Season's Greetings

Looks like the Silly Season has started a day early then. The season is normally meant to start when Parliament rises for the summer recess, but today we have Johnson on the steps of No.10. It would now appear that he has a good six weeks at least to do what he wants without parliamentary scrutiny. Great timing, thank you Tories. His speech outside the famous door, like many of his predecessors set out a vision of his idea of One Nation Conservatism (truncate that to One Nationism) and I feel fairly certain like Theresa May’s similar appeal three years ago his will be just piss and wind. I was rather hoping he would rise to the occasion as the great Churchillian scholar that he is and deliver a truly memorable Churchillian speech, but his words were pedestrian and uninspiring (‘doomsters’ and ‘gloomsters’ doesn’t quite cut it—he sounds like a schoolboy worried that the tuck shop is about to run out). His promises, of which recruiting 20,000 more police officers was given star billing, ring hollow when you consider who it was that drastically cut police officer numbers in the days of austerity. As regards the biggest issue of the day—climate change, not Brexit—he could only muster a mention of battery technology buried in the depths of his rant. Hardly an acknowledgement that he ‘gets it.’ Anyway, he has rattled off a shopping list which suggests that he thinks he’ll be around long enough to deliver it. Since the immediate prospect of the ‘National Unity’ government scenario seems to have wilted in the summer heat, it looks like Johnson will have a little window of opportunity to demonstrate his worth. It could be a Silly Season to remember, so Season’s Greetings!
 
Let’s not forget that another bouncy, smiling full-of-optimism leader has been elected—this being Jo Swinson of the LibDems. She, as a fully paid-up minister in the heartless, feckless and reckless coalition Tory government now wants us to believe that all she ever did was the good stuff (like what?) and her only apology seems to be that she and her colleagues couldn’t do enough to stop the Tories wrecking British society. Obviously they were clueless. They could have pulled out of the coalition and left the Tories in a minority regime where their policies may have been more effectively challenged. Swinson is as two-faced as they come. Now she’s saying she wouldn’t work with Jeremy Corbyn. I’m not sure she would ever be offered such an invitation.
 
We’re in the soup. Main ingredient: laughing stock.