The road most travelled…

Theresa’s strong weak leadership.

Here we go. It used to be that elections came along every few years and now it seems unusual if we go a year without some vote or other. Which drives some people crazy but is great for certain special interest groups like journalists, bloggers and primary school kids desperate for yet another unscheduled day off.

And of course it is the journalists who are making hay right now.  They do not need to sit in editorial meetings pitching stories when the stories come to them so easily and even when there is a paucity of actual facts (‘what’ is the announcement? Soon became ‘why?’) then they can all stand around guessing at the motives of Mrs May.

And what guesses we got.

Theresa was either cunning or brave or ruthless or astute or… all manner of things, mostly said with either respect or a grudging admission that it made sense for her and her party. The common factor in all of this being that the decision was, at least, decisive.

But it isn’t.

I don’t normally recommend reading below the line but if you bob your head into the sheep dip that lies beneath a Daily Mail article (or on their twitter feed) you soon find orgasmic haters delighted at the ‘strong leadership’ being shown. They see May as a person driving the agenda – outfoxing her opponents before they have even thought of their move.

But she isn’t.

All Theresa May does is look down the road. And then identify the places where decisions must be made.

She sees the points in the story where things will fall one way or the other, for good or ill. (Not our good or our ill; her good)

And then she chooses. The problem with Theresa is that she always makes the same choice and it’s never the right one.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost

Mr Frost spoke of deliberately taking the unpopular route; of choosing a path that others would not have chosen. Theresa May is the exact opposite.

Look at the issues raised.

Brexit

Theresa was a remainer. Not a strong remainer because she doesn’t actually have strong opinions about anything (National Insurance included, thankfully).

By simply agreeing with everyone she became leader of her party and Prime Minister. It was easier to concede to the EurOgres in her party than do anything else.  Pretending that her hands were tied by the ‘Will of the people’.

Moving on from that she has carefully decided not to reveal her Brexit strategy. An easier choice to make when there is no strategy to reveal. You only have to see David Davis admit that they haven’t even costed out a ‘no-deal’ scenario to realise they don’t know what they are doing.

Indy

When Theresa May realises that there is no good option she makes no decision at all. David Cameron famously ‘checked his socks’ every time he came out of a meeting with Alex Salmond and (never thought I would be saying this) you have to give him credit for even trying.

Theresa doesn’t engage with Nicola Sturgeon because she knows she’s on a hiding. Now is not the time? Really? When Theresa thinks she is going to lose, she just doesn’t show.

Election Fraud

The new MP accommodation block was very popular.

With the CPS looking at 30 individuals in the Conservative apparatus this was the most pressing reason to take another path. There would have been by-elections and they would not have gone well for the tories.

This was going to be the scandal of her time in office. Perhaps as many as a dozen seats up for grabs with Tory politicians walking in and out of court as police personnel look on.

Can’t have that. So, a poll appears showing Theresa is well liked, her party are ahead and Labour have been in the doldrums for so long that they seem to have forgotten where the ship was headed in the first place.

It is a big decision, but an easy one to make in the end. Election!

And now we come to the most telling example…

Debate

Theresa has stated right at the top of the show – there will be no debate.

Er… what?

This is about Brexit, she said. This is about having strong and stable leadership, she said.

But we don’t get to see her be a leader. We have to give her the authority to argue the case against 27 other states (represented by highly educated and capable politicians) and we have to trust in her ability to manage that process when she is unwilling to go up against Paul Nuttall.

Scarier than Donald Tusk apparently.

Theresa must know she is going to get hammered for this. I am already writing about it and the press, for all their faults, are asking questions about it.

Why would she let herself in for that kind of abuse?

Because it is the easier road. For both Labour and the Conservatives this election is impossible to fight in soundbites. They can’t have one message because they managed to split the country in half with that stupid Brexit nonsense. Whatever position the Prime Minister takes on the podium there will be someone on either side of her who can attack anything she might say. Put aside for the moment that Brexit is an act of irreparable self-harm, put aside that she doesn’t really believe in anything she might say. Theresa May would need to enter that debate with answers – and she doesn’t have any.

