It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick.
I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you.
A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres. I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over.
You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming" the never-knowingly-underlunched Minister decreed that they be painted over, presumably in a nice bland bureaucratic beige. It's the sort of story that you find faintly unbelievable at first, it's surely too much of a caricature of mean-spiritedness, it's too perfect in its soul-deadening grimness.
Because this isn't just an attack on migrants, it's an attack on children, alone and in weird country where everyone seems to hate them and politicians try to outdo each other with hammed-up hatred, lock 'em in a barracks, no, stick 'em on a barge, no shoot them into the sun. The story seems, at first glance, to be too pat a summation of the pointless cruelty if the last throes of this dying administration. Being a cunt is all they've got left.
It puts me in mind of the fag end of the Major administration, about which if you ask anyone to think about it it they'll shrug before saying "Cones Hotline? Was that them?". The much derided policy was perfectly emblematic of a drifting, rudderless administration which was bereft of ideas. In the same way, Jenrick and Braverman's performative hostility towards migrant children is the perfect summation of the dying embers of this particular stint of Tory mismanagement. A neat little capsule of a story to sum up their bewildering lurch into complete arseholedom.
It's all the more mystifying because this appeals to literally no one beyond a small cadre of weird racists. The Government, and its baying outriders in the less savoury sections of the press, are so spectacularly out of tune with your average punter, who is more concerned with the fact that you can't even get the family shop done in Lidl for under a ton any more. Readers of the Sun, Mail and Telegraph are on the whole, significantly less mad than those increasingly rabid organs. The same probably cannot be said for avid viewers of GB News, whio are, in all likelihood, beyond hope.
The point being that no one, literally no one, thinks painting over cartoons to make an environment more hostile for kids is a good idea. Not even those insane few who still think the Rwanda thing is going to happen. I don't even think Jenrick thinks it's a good idea, I'd be fucking amazed if Sunak did (Braverman might, she's a genuinely nasty piece of work). He just feels compelled to do it because they've painted themselves into a corner whereby the only policy they have left is to punch down, ever harder, and if it means some scared and bewildered kids have a less pleasant place to say, then that's better than some dingbat on Talk TV calling you woke.
The current administration is a dog driven mad by fear, biting at everyone and everything, it knows it's doomed, but it can't fathom it's own destruction. For their own sake, this Government needs to be put out of its misery, before it inflicts yet more on others.
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