It's been quite the week for fans of politics as theatre.
Without wishing to recap details of the Hancock saga, which which you are all doubtless more familiar than you wish to be (I,like many others, strongly considered giving up kissing after seeing THAT video, yeech), the story of where Matt puts Little Matty of an evening has been the only game in town the last few days; I suppose I ought to touch on it in brief, so, to summarise:
1) Don't care about his private life, other than it confirms that he's not bright enough to realise the consequences of his actions.
2) Do care about corruption and cronyism, her appointment as an aide is the actual scandal here, in terms of public interest.
3) He should have been sacked for the deaths in care homes / failure of PPE / blatant misuse of public funds in handing out contracts (including to companies owned by the Landlord of his local, and one owned by his sister) / Dido fucking Harding. Seems a shame that this is what got him. Resigning allows a narrative of competence to stand, when in fact his abject failure is responsible for thousands of deaths.
4) Johnson should have sacked him, but couldn't, because he's surrounded himself with fools and adulterers, and is one himself. Sack one and you have to sack everyone and resign.
5) Sajid fucking Javid? Are you kidding me? The guy from JP Morgan? Not even trying to hide the privatising of the NHS at this point, are we?
6) (and most importantly) His poor wife, his poor kids.What a shithouse.
Right, now that's out of the way, on to the topic of the blog.It is partially to do with Matt Hancock, but it's also to do with Gove and, in part, Johnson. It's a theory I've been working on.Not a very good theory, I'll be the first to admit, but as it's a flimsy pretext to hang a blog off it'll do.
You'll doubtless be aware that the woman on the receiving end of Hancock's gauche fumblings, Gina Coladangelo, is an old friend from his University days. You may also, but are less likely to be, aware that Gove appointed his old Uni girlfriend, Simone Finn, to a post in the Cabinet Office (the rumours surrounding Gove's playing away are interesting enough in themselves, as The Sun have been curiously quiet on that one, Govey and Rupert go way back,of course). Johnson just got married to a woman significantly his junior,and rumours persist of a fling with another one that's younger still.
As such, my theory is that what we've witnessed over the last *waves hands vaguely* humunumun years is the outcome of what happens when every single man in Government is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. It's screaming it. But buying a fast car, getting the band back together or getting a tattoo isn't going to cut it when you're a Master of the Universe with his hands on the levers of power, combine a mid-life crisis with an out of control ego and a shitload of power and influence and you get the toxic brew which is British political life at the moment.
There was a joke I repeated in an old blog about the TV adaptation of Normal People, drenched as it was in the lust and yearning of your younger days, someone pithily commented "anyone thinking of calling their s/o from University: don't". Well,these lads not only did, but they gave them jobs in Government. And they did so safe in the knowledge that the Boss's own mid-life crisis was manifesting itself by trying to shag anything that moves.
And so, drenched in machismo and posturing,and all the other stupid ways men behave when there's no one to tell them what a twat they're being, we have the complete disaster of of the Brexit negotiations,the catastrophic mishandling of the Covid crisis and the riding roughshod over the law, democratic norms and all the fabric which has held this awkward, cussed, mishmash of a country together. Who'd be a policeman enforcing Covid regs when the Health Secretary's fucking his mistress over the photocopier?
It's a theory with some sizable holes in it, I grant you.It doesn't explain the abject nature of Theresa May's tenure, but I reckon there's something to it. And at least the Hancock affair's given us all a bloody good laugh,as we descend ever further into their personal hells.
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