Brexit is already tumbling off the cliff.

Not having a debate attracts uncomfortable questions, but not as many as a debate would.

And Theresa doesn’t show up when she is going to get beat.

Theresa has taken the easy option again and she will continue to do so. This election will be fought with platitudes on the TV and location-specific lies on the ground. In areas where Remain was strong the tories will state that a mandate would allow her to soften the blow. That she would have the base to create a soft-brexit. Where Leave held sway they will be on the ground telling voters that they need a strong leader to show the Europeans we mean business.

Theresa May did not call the election because she is a strong leader. A strong leader does not need 100 extra bodies. No, she called it because she is a weak leader in need of back up.

When this is finished she will still be inherently weak and she will always, always take the path of least resistance, More austerity, more tax breaks for the corporations, more cuts and less humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

How I learned to love worrying.

This is my new profile picture. And yes, it has been photoshopped a bit.This one makes me look taller – with a better complexion and whiter teeth. But this is me sure enough. As it turns 6am on Easter Sunday I have been out in the back garden depositing chocolate eggs (and rabbits and rolos) for some reason I am not quite sure of.

Which is insane on several levels.

We’ll get the obvious one out of the way first. What the hell is he doing celebrating Easter when he is a stone-cold atheist? And I could yadda, yadda, yadda, pagan ritual really, yadda but the truth of the matter is that sometimes (not all the time) I just like a quiet life and sometimes (most times) there is chocolate left over for me.

But that’s not the biggest piece of insanity in this tableau of madness. The astute reader (if such I have) will have spotted the truly alarming aspect as being the fact that I am awake and alert at 6am on a Sunday.

What the hell is he doing up at that time? I can hear him/her asking.

I was supposed to get up at 6.30am. So I got up at 4.14am. That wasn’t my first wake up. No no no. I had already woken up at … 00.34am having gone to bed at 10.22pm the previous night. All in all this amounts to not very much sleep before doing 5 hours of driving on twisty roads. A crap idea.

And only made possible through worry. If I hadn’t been worried about getting up then I would have slept like a baby. I did not sleep like a baby and the worry achieved what worry generally achieves. Fuck all.

And there seems to be a lot of worry going about at the moment. I was worried about being in Argyll in time to pick up my family but if you don’t have that there is plenty else to be worrying about.

There’s all this for a start. And that’s before you start adding on all the personal stuff that you might have on your plate. The kids, your health, someone else’s health. There’s money and work and the inability of your team’s strikers to score goals. It’s literally endless.

I have now established that there is no point, no point at all, in not worrying. It would not have assisted me in any way to have someone there telling me that I should get some sleep. Actually that would have only caused more problems since my wife was 120 miles away and who would this other person be, exactly?

So, I can toss and turn in bed or I can wander about the back garden placing chocolate confections in unlikely locations just so that my kids can wander about the next day picking them up and shouting ‘Thank you Easter Bunny!’

Dealing with their illogical certainty in a magical bunny delivering chocolate foodstuffs is actually perfect training for dealing with other things in life that I find nonsensical (Trump voters are a fine example here) and I move forward in the hope that this is a temporary state of affairs. I shall be just equally alarmed four years from now  should they still be adamant that bunnies lay eggs and Trump is still President. But there is nothing I can do about that.

If you are blessed with a lack of worry then I welcome you. We are in desperate need of optimists right now because (as I have shown) worry can actually cause the very thing you might be worried about. It is actually beneficial for us to have people with a sunny point of view; People who sleep soundly and then get up on time.

In my case that is never going to happen – so, I embrace it. I get up at 4.14am. I put eggs in the garden as the sun rises and I am exhausted by mid day.

But…

Everything was achieved that had to be achieved and if you think you might have cause to worry then you can always ask me. I’m an expert.