I can look back at Victorian social reformers and activists and admire them wholeheartedly. Saving prostitutes from a life of degradation, ameliorating the sufferings of children working in factories, ending the slave trade, trying to ensure that the unemployed don’t starve to death, clearing slums, fighting the effects of the demon drink, bringing hope to the hopeless etc. etc. – it’s all good stuff. These driven, obsessive, energetic worthies would no doubt have got on one’s nerves after a while, but, on the whole, they saw a problem, devised a solution, implemented it, and thereby created a more decent society.
But hearing about current members of the global Great and the Good club gathering in some exotic location to talk away the world’s problems always makes me feel ill - because they invariably come up with disastrously idiotic left-wing “solutions” which are either impossible to implement because a five-year old can tell that they won’t work, or they manage to get bits of them implemented and real human beings suffer as a result. All they really want to do is to increase their already inflated sense of self-worth while making the rest of us feel guilty about various aspects of our humble, generally blameless, little lives.
I was reading an article this morning by Bryony Gordon, one of the Telegraph’s resident “Polly Filla” airheads, and feeling vaguely sorry for Richard Branson’s recent bit of bad luck and generally admiring the pluck of toothsome middle-class English gel Kate Winslett and being pleased that Rick’s nonagenarian Mum hadn’t perished in the blaze, when I came to the bit about the hirsute tycoon’s Caribbean island being regularly used for meetings of The Elders.
To be honest, I’d never really registered this particular self-selecting mob, which is apparently comprised of a mixture of former world political and religious figures and some current business leaders. It was set up at the behest of Nelson Mandela (cue choirs of angels) in order, one presumes, to cure all diseases, eradicate poverty, make deserts fertile, stop war and knock Global Warming on the head: their answer to all these “problems” would no doubt require the transfer of yet more money from Western democracies to Third World dictatorships.
When I discovered that members of this high-powered international brains trust include Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Gro Harlem Brundtland and Mary Robinson, I’ll admit I almost regurgitated my Rice Krispies.
For God’s sake! – I can’t think of a single “problem”, from a leaking tap to world poverty, which this collection of grotesquely useless numbnuts wouldn’t instantly make ten times worse: give this bunch genuine power and that leaking tap would turn into a bleeding tsunami overnight and we’d all be dead of starvation by Christmas.
Desmond Tutu was a prime mover in the creation of the most violently lawless society on the planet; Kofi Annan presided over a grotesquely corrupt and inept organisation whose sole purpose seemed to be to keep evil tyrants in power while attacking democracies; Jimmy Carter turned the most powerful country on earth – and its greatest force for good – into an economic, social and military basket-case; Gro Brundtland’s impeccably wet liberalism has led to the fracturing of her county’s once-strong social fabric; and Mary Robinson’s Ireland recently went bust due to its politicians’ addiction to left-wing policies and EU charity.
I mean, why not go the whole hog and invite Colonel Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il to join?
Whenever the home of someone eminent is destroyed by lightning, it’s tempting to speculate that the Hand of God played a part. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case here: in the unlikely event that the Supreme Being doles out targeted punishment in this way, I’m certain he’d have waited until these self-important, meddling, superannuated tossers had gathered for one of their regular smugathons before reaching for the lightning bolt.
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