The plague is making a comeback and our head clown is tightening the screws again on who, when & where we can catch the blight.
I have watched with increasing horror the mounting ineptitude of our leaders in almost every sphere of endeavour they undertake. I am watching an unfolding farce with no resolution and with each new blow I feel the weight of my generation’s failure to lead our times with any degree of competence.
If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then Slough grammar and its peers are where the battle of Brexit and modern leadership was lost.
When I went to a certain minor public school of modest accomplishment, there were various tenets of conduct & behaviour that were drummed into us from the very air we breathed. They were largely unspoken but they revolved around an assumption that your peers were honest, decent, true & stood for everything that made the British gentlemen superior to all other forms of upper-classishness.
We learned our history from gung-ho boy’s comic books & acquired our sense of entitlement from 500 years of in-breeding, but the point was we were the best of the best and had a paternatalistic rightness about our cause & our actions that made us superior and fit for leadership. Our word was our bond and we would make the World – if not a better place – a better place for Britons. Or so we believed.
It struck me even at school that our class behaviour did not always match the ideals we inherited, but it was ‘bad form’ to point out other peers weaknesses, or acknowledge your own short-comings because this let the side down, and a few back-sliders were tolerated to maintain the dignity & integritity of the whole structure.
When I went to work in the City in the late 1970’s to gain all the benefits I had been taught to expect from my background & education, I found very quickly that I had to turn a blind eye to all the transgressions, from all sides, to our unwritten code of conduct.
‘A Gentlemen’s word is his bond’, ‘Utmost good faith’ ‘Always truth’ were phrases I heard quoted frequently by people who were doing the exact opposite on a daily basis. I began to realize with mounting horror that the whole system ran on hypocrisy and if everyone started dealing with the reality of the situation, the whole system would collapse.
But it wasn’t just dishonesty that was underpining the system, it was incompetence and wilful blindness as well. And this shallow, hollow system nearly went to the wall in the ’90’s as the City’s financial services was submerged by a sea of incompetence, obsolesence, greed, dishonesty & ignorance and most importantly of all a lack of regulation caused by a class who didn’t apparently need it because they were ‘Gentlemen’.
And the ‘Gentlemen players’ were already being overtaken by a new breed of more competent, professional, QUALIFIED, leaders who implemented the regulations and controls needed to keep the whole City of London afloat. Although this new breed of ‘barrow boys’, bean-counters, pony-tails & MBA’s had their own flaws and I’m not certain much has really changed if someone competent looks really hard under the lid. It’s just harder to get a decent lunch nowadays but the greedy hypocrisy is still there in gold-plated buckets.
Which brings me back to Bojo the clown. There he sits at the top of the tree. Privileged, entitled, incompetent, expecting whatever tosh he comes out with to be believed because he comes from a World where his word is his bond and it’s bad form to point out he’s welched on his debts. That won’t stop the bookies coming ’round and breaking his legs, but in Boris’ World it’s the bookie’s fault for not respecting a Gentlemen, not his fault for not paying his debts.
So the only questions that matter are: does Bojo believe the old tosh he comes out with or does he know he is lying and expect his privileged position to protect him from reality? And does the man in the street who put him in Number 10 know or care whether Boris is lying or not?
Because if the answer is his voters know Boris Johnson is lying and believe he is a ‘Gentlemen’ and that excuses him, then Democracy is not working and the lunatics really have taken over the asylum, and we gave them the keys.
Bulk and The Devil 