A reputation at stake

+We’re only into the first 24 hours of Johnson’s premiership, and already there’s been a power cut (here in Yorkshire). Of course I hear you say, I can’t blame Johnson for that. Maybe not. But it merely begs the question as to how long we will be asked to wait for him to accept responsibility for things going belly-up. I don’t believe he’s expressed a single word of contrition for his £multi-million cock-ups as Mayor of London. Now that he is responsible for all of us (ugh!), the ante has been somewhat upped. We’ll soon hear that it’s all Jeremy Corbyn’s fault that things aren’t working out (May tried this trick too) which rather begs the question whether Her Maj invited the right person to form a government.
 
Not to worry. We’re learning as we go along. We’ll soon see our Great Clown Leader meeting Trump. It must necessarily be one of Johnson’s first ports of call in the remote possibility he might wish to utterly burnish our appreciation of his historic importance. This, I would suggest might not be best served by a meeting in the boring old Oval Office but rather on a warship, as when Churchill met Roosevelt in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in August 1941. Now of course, to celebrate our special relationship, Johnson could have a similar meeting with the added bonus of welcoming Trump on board HMS Queen Elizabeth, our new aircraft carrier, moored next to the Statue of Liberty. A fitting location, since both men were born in New York and no doubt both appreciate the symbolic importance of the Statue of Liberty as a welcome to immigrants. Then they could witness the landing of a squadron of American F35s, or at least one of them, to demonstrate both leaders’ commitment to fending off fake news attacks from wherever Putin dispatches them. Hurrah! We need to see Johnson saluting the great Commander in Chief himself! (I think Johnson too would love to be a commander in chief, wearing a uniform of one sort or another like his hero Churchill did, assuming that no-one in the Johnson loving media would question his lack of military experience). That’s one scenario. Others abound.
 
But what do you do with a Churchill hero worshipper, one who has finally earned  his own portrait’s place on the famous No. 10 staircase? I suppose we shouldn’t dwell too long on Churchill’s many strategic failures, brought on by an abiding confidence in his own utterly flawed strategic genius. The Brexit war (let’s not forget, the most decisive issue for the UK in 70 years) has its own momentum, as indeed does physical combat, and Johnson much like Churchill is merely reliant on the failed strategic thinking of the past. This means he will try to undermine the EU’s bargaining position by an appeal to its weaker flanks—i.e. those that are fairly recent members whose culture has yet to assimilate the liberal set of values which most of us understand rightly or wrongly to have sustained some form of irreversible social progress in Europe. What does this matter to an ego the size of Johnson’s? A man who is a licensed liar? He has given the green light to all who have some petty axe to grind, but especially those who  profit from others’ weakness (the dominant theme of UK politics)? I could go on, but since I’m not paid £100,000 a year for this, I’ve decided to take a rest. I’d just like you to know that more power cuts may be on the way.
 
+I have been brought up to speed on my old friend and colleague Gordon Prentice’s run-in with Conrad Black, also known as Lord Black of Crossharbour, a Tory nominee to our legislature gifted by William (I’m ever so witty) Hague. It seems that Black’s lawyers have picked up comments by Gordon that Black is a ‘convicted fraudster.’ It gets complicated when one finds that one D. Trump gave Black a presidential pardon. It would seem that in the U.S. system that’s a get out of jail free card, but does not exonerate you from the original conviction. Gordon it has be said always had a penchant for calling a turd a turd, and on this occasion he has flushed Black as he should be to the rear of a u-bend. It all rather begs the question as to whether being pardoned by Trump is not in itself a conviction, a declaration of your guilt. Silly. Of course it is. Gordon’s refutation of Black’s position is rather bolstered by the presidential pardon, reproduced on Gordon’s webpage. If Black wasn’t convicted (and received a 42 month jail sentence and a $125,000 fine) what was he being pardoned for?