Thursday 14 July 2016

Reasons to be cheerful about the cabinet reshuffle... starting with the abolition of Green crap!

Yes, there is actually a chance that we now have a government which has clocked the fact that the whole man-made climate change myth is unsupported by the data, and that pursuing economically ruinous policies in order to combat a non-existent danger is the sort of foolishness that's best left to the Islingtonian wing of the Labour Party and the tiny gaggle of boring fruit-loops which is all that's left of the Liberal Democrats in parliament.

And then there's putting the alluring, sultry, pouting Pritti Patel in charge of...
...the Department for International Development. I may even have let out a bit of a gasp when I heard about that. Or I may just have been admiring the bewitching combination of a mischievous smirk and a sideways glance with which Ms. Patel rewarded assembled journalists as she made her way along Downing Street. With any luck it'll mean less of our money ending up in Cayman Island accounts belonging to kleptocrat third world dictators, and maybe department staff won't have to work up a muck-sweat at the end of the financial year by power-hosing British tax receipts at farcical schemes dreamt up by foreign criminals to line their own pockets by helping DFID bureaucrats reach their wildly inflated annual spending targets. Wouldn't it be great if ministers were allowed to do their jobs without having to satisfy the feelgood fantasies of Bob Geldof, Benedict Cumberpratt, Bono, Guardian readers and the staff of Newsnight? Enough already.

And could the return of my former BBC News colleague Chris Grayling to Transport spell the end of Cameron's idiotic, ill-conceived and wholly unjustified HS2 vanity project? (Unfortunately, it could also signal the go-ahead for the expansion of Heathrow Airport, which would place our house directly under one of the proposed flight-paths - but that's a subject for another day.)

I laughed when I heard about Boris Johnson - and not in derision. Hard to believe, I know, but I think he'll do a surprisingly good job. But what particularly delighted me was the thought of how spectacularly annoyed it would make all those bitter, vengeful Remainers who are still taking to social media, newspapers and television and radio news studios to exult at every promising sign of a downturn in the British economy because, in their strange, twisted minds, the pound dropping a few cents against the dollar or house-vendors in central London having to cut their asking price by 5% means that THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG! Good Lord - how petty you must be to long for an economic catastrophe to engulf your country, just to validate your hysterical pre-referendum scare-mongering? Shame on you.

Then there were the wholly unexpected David Davis and Liam Fox appointments. Hot damn, Theresa May took us by surprise - but in a very, very good way. I was sorry to see Michael Gove defenestrated, but he and the new PM evidently aren't BFFs, and he did rather bring it on himself. One can only imagine that Gove somehow confused the battle for the leadership of Britain's natural party of government with the sort of febrile, vicious, adolescent shenanigans that have always characterised university politics. God, he must be feeling sick. I wasn't in the least sorry to see the back of the goggle-eyed Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, or serial cock-up merchant Oliver Letwin, or (alleged) serial text-messager Stephen "Man of the People" Crabb, and I must admit that my reaction to the news that George "Hubris" Osborne had slunk out the back-door of No. 10 after being sacked by Theresa "Nemesis" May was to let out a "Yes!" - quite possibly accompanied by a fist-pump. I'm no great fan of Gove's successor as Chancellor, but I suspect that Philip "Interesting" Hammond's very dullness will prevent the sort of shambolic budgets - characterised by silly "surprises" whose sole purpose seemed to be to wrong-foot the opposition (what larks!), followed by any number of "clarifications" and humiliating U-turns - that marked Osborne's reign.

There were a lot of other appointments, of course, many of which seemed to involve interchangeable blonde women, but by that stage my interest was sated.




4 comments:

  1. I was shocked to read in the Guardian today that: "Priti Patel, the former employment minister, takes over as secretary of state for international development, despite a history of being sceptical about foreign aid. She haspreviously called for the department to be abolished".

    My friend Alastair is in Greece today where, he tells me, you can't go into a taverna anywhere without hearing Boris Johnson's Ode to Erdogan.

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    1. Johnson's limerick, which won a £1,000 prize, is woeful - all contrived rhymes and incorrect scansion. The result was a stitch-up and nearly made me cancel my Spectator subscription.
      I'm trying not to sound like a sore loser, but this was my entry:

      Old Recep, while visiting Kurds,
      Would sneak off and play with the herds.
      They caught him red-handed and guess what the man did?
      He burgled a billy goat's turds.

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    2. Okay, that's really good, Tomahawk - but Boris Johnson's effort actually prompted an attempted coup against Erdogan (no one has actually alleged this yet, but it's only a matter of time).

      But if you feel strongly about it, I'd demand that Fraser Nelson reruns the competition: it's all the rage these days.

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    3. Let's hope, Mr. Moss, that she doesn't "do a Whittingdale" by becoming yet another victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Apparently, BBC staff cheered when it was announced that Whittingdale had been sacked, but I've no idea why - he'd caved in to all the corporation's demands!

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