A little bit of honesty wouldn’t go amiss
US President Donald Trump – a special and indeed unique case in the history of Man – aside, yesterday the UK Government stood out yesterday by continuing its ludicrous late afternoon “Number 10 press conferences” seeking to give the impression that from the outset it had been in charge, and in control, of the nation’s Coronavirus crisis whilst recently all around it the evidence has been piling up that quite the contrary was the case, as Lavinia Thompson’s piece in The Rust so aptly pointed out.
Everyone will know of the Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Emperor Has No Clothes – and I promise that I’m the last person to wish to bring to mind an image of Boris Johnson in the buff – but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Tory Government really ought to stop digging the black hole that it’s been creating for itself over the last month.
I’ve just spent twenty minutes googling the origins of the statement that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”: I had thought it was Einstein that came up with the quip, but I’ve now seen also it attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and novelist Rita Mae Brown.
The truth is, of course, that the originator it doesn’t actually matter because the simple point I wished to make is that it could certainly be applied to UK Government thinking at the moment, most probably because it (or those at the helm of it) are collectively thrashing around in a desperate search for an alternative, so far without success.
Yesterday’s fall guy was the hapless Business Secretary Alok Sharma whom – to be fair to him – is at least a half-decent performer/graduate from the Tory HQ “How To Appear Plausible In Front Of The TV Cameras” crash course that all ministers (if not MPs) have plainly been sent on.
The trouble was – as every journalist, lobby correspondent, scientist, doctor and the other several million of ordinary members of the public (never mind those who had been picked to ask questions that were never going to be directly addressed or answered during the derisory fifteen minute Q & A session at the end) knew all too well in advance – that the Sharma brain’s hard drive had been programmed only to put out evasive “politico-speak crap filler” by the proverbial yard.
The disappointment lay in the fact – not that everybody concerned knew this before the charade began – but that it went ahead anyway.
Here’s a link to the review of yesterday’s press conference by John Crace that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Not that I’m drawing a crass parallel here [which statement probably means I am!] but the 108th anniversary of the loss of the RMS Titanic is less than a fortnight (15th April) away.
If this outfit – rather than the White Star Line and its captain Edward Smith – had been in charge at the time, they’d have been putting out statements that – unfortunate as the iceberg collision was – everything was in hand and proceeding as they had expected and planned, though clearly everyone should remain vigilant and there was, of course, a lot more work to be done.
