Cometh the hour ...

 It’s a crisis of Churchillian proportions and “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”. If only that idiomatic expression was based on what someone had said or written. But it is not. And, in the same vein, it’s just the thought that must pass through the mind of the British Prime Minister. Narcissistic in the extreme, I can imagine him staring into the mirror and perhaps believing that there is the picture of a national saviour. Perhaps he even poses as Nelson, with one arm hidden in his ill-fitting suit, as he prepares to battle the invisible enemy.

I sat up last night to watch the prime ministerial address with a growing sense of déjà vu. Here was the man tasked with saving the nation, who looked as if he combed his hair with a toffee apple (thanks to John Crace in this morning’s Guardian for that turn of phrase), coming out with platitudes and so many statements beginning with “If ...” 

And so, with his band of merry morons at his back, he ploughs on - unthinking and unfeeling. The old Bullingdon Club bravado, and the same disregard for any lesser beings, so out of touch with the emotions of the time. During my time at Oxford my close group of friends considered members of that club to be heartless, thoughtless and beyond the pale. There was never any sense of intellectual rigour in their braying drunkenness. And now, two of their number have been Prime Minister. Ye Gods! What has Britain become?

There used to be an apocryphal joke that made the rounds of the officers’ messes in various regiments. The names of the Public Schools could be adapted to suit the audience. It went something like this:

Two old boys from different schools meet in the lavatory of a gentleman’s club. They observe each other carefully until one notices that the other has not washed his hands. 

“I say, old boy, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it but at Eton we were taught always to wash our hands after urinating.”

The other replies, “Not at all. At Winchester we were taught not to piss on our hands.”

And so we have Boris Johnson, a man so completely out of his death, that I get the distinct feeling he doesn’t understand the situation he is in. And to make matters worse, I voted Conservative at the last election. I must just go and wash my hands.