{"id":147215,"date":"2023-03-20T15:47:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T23:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=147215"},"modified":"2023-03-20T15:49:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T23:49:20","slug":"bloody-panico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=147215","title":{"rendered":"Bloody Panico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Review<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 2022 will be remembered as the year of two monarchs and three prime ministers, not to mention four chancellors of the exchequer, five education secretaries, and more than thirty resignations from the government.<\/p>\n

* When I sent half-ironical congratulations to a don at Lincoln College, Sunak\u2019s Oxford alma mater, on the ascent of their eminent alumnus, he replied, \u201cWe\u2019re very proud of Rishi and hope that he lasts at least a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

* But what distinguishes the Tories nowadays isn\u2019t marital infidelity or sexual variety so much as sheer squalor. One MP was imprisoned for sexual abuse of minors, one was forced to resign when a woman MP sitting in the chamber of the Commons noticed that he was looking at pornography on his cell phone, and another, Chris Pincher, was seen at a party at the Carlton Club fondling the groins of younger men, to which Johnson initially responded, with his ready wit, \u201cPincher by name, pincher by nature.\u201d Hancock\u2019s own political career ended when a CCTV camera caught him in a passionate embrace in his ministerial office with a colleague who proved to be also his mistress (transgressing lockdown rules as well as the Seventh Commandment). He has since appeared on a grotesque \u201creality program\u201d eating the genitals of exotic animals in some distant clime, and he looks more and more like our present-day answer to the Rector of Stiffkey, who was defrocked in the 1930s for devoting excessive pastoral care to chorus girls and ended his days exhibiting himself in a barrel at a circus before, sad to say, he was mauled by a lion.<\/p>\n

* While Johnson was mishandling the pandemic he would address the nation on television in his rambling, bumbling manner, which prompted Robert Harris, the political journalist turned novelist, to observe that as we listened to him blathering on with his feeble excuses and totally unconvincing explanations, we all realized what being married to him must be like. And so although Johnson\u2019s fall has been called unexpected, it was surely overdetermined. He always had a transactional relationship with MPs who knew very well that he was a \u201cseedy, treacherous chancer,\u201d in Ferdinand Mount\u2019s phrase, a ruthlessly ambitious, totally unprincipled opportunist who has never believed in anything in his life apart from self-advancement and self-gratification. While they supported him as long as he could win an election, the Tories sensed that he was always a series of accidents waiting to happen.<\/p>\n

* The first names of the latest four French finance ministers are Bruno, Michel, Pierre, and Fran\u00e7ois; of their German counterparts, Christian, Olaf, Peter, and Wolfgang; of American secretaries of the Treasury, Janet, Steven, Jack, and Timothy. The four successive chancellors of the exchequer until last October were called Sajid, Rishi, Nadhim, and Kwasi. Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, the Portuguese politician who is now a prolific commentator, has said that there is no other European country where four people with such names could have risen to such an office. Three of the highest offices\u2014the premiership and the two historic secretaryships of state\u2014are now held by people of color: the foreign secretary is James Cleverly, whose mother was from Sierra Leone, and the home secretary is Suella Braverman, whose parents were Indian by way of Mauritius and Kenya.<\/p>\n

Veneration of Churchill is a dogma of the Tory Party (with which he had a very checkered relationship over the years) as well as of the American right, although his racism is no secret. He once told a colleague that \u201cthe Hindus were a foul race\u201d who deserved to be extirpated, and in 1955, at the last Cabinet meeting over which he presided as prime minister, he said that the Tories should fight the next election on the slogan \u201cKeep England White.\u201d At the Conservative Party Conference the following year, one of the speakers was Captain Charles Waterhouse, a veteran of the Great War, an MP since the 1920s, and a great conference favorite. In his speech he used the phrase \u201cnigger in the woodpile\u201d; added in a stage aside, \u201cToo many of them about anyway\u201d; and brought the house down with raucous laughter\u2014a memory that must make today\u2019s Tories shudder, and not only them.<\/p>\n

This was at a time when recently arrived immigrants from the West Indies faced gross discrimination and occasional violence. In a particularly repellent story related in Matthew Engel\u2019s new book The Reign: Life in Elizabeth\u2019s Britain, Carmel Jones arrived in England from Jamaica in 1955. A pious Anglican, like many West Indians, she went to her local parish church, where the vicar told her, \u201cThank you for coming, but I would be delighted if you didn\u2019t come back. My congregation is uncomfortable in the presence of black people.\u201d<\/p>\n

* I\u2019m haunted by the memory of the speech that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha made to his unfortunate people one January long ago: \u201cThis year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Review: * 2022 will be remembered as the year of two monarchs and three prime ministers, not to mention four chancellors of the exchequer, five education secretaries, and more than thirty resignations from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t