. Friends have assured me that these days the Conservative Party conference is four days of wall-to-wall alcohol-fuelled, libidinous homosexual bacchanalia, so much so that it makes other famous fixtures in the LGBT calendar — Eurovision, for example — seem straighter than an evangelical Ugandan preacher.

    I don’t know when this started to happen. In the 1990s, when I last attended in a professional capacity, it was full of middle-aged male MPs trying to pull youngish babes with marbles in their mouths called Olivia.

    Times change. You never hear stories now about Tory MPs being inappropriate with young ladies at conference. They wouldn’t dare.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/if-conor-burnss-young-friend-was-happy-with-his-wandering-hands-then-we-should-let-it-be-m5rs58s3x

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  5. Good Lord. I remember Andrew Roberts, to name drop, telling me about libidinousness at the Tory conferences but he referred to heterosexual libidinousness. I remember at 17 wondering if I could be a delegate to the conference. I always liked women with very plummy voices. I begin to find myself getting out of touch which is somewhat enjoyable.

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