'A country run by clowns who put their own interests before anything else'
I had the week off last week – very nice, thank you. Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery, Brentford vs West Ham, superb. I had an obligatory to-do list which was overtaken by the Covid Inquiry.
Did you see it? The best bit of TV for ages. I couldn’t stop watching as the sheer horror of it unfolded.
Quite a cast, including Party Marty and Dominic Cummings, who revealed the scope of failings and chaos at the heart of No10.
Mr Cummings was very vocal on social media after his hours of evidence, telling people to focus on the ineptitude at the top and not the soap opera aspects of the inquiry and the personalities.
It is truly terrifying when you’re allowed a glimpse – a proper one – into the way decisions are made.
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A combination of panic, ego and stupidity. Superhero culture, macho behaviour, the whole sordid mess. Car crash.
And the truly repellent thing: the casual way people behaved when lives were at risk.
The ire reserved for the hapless Matt Hancock was quite something, though. In a message to Boris Johnson, Mr Cummings wrote: “You need to think through timing of binning Hancock.
“There’s no way the guy can stay. He’s lied his way through this and killed people and dozens and dozens of people have seen it.”
Killed people. That really is quite something. Anyways, we roll on to fresh horrors this week. Suella Braverman, the Mr Hyde to Rishi Sunak’s Dr Jekyll, was out and in full mad form this week.
Her article in The Times was as close to unhinged as I’ve seen.
People are marching in London because they want the violence in Gaza to stop. I couldn’t go yesterday but my friends were taking part.
They are not terrorist sympathisers or anti-Semitic and they condemn the horrors of October 7. They just want the violence to stop.
Ms Braverman’s tactics are abhorrent populism. And we saw the results in the unpleasant scenes in the capital yesterday.
For the Home Secretary to whip up the tension with toxic rhetoric is stupid and dangerous.
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And trying to strongarm the police is almost beyond belief.
But this is par for the course. Like the Covid Inquiry shows, this whole thing is being run by clowns who put their own interests and ambitions before even the most important of issues – public safety, for example.
You get what you pay for. But it’s no less staggering when you realise people in power are clueless.
I’ve worked in journalism, politics, education and experienced the criminal justice system.
The sad truth is, at the very top, I’ve only ever come across a tiny number of people who know what they’re doing. In fact, it’s about four.
And that might be generous.
Rat? It's rubbish, Nadine
There’s really not much I can say about the Nadine Dorries book, so instead I present an extract here for your delectation.
(I swear this is in there – actually in there – and not some sort of parody I’ve cooked up.)
“The brass screens on the window of the door rattled as the door swung closed behind him as he left, and as I crossed the room to drop the empty tea cups into the bin behind the bar, a startled rat that had chewed its way through a black bin bag, and that was cleaning its whiskers after having dined out, stared up at me.
“‘You don’t scare me any more,’ I said. ‘I’ve met bigger rats than you in this place.’”
(I phoned William Hill to try and get Nadine’s Booker Prize odds. They hung up.)
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