Paul Kirkley: Help, I think I’m suffering from smugpression, plus making Britain boring, #partygate and town v crown
So, in the least surprising plot twist since Sleeping Beauty said “I’m just going for a lie down”, it turns out that Boris Johnson is a liar. (And before anyone writes in, I don’t think we need to wait for a report by Sue Gray, Sue Ellen, Sue Barker, Runaround Sue, A Boy Named Sue or anyone else to tell us that, do we?)
I mean, who could possibly have seen this coming? Apart from literally everyone – including, if they’re honest, most of the people who voted for him.
It’s at this point that those of us who’ve spent years pointing out Johnson’s chronic unfitness for public office – because he’s twice before been sacked for lying, because he conspired to have a journalist violently beaten up, because his entire Brexit ‘strategy’ was built on a tottering pile of untruths, and so on – should be practising our smuggest, most triumphant “I told you so” faces. Except, of course, that we have to live in the mess he’s created, just like everyone else.
In fact, if I’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that being constantly proved right about everything is absolutely no comfort at all. (And, just to be clear, I’m talking about the big political choices of the day here: on a domestic level, as my wife will only too readily attest, I am rarely proved right about anything.)
What’s particularly depressing, for me, is this apparently constant urge – by politicians and large swathes of voters, egged on by the right-wing press and their bloviating columnists – to test every single lunatic theory to destruction. “Climate change is an existential threat to the planet and our way of life,” said the scientists. “Well, let’s just wait and see, shall we?” said the policy makers and the newspaper barons. “It might not be as bad as everyone sa... Oh.” “Brexit will make us all poorer,” warned the economists. “Project Fear!” cried the nationalist tub-thumpers. “There won’t really be higher prices and a chronic shortage of workers and miles of queuing lorries and… Oh.” “Donald Trump is insane, and potentially an actual fascist,” warned… well, pretty much everyone. “Oh, I’m sure he won’t be that bad,” shrugged 63 million voters, riled up by the grievance politics of Fox News and their ilk. “Let’s at least give him a chance to… Oh.” “Boris Johnson is a notorious charlatan who…”
Well, you get the idea.
Honestly, think of the time and energy we might have saved – and the world we might have got on with building – if we hadn’t insisted on reaching all these blindingly obvious conclusions in the hardest, most painful, most damaging way possible.
And the worst thing is, while the public inevitably end up feeling buyers’ remorse, the shameless grifters who encouraged them – the advocates of chaos, the reckless lords of misrule: they never seem to learn a thing. They never look back at the trail of destruction behind them with so much as an inch of humility. If I’d made as many calls that history has subsequently proved wrong as, say, Nigel Farage, Toby Young, Laurence Fox and Allison Pearson, I’d maybe consider just shutting up and keeping my head down for a bit. But no, now here they are being noisily wrong all over again in the coronavirus culture wars.
And for those of us who history has placed on the right side of these arguments – what do we have to show for it? Nada, that’s what.
As a result, I find myself caught in a near-constant state that’s somewhere between smugness and depression. Let’s call it smugpression. I’m smugpressed about the state of the world. And I suspect you are too.
Sometimes it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at the latest Whitehall farce that’s engulfing the country. One day we’re told Boris Johnson was “ambushed by a cake” – an actual sentence that was actually said by an actual MP – the next we’re told there was no cake. Forget Schrödinger's cat, meet Schrödinger's Colin the Caterpillar. Did Carrie Antoinette let them eat cake in the Cabinet Room or not? Maybe Sue Gray is interviewing Colin as we speak.
Anyway, it’s all really quite funny. Except, of course, it’s not, actually. Not if you weren’t able to spend time with a dying parent, or hug your loved ones at a funeral.
And it’s hardly as if this whole scandal is an isolated incident. Rather, it’s yet another chapter in the endless Tory psychodrama that has dominated – and diminished – British public life over recent years. Forget making Britain great again – who’s up for making Britain boring again?
Another day, another panicked policy announcement to try to deflect attention away from the prime minister’s problems. This time, it’s that old chestnut “a bonfire of Brussels red tape”. Honestly, imagine thinking that a flaming funeral pyre of health and safety regulations is a good look at the exact same time the Grenfell Inquiry is looking into the deaths of 72 people in an unsafe tower block. But hey, Boris – you do you.
A last word on #partygate (for now): Sir Keir Starmer has done a good job of holding Johnson and his cabinet of none of the talents to account on the issue – but why is no-one challenging the constant government refrain that the prime minister has “got all the big calls right” over the pandemic? Have they already forgotten that we suffered the highest death toll in Europe, and that the Commons’ own inquiry described the UK’s early response as “one of the most important public health failures” in the country’s history? I know a week is a long time in politics, but you’d think 155,000 deaths would stick in the memory.
It may only the first week of February, but “robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge” is already a contender for my headline of the year.
As you may have read, the automated cleaner made a break for it from the budget hotel in Orchard Park, and was “still on the loose” the following day. (He eventually turned up under a hedge, apparently none the worse for wear.)
Whole Pixar movies have been based on less than this. In fact, it’s basically the plot of WALL-E, isn’t it? Or maybe the robot saw himself as more of a Travis Bickle, from Taxi Driver – on a mission to clean up the streets of this filthy town.
A member of the hotel’s staff reassured reporters at the time that the errant machine “has no natural predators in the wild”. And yet, as wags were quick to point out on Twitter, we all know that nature abhors a vacuum.
On the subject of headlines, here are two more I read last week: ‘The Cambridge children who have never seen the River Cam’ (Cambridge Independent), and ‘The Queen treats Cambridge kids to surprises on sleepovers’ (Woman & Home). It took me a few moments to work out that the ‘Cambridge kids’ in the second one are actually the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Everyone knows town and gown inequality is a problem in this city – but town and crown is just rubbing it in.
Read more from Paul Kirkley, Columnist of the Year at the UK Regional Press Awards, in the Cambridge Independent each month.
