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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