Yesterday the Prime Minister announced that he was shuffling the cabinet round in an attempt to stop the Downing Street coach from sliding over the cliff edge. The nation is holding its breath.
This is the spawn of the Human Rights culture, the me, me, me, self preservation society of insatiable ambition placed under an unrelenting spotlight. Nothing could more effectively reveal the utter contempt for any coherent policy regarding the governance of Britain than the placement of unaccountable, disgraced former ministers, in the heart of government – an unabashed determination to shore up the position of an unelected Prime Minister with no thought for the ‘best interests’ of a nation sorely in need of professional guidance.
Caroline Flint complains that ‘she was only window dressing’ – the entire Blair/Nulabour project was only ever window dressing.
‘The Project’ as it was ominously known, was the political equivalent of Topshop’s notorious ‘the Dress’; designed to attract the eye, to be bought, with no thought to wearing it, no thought to longevity, all form no function. Tony Blair was the equivalent to Topshop’s ‘Kate Moss’, picked for no other reason than that he made ‘the dress’ look good, dazzled as you were by the form beneath the garment, the aura of seductiveness, you were never intended to inspect the seams, or test the fabric for warp and weft. It was an impulse buy for the millions tired of Mark’s and Spencer’s boring but functional crimpelene. A rhetorical exercise in cynical marketing.
Eventually a size 22 version of ‘the dress’ was produced, and dragged and pulled over the misshapen body of Gordon Brown, and he twirled in the spotlight – ‘look at me, I’ve got ‘the dress’, I’m just like Kate Moss’ he cried. No longer dazzled by Kate’s impossible body, we could see the broken zip, the split seams, the hanging threads.
That he can continue to trot out lines like: “I will not waver, I will not walk away, I will get on with the job.” is not evidence that he can do the job, but mere evidence of how badly he wants the job. As Charlotte Gore has said:
“Brown won’t go voluntarily. The pressure and murmurings of rebellion will do nothing to dent Brown’s resolve.”
The rag bag collection of ‘has-beens’ that Brown has appointed this week cannot be relied upon to refocus attention on the economy and the needs of a battered populace – their acceptance of a position in this devalued cabinet shows them to be driven by personal avarice and a desire for personal aggrandisement.
Now that Peter Mandelson, a man removed from office twice for wrong doing, is but one missed heartbeat, or bullet, away from ruling what was the greatest nation in the world, at the beginning of a week when we see the formation of an unelected council for ‘Democracy Review’ to determine how to control the rump of the whisper of our voices that are our MPs, I realise that throwing ‘Croker’ out of the coach, is the only conceivable solution of the conundrum of how to save our gold.
I have shied away from Old Holborn’s clarion calls for revolution, too anarchic for my liking. I was wrong. The Rule of Law is no weapon to fight Rule by Imbeciles.
I’m in Old Holborn, start the engine – now.