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For a while last year, I was impressed by Starmer’s sharp probing of John Son Un’s lethal dishonesty
Now I see these confrontations as a clash between a stiletto and a blancmange.
The blancmange always wins because it doesn’t actually feel or care about the point.
Now I see these confrontations as a clash between a stiletto and a blancmange.
The blancmange always wins because it doesn’t actually feel or care about the point.
This isn’t entirely Starmer’s fault. It’s very difficult to try and shame Johnson for his dishonesty and inconsistencies when his entire career is based on...dishonesty and inconsistencies. How can you shame a man who feels no shame? You can’t.
These skirmishes might have more impact if Johnson’s government and party had some kind of moral acceptability threshold that they would not allow their leader to fall beneath. Quite clear that they don’t. Those who do have that threshold have left or been driven out
The remainder care about nothing but their own careers and party interests. Like the GOP with Trump, they will go all the way as long their man ensures the above. They do this in the knowledge that some 40 percent of the electorate doesn’t care about Johnson’s defects either
100, 000 dead? Rampant corruption and cronyism? A succession of lethal mistakes, overpromising and broken promises? The glaring disparity between the Brexit that was promised and what is actually happening?
That 40 percent yawns and even applauds.
That 40 percent yawns and even applauds.
And in these circumstances the Great Blancmange could care less about a former QC’s forensic questioning. He simply reconstitutes himself after the blade has gone in like John Carpenter’s Thing. Allowing the PMQs to become ritualistic and increasingly irrelevant.
This is also easier because of Starmer/Labour’s obsession with caution and ‘competence’ at the expense of anything else. And the absence of passion, fire, and anger behind the stiletto thrusts, and the pandemic-induced absence of wider political noise.
Then there is the fact that the government, through its press conferences and briefings and near total domination of the press, controls the daily narrative and news cycle, marginalising alternative voices
But the result is that a government that has presided over avoidable mass deaths and which has inflicted egregious economic self-harm through its reckless and arrogant Brexit diplomacy, is getting away with all of it. And if Labour is angry about any of this, that anger is muted
To the point of being comatose. And that is why the blancmange is winning, and why we need more fire and less stiletto, because a government this bad should not be doing this well.
