The British people have stayed calm and patient while the elite have become jokers
POLITICS has flipped. I don’t mean “flipped” in the sense our politicians have gone loopy, although quite a few have plainly been sent round the twist by Brexit and could do with a syringeful of sedative in their backsides.
I mean that the normal relationship of voters to those in public life has flipped inside out and upside down.
It used to be the establishment that showed the statesmanship while the rest of us followed them. In the last three-and-a-half years, the opposite has occurred.
It has been the British people — calm, patient, amazingly good-humoured — who have set the example to the foaming fools of our political class. It has been the elite that has been rioting and generally behaving like hooligans.
Has there ever been a wilder time in the corridors of power, here and abroad? In the House of Commons we have had sit-ins and choruses of communism’s Red Flag anthem.
Middle-class vegan eco-warriors — few of them seemingly poor enough to have to earn a living — have set up tents in Trafalgar Square and Whitehall and brought traffic chaos to working Londoners.
Top civil servants and privy councillors have almost come to blows. And a prince of the realm and his new wife have thrown a massive wobbly about their Press coverage, mere days after most newspapers had showered them in positive publicity.
The clincher for me was Piers Morgan’s rivetingly bizarre ITV interview this week with Boris Johnson’s ex-crumpet (sorry, “tech adviser”) Jennifer Arcuri.
Here was a network breakfast TV show quizzing a dimpled dolly-bird in Los Angeles for the best part of an hour, feverishly trying to find out if she had had nookie with our Prime Minister.
Up and down the country, families were trying to get some cornflakes into the kids before school, while listening to a blonde with a dirty laugh fight off persistent questions about whether or not she had been “intimate” with the head of our country’s government.
DIMPLED DOLLY-BIRD
Look, I’m no vicar. I don’t really care about politicians’ sex lives, though I happen to think people are happier — and lawmakers more trustworthy — if they obey their wedding vows. I also thought Morgan did pretty well in the interview. But it was just such a vivid demonstration of the cartoon-ishness of our current predicament.
Cartoon seems the right word because so much of what has been happening in British public life has been farcical and obvious to the point of caricature. Look at the behaviour of the Commons Speaker, John Bercow. His self-conduct in the chair of the Commons has been so maniacally biased, it really does belong to an episode of The Simpsons.
Bercow has screamed abuse at MPs who have dared criticise him. He has ripped up centuries of procedural custom to bend the rules to the advantage of his Remain-backing friends. One of his family cars even sported a “Bollocks to Brexit” sticker.
If someone tried to chair a parish council in such a blatantly preachy, lecturing way, they would be fired before the first item of business had been completed. Yet Bercow, who will finally quit his role at the end of this month, is going to walk into a six-figure pension for the rest of his life — and he is only 56.
The recent party conferences saw ripe behaviour from our political class. The Liberal Democrats passed a motion vowing to ignore the result of our country’s largest ever public vote. Er, how is that “democratic”?
At Labour’s conference, the apparent result of a key vote was overturned on the blatant say-so of one of Comrade Corbyn’s key commissars. They didn’t bother to have any votes at the Tory conference — they never do — but we did have the spectacle of a parliamentary knight of the shires being kicked out of the premises after an alleged contretemps with a doorkeeper.
And you should have seen the amount of booze being put away at those party conferences and at the TUC’s shindig a week earlier. Great lakes of alcohol were gulped down, much of it free. This from the same political class that loves to lecture the rest of us about watching our weekly units.
Things are not much better elsewhere in our body politic. Top judge Lady Hale has been revelling in her notoriety after she and her fellow Supreme Court judges changed the law and thus made Brexit less likely.
SWOLLEN-HEADED
Judges once kept themselves away from the media fray. Hale, making jokes at Boris Johnson’s expense and giving quite unnecessary self-promotional interviews, has looked swollen-headed and has done nothing to allay fears the judiciary is as bent as Bercow.
The police’s reputation is also in the mire after the mishandling of some plainly absurd sex-abuse allegations. The only other person who believed them was Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, who is now bleating about the dangers of a No-Deal Brexit.
Why should we believe a single word he says? Talking of the police, why are the Met so timid about stopping the Extinction Rebellion protests in London? You can bet that if those protestors had been massing in favour of a No-Deal Brexit, they’d have been baton-charged and loaded into the back of a Black Maria. And the public’s response to all this? You have, ladies and gentlemen, been magnificent.
You have not rioted. You have not risen up in fury. You have found it hard to stomach, I know, but you have kept your humour. You have stayed loyal to democracy, voting in the European elections we were never meant to have.
MOST READ IN OPINION
The BBC and big business and others have tried to scare you with Project Fear but you have not shifted your view.
Opinion polls suggest that Euroscepticism is only growing, with more now wanting a No-Deal Brexit than not.
You have, in short, shown the poise and maturity we once expected from our political masters. Take a bow.
- GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAIL [email protected]