As Brexit day draws nearer with the fetid inevitability of a drunken sales rep making a pass at your wife at a works do that you really didn't want to go to but you'd made excuses for the last five, it is reasonable to say that I've been, at last, gripped by The Fear. Not of the day itself, or it's aftermath; it's been patently obvious to anyone with half a brain that THAT was going to be the biggest clusterfuck since the Somme since the get-go (though argument could be made for mid-nineties Tottenham Hotspur, I still wake up in a cold sweat at the memory of a team containing Dean Austin AND Justin Edinburgh). No, I've long since reconciled myself to having to go to war with neighbouring tribes for the last box of Ventolin inhalers, and have been busy collecting beads which I can trade with gullible natives of richer pastures who I can then infect with my advanced diseases.
The Fear that has clasped me so implacably has been more of an existential funk. It's been a gasp of despair at my own stupidity for not seeing what should have been painfully apparent all along. For many years I've laboured under the misapprehension that, whilst the House of Commons certainly housed the odd kook and misfit, the overwhelming majority of MPs of all stripes were, at base level, reasonably well-intentioned and capable. The system seemed to work, after a fashion, and occasional breakdowns like the dog days of the Major administration, or Thatcher thinking the Poll Tax would be a popular wheeze were generally subsumed by the overall day to day business of getting on with stuff. Even Blair's weird messianic period where he thought an illegal war would be a boss idea was easily explained away by the fact that he was a) nuts and b) really, really likes money.
And the Iraq war was catastrophic, and illegal. And Thatcher's deliberate dismantling of the industrial base was inhuman and ideological, and the relentless shagging of the Major administration was embarrassing and gross. Labour's unelectability of the early eighties was bloody-minded and dogmatic. The formation of the SDP was vainglorious but none of these, none of these dreadful or ridiculous things were, and this is the important bit, so pay attention: stupid.
Because the Fear which has been a background hum since, ooh, about 2010 or so, has become too loud a drone of terror to ignore, for make no mistake, we are in the clutches of some very, very stupid people. And some very, very stupid people are making the decisions about how our lives run. It started, of course (oh, now, with cold clarity of hindsight, our doom is mapped out) with Cameron and Osborne, those breezy, laissez faire motherfuckers who thought that governance was basically a wizard jape. Whilst they weren't necessarily stupid (though a strong argument could be made for Osborne being one of the worst Chancellors of all time, he wasn't thick in and of himself, he was just an uncaring twat who didn't give a monkeys about the disastrous effects of his policies)as such, they did lay the groundwork for a Parliamentary environment where a lack of intellectual rigour could be seen as an advantage, rather than a hindrance, and where they blazed a trail, a flood of incompetents, hucksters, fools and demagogues followed. And some who'd been there all along stood and proudly proclaimed their stupidity: like when Brexit meant that your Uncle thought it was okay to be racist to that nice Polish guy who runs the shop, and your Auntie committed murder in her mind. Again.
I'm going to gloss over Chris Grayling. I don't have the time or the energy. But he does deserve a mention as the one on whose sheer dim-wittedness we can place a cost to the tax-payer. £2.7bn, according to the opposition, but given how shaky THEIR maths is at times, it's probably best to take that figure with a pinch of salt. If you can find any when the panic-buying starts. But in this Government of None of the Talents, he is only one of a crepuscular array: the non Good Friday Agreement reading Dominic Raab, who didn't realise how important Calais was, and then resigned because he couldn't support a deal that he helped negotiate, the hapless Karen Bradley, an NI Secretary who didn't realise that people there vote along sectarian lines, and then thought it would be a good idea to say out loud that murders committed by the security services don't count. Or Amber Rudd, of whom one is forced to ask the question: if YOU had been forced to resign because of how your office had dealt with Caribbean migrants, would you think it a good idea to use the word "coloured"? Let's, for the sake of pity, quickly bypass the serial bell-end Liam Fox, who, as councils beg for money to run basic services, thought spunking £100,000 on a vanity podcast would be just the ticket. And we'll ignore baby-murderer Sajid Javid because, frankly, it's best for all our sanity if we do. We shan't, however, ignore golf club bore non pareil Mark Francois, who wouldn't know irony if it bit him in the leg, much less logical syllogism. He truly is the bloke down the pub told me made flesh. Quite a lot of flesh.
I'll ignore the evils of Gove and Johnson, they don't really fit the bill here, because whilst undoubtedly self-serving, malicious and amoral, neither qualifies as stupid. Nasty, yes, thick, no. They know what they're doing. Andrea Leadsom, on the other hand, is as thick as mince. How else to explain that she thought Islamophobia was matter for the Foreign Office? And what possible explanation is there for David Davis's blithe disregard for the basic niceties of negotiation (rule one: know what you're talking about) other than that he's utterly stupid? I mean dynamically stupid, so stupid that you could use his stupidity as a form of green energy. You will, acute reader that you are, note that I'm also ignoring some pretty obvious examples. Well, that's because their stupidity has already propelled them far beyond the obscurity they so richly deserve (Nadine Dorries, I'm looking at you) and also, typing this has made the despair worse. I'd hoped to exorcise it but ah well. The awful truth is that we are in the grip of imbeciles, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it, aside from maybe selling them some disease ridden blankets in a few weeks time.
