Public servants

Image via BBC

We in the still just about United Kingdom are fortunate enough to be served by a silent army of selfless public sector workers who tirelessly toil to maintain and improve our precious way of life. Often without witness, recognition or appreciation, their meagre financial reward is offset by the pride in fulfilling public duty for the general good. Avoiding vulgar and shameless self-publicity, we owe these saviours of society a debt of thanks that transcends mere pension schemes, employment rights and tasteless arguments over take-home pay. High court judges, senior police officers, NHS Trust executive managers and local authority cabinet members work unstintingly for a generally unappreciative populous and would never demean their public duty by discussing salaries, allowances and perks.

Consider Nicholas Paget-Brown, the former leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who displayed such selfless leadership in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster by adopting a stance of complete inaction and a policy of victim blaming.

Advertisement

Clad

Following detailed analysis by a number of globally prominent experts, there is growing concern for the safety of a vulnerable Westminster resident who is refusing to evacuate a space that is in real and imminent danger of complete collapse. With her house falling down around her ears and her premises no longer viable or credible, this poor victim of shoddy workmanship and scandalous cutbacks during the construction and refurbishment process now finds herself almost homeless. Fortunately, the recent sub-letting of the crumbling town house to her new orange friend and the installation of a money incinerator under the Renewable Heat Initiative means that the plucky resident is immune from forced eviction as long as the recently discovered money tree continues to supply the recently installed money incinerator.

There are, however, further concerns regarding the materials used to board up the doors and windows of the property in an attempt to thwart the so-called experts and the health and safety storm troopers. It seems that samples of the decorative cladding have been tested and the preliminary results suggest that living in an environment enclosed by such heat insulation is about as safe as opening an email from a Russian cosmonaut en route to a rendezvous with a super nova.

More worrying still is the horrible realisation that similar boarding up cladding is being used to isolate other Westminster addresses including Number 11, the Scottish Office, the Welsh Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Treasury and, more importantly perhaps, the newly created Office for Making a Total Mess of Getting Out of Europe. There are people within these buildings who, like the vulnerable Westminster resident who refuses to leave her subsidised home in spite of all evidence and advice, must be finding it difficult to sleep at night.

Tragedy

Via ITN.com

It is conceivable that during the early hours of last Wednesday morning returning from a game of football between France and England in Paris the previous evening, Prime Minister Theresa May on final approach to RAF Northolt might have glanced out of the window and witnessed flames lighting up the night sky above West London. Later, as her motorcade sped along the A40, perhaps her thoughts on England`s woeful defensive performance against 10 men were disturbed by the smell of acrid smoke. Then on the Westway, the burning cladding blowing across the carriageway might just have distracted her mind from what she needs to bribe the Democratic Unionist Party with in order to prolong her stay in Downing Street. We may never know at precisely what point, if indeed at all, she considered the game was well and truly up.

Morning has broken…it`s time

With the result of the General Election now a foregone conclusion and with a guaranteed landslide heading towards President Theresa May, the BBC can at last stop searching the streets to interview former Labour voters who will now enthusiastically cast their ballot for Mrs May because the alternative in the sickening shape of Jeremy Corbyn who is simply unelectable.

The small group of newspaper owners can relax in their off-shore havens safe in the knowledge that their editors and hacks have informed the electorate that Jeremy Corbyn is a murdering terrorist who stamps on kittens for pleasure and will sell our children in order to fund a communist invasion from planet Mars.

Having made the sensible decision to announce the only proper result of the election before the polls have opened, mainstream media and sections of social media have spared the population the tiresome and quite unnecessary chore of actually going out to vote. Even a cursory glance at the published manifestos of the political parties would make it impossible for anyone other than a complete idiot not to vote Tory.

Air sick

As the English language continues to gloriously expand and evolve, it has yet to create an adequate word or phrase to capture the true essence of what it means to be a spectator of political campaigning.

The German “schadenfreude” or the related “joie mauvaise” from the French describing an evil joy might explain taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others but does not quite capture the feeling of toe-curling discomfiture watching politicians dig holes armed with only sound bites and spurious facts and figures. Even the Spanish “verguenza ajena” which relates to the sublime if guilty delight of seeing total strangers making fools of themselves during episodes of vicarious embarrassment cannot fully encompass the feeling of wanting to look away even though continuing to look through fingers thrown across disbelieving eyes. The invented “freudenschade”, which cleverly flips the German original to mean expressing sorrow at the success or good fortune of other people, does not cut the linguistic mustard. The advantage of a snap election means that the inevitable gaffs, faux pas, howling examples of hysterical hypocrisy and moments of undiluted unmitigated madness are condensed into a few, brief weeks of something that has no satisfactory descriptor known within the English language.