I hadn’t seen him in more than thirty years when I bumped into an old classmate randomly on the street a couple of weeks back.
Unlike myself, he was one of the bright guys at school, top of the class at everything – and he went on to become a very successful professional man spending a lot of his time abroad earning big bucks. Now he’s back living in his home place.
Having nothing better to do we went for a cup of coffee, and the conversation inevitably came around to what was the biggest changes we had seen since we last met up.
To be honest I expected him to say the internet, mobile phones, the Good Friday Agreement but out it came – “Naked Attraction”.
“What?” says I, nearly falling off the chair “Naked Attraction - that the biggest thing that’s happened in the past thirty/forty years?”
He was deadly serious in that he said nothing reflected a bigger change in society in his view than a dating programme on mainstream television where there was close ups of full frontal nudity.
Along with Celebrity Big Brother and a couple of other reality TV shows, he maintained Naked Attraction perfectly reflected a very different society.
He even had me half convinced by the end of our chat.
And that conversation, believe it or not, brings me on to Sir John Major’s speech last week. He, too, was harking back to values of another era.
Former prime minister Major launched his attack on Boris Johnson stating bluntly that the current Prime Minister’s disregard for truth and ministerial standards risked undermining the very fabric of British democracy.
Major, basically, said BoJo was a lawbreaker who appeared to believe the rules didn’t apply to him, that the truth was optional and that his behaviour was tarnishing Britain’s reputation globally.
And in regard to the defence of the so called ‘Covid parties’ Sir John really went for the jugular: “Brazen excuses were dreamed up. Day after day the public was asked to believe the unbelievable. Ministers were sent out to defend the indefensible – making themselves look gullible or foolish.”
The prime minister’s BS is not exactly hiding in a corner - it’s out there front and centre. You sure don’t need to be rabid socialist to come to the conclusion that Major is 100% correct in his analysis that this current government is possibly the most incompetent, maybe even the most corrupt, in history.
If it’s not, the others must really have been bloody awful.
Here’s how it works. BoJo begins every speech with a claim that Britain is a world beater in something or other. He then shifts blame for any and all of his mistakes on to someone else, throws in a few phrases in Latin - oh, plebs, amn’t I so clever! - and finishes by refusing to answer legitimate questions from the assembled press corps by claiming – again for public consumption – that he’ll give full and frank responses to those questions at a later date. He never does.
And that, folks, is the formula that got him an 80 plus majority at Westminster.
Sir John suggested that misleading people with half-truths to legitimate questions breeds disillusionment whilst ‘outright lies’ breed contempt. That’s definitely a truism.
Remember that BoJo promise of no border down the Irish Sea? That no British prime minister would contemplate such a thing?
So, here’s another change of note I’ll leave with you – it used to be the nationalist community that held British administrations in contempt. Now I’m pretty sure the contempt on the unionist side is way, way stronger. That is what ‘outright lies’ have done.
