Boris Johnson says greed is good, David Cameron hails privilege, George Osborne spends more than £8m redecorating the Treasury Big Brother-style. Whatever next?
I'm wondering if there's a secret, bespoke game of Top Trumps being played among senior members of government and/or former Bullingdon Club members, whereby they compete to display the greatest measure of contempt for the public in the shortest possible time. There must be some underlying strategy, some ultimate goal of which we are not aware and which has no connection to their purported aims to explain what would otherwise appear to be wilfully self-defeating, suicidally imbecilic moves.
Boris Johnson's latest was to use the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture to hail greed, inequality and the envy it produces as the best way to ensure competition and economic growth. Gave me a tingle of nostalgia, that did. Or was it a shiver of dread? So little to choose between them when your childhood memories are derived almost wholly from the iron (lady) age. Trumps-wise: high scoring on offensiveness, but low on originality.
Next up, David Cameron. The speech about permanent austerity delivered from a golden throne at the lord mayor's banquet was the card to beat last time round, but this time it's a joke at the centenary dinner of the Association of Conservative Peers about his father-in-law, hereditary peer William Astor, who fretted when Blair came to power that between the Lords reforms and the hunting ban, he would have nothing to do during the week or at weekends. But, said Cameron, he seemed to spend his time in much the same fashion as he had before Blair arrived! Let joy and reckless-demonstration-of-inbred-over-privilege points be unconfined.
Then it was Gidiot's turn. George Osborne laid down the spending of more than £8m on redecorating the Treasury, complete with furniture commissioned from the people who provide Big Brother and X Factor with some of their most hideous on-set pieces. The expensive, tax-funded refurb is such a derivative and unimaginative move that it qualifies in the "timeless classic" category and earns back all the points lost. The making of such a move is, in fact, known as the Osborne manoeuvre.
Plus, of course, in Top Hole! Trumps, you get extra points for anything involving wasting taxpayer funds, for the shades of the Bullingdon initiation rite of burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person that it evokes.
Of course, in this variation there are further points to be earned by standing by your play. If Boris doesn't cave and start insisting that he was misinterpreted ("No, no – I was sight-translating from the Latin! Bound to be a few errata as one heffalumps along, what!"), his reworking of Gordon Gekko for a generation who knows Michael Douglas only as the guy who reckons he caught cancer from Catherine Zeta-Jones' pudenda terribilis is a potential winner. And if Gidiot resists the temptation to scream, "A bigger boy made me do it!" then he's certainly in with a chance. Because, although Cameron held the strongest hand, he will have to deny his own nature and refuse to turn and backtrack so fast and lightly (a skilled estate manager standing ever-poised to rake over the footprints as he goes) that no one can ever prove he was there.
Still, it doesn't matter too much. As long as they're the ones holding all the cards, none of them can ever really lose. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
I'm wondering if there's a secret, bespoke game of Top Trumps being played among senior members of government and/or former Bullingdon Club members, whereby they compete to display the greatest measure of contempt for the public in the shortest possible time. There must be some underlying strategy, some ultimate goal of which we are not aware and which has no connection to their purported aims to explain what would otherwise appear to be wilfully self-defeating, suicidally imbecilic moves.
Boris Johnson's latest was to use the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture to hail greed, inequality and the envy it produces as the best way to ensure competition and economic growth. Gave me a tingle of nostalgia, that did. Or was it a shiver of dread? So little to choose between them when your childhood memories are derived almost wholly from the iron (lady) age. Trumps-wise: high scoring on offensiveness, but low on originality.
Next up, David Cameron. The speech about permanent austerity delivered from a golden throne at the lord mayor's banquet was the card to beat last time round, but this time it's a joke at the centenary dinner of the Association of Conservative Peers about his father-in-law, hereditary peer William Astor, who fretted when Blair came to power that between the Lords reforms and the hunting ban, he would have nothing to do during the week or at weekends. But, said Cameron, he seemed to spend his time in much the same fashion as he had before Blair arrived! Let joy and reckless-demonstration-of-inbred-over-privilege points be unconfined.
Then it was Gidiot's turn. George Osborne laid down the spending of more than £8m on redecorating the Treasury, complete with furniture commissioned from the people who provide Big Brother and X Factor with some of their most hideous on-set pieces. The expensive, tax-funded refurb is such a derivative and unimaginative move that it qualifies in the "timeless classic" category and earns back all the points lost. The making of such a move is, in fact, known as the Osborne manoeuvre.
Plus, of course, in Top Hole! Trumps, you get extra points for anything involving wasting taxpayer funds, for the shades of the Bullingdon initiation rite of burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person that it evokes.
Of course, in this variation there are further points to be earned by standing by your play. If Boris doesn't cave and start insisting that he was misinterpreted ("No, no – I was sight-translating from the Latin! Bound to be a few errata as one heffalumps along, what!"), his reworking of Gordon Gekko for a generation who knows Michael Douglas only as the guy who reckons he caught cancer from Catherine Zeta-Jones' pudenda terribilis is a potential winner. And if Gidiot resists the temptation to scream, "A bigger boy made me do it!" then he's certainly in with a chance. Because, although Cameron held the strongest hand, he will have to deny his own nature and refuse to turn and backtrack so fast and lightly (a skilled estate manager standing ever-poised to rake over the footprints as he goes) that no one can ever prove he was there.
Still, it doesn't matter too much. As long as they're the ones holding all the cards, none of them can ever really lose. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.