The Fear that has clasped me so implacably has been more of an existential funk. It's been a gasp of despair at my own stupidity for not seeing what should have been painfully apparent all along. For many years I've laboured under the misapprehension that, whilst the House of Commons certainly housed the odd kook and misfit, the overwhelming majority of MPs of all stripes were, at base level, reasonably well-intentioned and capable. The system seemed to work, after a fashion, and occasional breakdowns like the dog days of the Major administration, or Thatcher thinking the Poll Tax would be a popular wheeze were generally subsumed by the overall day to day business of getting on with stuff. Even Blair's weird messianic period where he thought an illegal war would be a boss idea was easily explained away by the fact that he was a) nuts and b) really, really likes money.
And the Iraq war was catastrophic, and illegal. And Thatcher's deliberate dismantling of the industrial base was inhuman and ideological, and the relentless shagging of the Major administration was embarrassing and gross. Labour's unelectability of the early eighties was bloody-minded and dogmatic. The formation of the SDP was vainglorious but none of these, none of these dreadful or ridiculous things were, and this is the important bit, so pay attention: stupid.
Because the Fear which has been a background hum since, ooh, about 2010 or so, has become too loud a drone of terror to ignore, for make no mistake, we are in the clutches of some very, very stupid people. And some very, very stupid people are making the decisions about how our lives run. It started, of course (oh, now, with cold clarity of hindsight, our doom is mapped out) with Cameron and Osborne, those breezy, laissez faire motherfuckers who thought that governance was basically a wizard jape. Whilst they weren't necessarily stupid (though a strong argument could be made for Osborne being one of the worst Chancellors of all time, he wasn't thick in and of himself, he was just an uncaring twat who didn't give a monkeys about the disastrous effects of his policies)as such, they did lay the groundwork for a Parliamentary environment where a lack of intellectual rigour could be seen as an advantage, rather than a hindrance, and where they blazed a trail, a flood of incompetents, hucksters, fools and demagogues followed. And some who'd been there all along stood and proudly proclaimed their stupidity: like when Brexit meant that your Uncle thought it was okay to be racist to that nice Polish guy who runs the shop, and your Auntie committed murder in her mind. Again.
I'm going to gloss over Chris Grayling. I don't have the time or the energy. But he does deserve a mention as the one on whose sheer dim-wittedness we can place a cost to the tax-payer. £2.7bn, according to the opposition, but given how shaky THEIR maths is at times, it's probably best to take that figure with a pinch of salt. If you can find any when the panic-buying starts. But in this Government of None of the Talents, he is only one of a crepuscular array: the non Good Friday Agreement reading Dominic Raab, who didn't realise how important Calais was, and then resigned because he couldn't support a deal that he helped negotiate, the hapless Karen Bradley, an NI Secretary who didn't realise that people there vote along sectarian lines, and then thought it would be a good idea to say out loud that murders committed by the security services don't count. Or Amber Rudd, of whom one is forced to ask the question: if YOU had been forced to resign because of how your office had dealt with Caribbean migrants, would you think it a good idea to use the word "coloured"? Let's, for the sake of pity, quickly bypass the serial bell-end Liam Fox, who, as councils beg for money to run basic services, thought spunking £100,000 on a vanity podcast would be just the ticket. And we'll ignore baby-murderer Sajid Javid because, frankly, it's best for all our sanity if we do. We shan't, however, ignore golf club bore non pareil Mark Francois, who wouldn't know irony if it bit him in the leg, much less logical syllogism. He truly is the bloke down the pub told me made flesh. Quite a lot of flesh.
I'll ignore the evils of Gove and Johnson, they don't really fit the bill here, because whilst undoubtedly self-serving, malicious and amoral, neither qualifies as stupid. Nasty, yes, thick, no. They know what they're doing. Andrea Leadsom, on the other hand, is as thick as mince. How else to explain that she thought Islamophobia was matter for the Foreign Office? And what possible explanation is there for David Davis's blithe disregard for the basic niceties of negotiation (rule one: know what you're talking about) other than that he's utterly stupid? I mean dynamically stupid, so stupid that you could use his stupidity as a form of green energy. You will, acute reader that you are, note that I'm also ignoring some pretty obvious examples. Well, that's because their stupidity has already propelled them far beyond the obscurity they so richly deserve (Nadine Dorries, I'm looking at you) and also, typing this has made the despair worse. I'd hoped to exorcise it but ah well. The awful truth is that we are in the grip of imbeciles, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it, aside from maybe selling them some disease ridden blankets in a few weeks time.
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