The sermon Welby should have given

Like many, I was incensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon, widely reported with glee in the likes of the Guardian, and with umbrage in the Daily Mail et al.

Welby is an intelligent man, an experienced man of the cloth, a man with a real-world (i.e. non-ecclesiastical) past, so you’d think he’d know how to write a sermon, especially at Easter, the most joyous event in the Christian calendar. Such a sermon should have been accessible and inspiring, uplifting yet deep, authoritative but humbling, didactive while forgiving.

‘Twas nothing like that. The kindest thing I can say is that it was unhelpful. Welby basically said, Priti’s plan to send immigrants to Rwanda is bad and God will be cross, because I say so.

Pants round their ankles

Having ached a bit on Saturday evening owing to, so I thought, a day’s gardening, I tested positive for Covid on Easter Sunday morning. 

Talk about cocking everything up: I can’t visit my Mum; Hubby can’t visit his; my friend with whom I spent Thursday evening cancelled her Easter lunch with her neighbours; and friends with whom we lunched, also on Thursday, are running around like headless chickens. I feel like I swallowed a wasps’ nest, my cough is worse than any chain-smokers’, and I spend my days sleeping in bed, sleeping in the comfy armchair, or nodding off at my desk. However, my vitals (signs, not statistics) are all good so I think I’m getting off lightly. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t. Horrific stats, horrific suffering, horrific impact on loved ones and healthcare workers, horrific impact on our kids’ education, horrific mental health legacy, and so it goes on. We can’t afford to get distracted and allow the horror to return because we failed to plan for a sinister new variant. We need to stay alert, focused, prepared, not distracted or stuck down a rabbit hole. However, the country’s needs are once again playing second-fiddle to the wants of a few sanctimonious, hypocritical, own-agenda, traitorous rabbit arseholes who’d rather risk emboldening Putin with a PR coup than tolerate a democratically elected PM they despise. BoJo’s crimes, in their eyes, include getting Brexit done, going after the Northern Ireland Protocol, and caring more about saving lives at sea than being intimidated by a few Peloton-obsessed, workshy civil servants who obviously haven’t read the Rwanda policy, just the BBC take on it. Sigh. 

BoJo is also loathed because of reports he overruled the security services and got his Russian oligarch mate ennobled. Except he didn’t, did he. The Lords’ appointment chief just said so. 

Oh dear. BoJo haters been caught with their pants round their ankles.

Because I’m not fit to do much else this week, I’ve spent more time than usual reading newspapers – not exactly morale-boosting. Here’s a selection of headlines (paraphrased):

• Putin orders troops to seal civilians in steelworks and starve them to death
• Five-year-old was tortured then murdered by own family
• Cocaine gang exchanges cash in busy street while unsuspecting bystanders walk by
• 40% of households face fuel poverty
• Scholar banned from Twitter for quoting Shakespeare
• Prince Harry opens his mouth
• Labour moves for a fresh PartyGate probe

PartyGate! Down the rabbit hole the country went some months ago – I think my first blog about this was in January – and we still haven’t re-surfaced. One might expect opportunistic politicians, woke ‘civil servants’ (who are no longer civil or act like public servants so don’t deserve respect in my blog), and headline-chasing journalists to enjoy skulking where the sun don’t shine – in rabbit holes, not the other sort (oh, I dunno though) – but now the business community has joined the fray, bleating for their Brexit-revenge in group-think fashion rather than running their businesses. 

Yes, the great and the good on LinkedIn, setting themselves up (for a fall) as ‘Leadership Consultants’, ‘Ethics Advisers’ and ‘Risk Assessors’, have picked up the ‘lied to Parliament’ baton as proof that BoJo has no integrity, and integrity is a key characteristic of a good leader, so BoJo has to go. Sounds as if integrity is the only attribute, doesn’t it? Bugger ‘perspective’, ‘empathy’, ‘perspective’, ‘free-thinking’, ‘perspective’, ‘personable’, ‘perspective’ and so many more. Choose one that Boris hasn’t got and the others don’t matter.

The problem with such group-think is it puts off potential clients. I mean, it’s not exactly conducive to projecting a Unique Selling Point, is it; and it limits the way problems are analysed and solutions are developed. Overall, bigotry clouds judgment and compromises skillsets. Would you hire a leadership consultant who thought integrity was the only attribute? What about an ethics adviser who felt that not telling the whole truth about eating cake was a bigger crime than marching at a terrorist’s funeral à la Sinn Fein’s Miss-step O’Neill? Would you trust a risk assessor who advocates the (avoidable) creation of a power vacuum for a dubious gain that would in any event destabilise the country? 

Pants round their business ankles, indeed.

There are so many pants round ankles with PartyGate that it’s beginning to look a lot like a Carry On film – full of immaturity, crudeness, naivety, clichés, corn, has-beens, wannabees, closed minds, and open goals. The three most apt titles that spring to mind are: Carry On Regardless, Carry On Screaming and, all I can do is hope and pray, Carry On England.

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Rwanda or bust

If there’s one notable Tory whom the anti-Tories love to hate more than Boris, it’s Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, Nadine Dorris, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel.

Her ‘problem’ is that she’s a female ethnic-Asian from an immigrant family who doesn’t think like she’s supposed to. She’s not only a Tory but a right-wing Tory, which is not what a female ethnic Asian from an immigrant family should be. The easiest way to defeat the Tory party, ya see, is to portray them as offensive, racist misogynists – I’ve got two of those three T-shirts so I should know. Then along comes Pretty Priti (something else they don’t like about her – she looks good) who cannot, by definition, be a racist misogynist, which drives the Guardian fan club to distraction.

Fishy Rishi is a sprat

This blog, not unexpectedly, is about the Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murty, declaring non-dom status to avoid paying tax in the UK on her worldwide income. The sub-plot is whether I can forgive her as readily as I have forgiven BoJo almost anything to date, because Akshata’s hubby got furlough done during the height of the pandemic, just as solidly as Bojo got Brexit done.

By way of explanation, a non-dom tax status typically applies to someone who was born overseas, spends much of their time in the UK, but still ‘considers’ (for sentiment or convenience) another country to be their permanent residence or 'domicile'. Citizenship is irrelevant when it comes to non-dom status, because it is possible for a UK citizen, or someone born in the UK, to claim they are a non-dom. In Akshata’s case she was born in India and, while living in the UK at the moment, claims permanent residency elsewhere.

Does this make her a ‘bad’ person, or at least an ‘unfit’ Chancellor’s wife? Does this make Rishi an unfit Chancellor?

FofF = Flights of Fancy

When I was at junior school, there were certain maths problems we had to solve. One was along the lines of, if you need 30 people to do 90 tasks and 10 people to do 30, how many people do you need to do 60 tasks? 

The answer of course is 20.

Here’s a follow-up question. If 3/5 of your staff are off sick at any one time during a pandemic, compared with only 1/5 when there’s no pandemic, how many staff should you hire for (answers in brackets):

a) 90 tasks in normal times  (38, or 37.5 if you’re a purist)
b) 30 tasks during a pandemic  (25)
c) 60 tasks during normal times  (25)
d) 60 tasks during a pandemic  (50)