The dangers of Trusk, casinos and politicising space exploration

22 February 2025

Somebody recently accused me of hating Donald Trump so I thought I should point out I don’t know the man so I can hate him?  I am, however, very nervous about what he’s been doing since he came to power, and what an unholy mess he’s creating for the next generation and their offspring.  I know he and I will both be dead before the full effects of his destruction can be seen but that doesn’t cheer me at all.

Nor do I hope for his death, though I wouldn’t be upset if he died;  as Clarence Darrow, the 19^th century lawyer, once said “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Trump once wrote (ghost-wrote?) a book about deals but clearly hasn’t a clue about what a deal is.  For me, a good deal is when both sides are happy with the solution and are happy to work together from there on even if they didn’t get all they had asked for.  Trump’s idea of a deal seems to be to get an outsider to talk to one of the parties and then impose the ‘deal’ on the other party.

Remember this is the man who bankrupted a casino, which is pretty hard to do because the one thing known about casinos is that, in the long run, the house will always win.

It’s based on Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers.  In the case of the roulette wheel, this law says that, if each spin is random, there’s no way of knowing what number will come up next but, over (say) a million spins, all the money placed on about 27,000 of them will go straight to the house.  Now multiply that by the number of times each wheel spins in 24 hours (remember casinos don’t have clocks in them so there’s no way of knowing if it’s night or day and people just keep on playing); and again by how many wheels there are, then add in the ranks of one-arm bandits and blackjack tables and side entertainments.  That’s a lot of money, so it takes somebody really stupid to break a casino.

And this is the man, an American, who’s trying to decide with Vladimir Putin how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine and he expects Ukraine to accept whatever they agree.  Trump even said last week “[Ukraine] should never have started it”.  Since the second amendment to the American Constitution gives citizens (limited) powers to own guns (I paraphrase), this means that, if somebody goes into a neighbour’s house uninvited and shoots somebody, Trump will decree that the dead person’s family should never have started it.

Incidentally, his current wife was born in the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia and is a naturalised American.  Do Trump’s new orders mean that their son Barron will be deported because Melania is an immigrant and her son therefore has no right of residency in the US?

Trump has also claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s approval rating is only 4% in Ukraine but when has he ever let facts spoil a rant?  A February poll in Ukraine showed Zelenskyy is trusted by 57% of the population (so he’s supported by a lot more of his people than Trump is by his).

Trump’s even described Zelenskyy as “A Dictator without Elections”, something that he’d never dare say about Vladimir Putin, even though an anti-war singer, Vadim Stroykin, fell from a ninth-floor to his death during a recent visit from security services.  Rumour has it that defenestration is now rising up the charts of the most common causes of death in Russia.

Even Nigel Farage said “you shouldn’t always take things Donald Trump says absolutely literally… Let’s be clear, Zelenskyy is not a dictator”.

Trump’s psychopathy has a certain academic fascination and somebody recently suggested he’s not a narcissist but a solipsist, so he’s the only thing that is real and everything else is unreal and he can ignore the Constitution and laws of America because they only exist in his head.

This does seem a little extreme but so are his media posts:  after he’d cancelled Manhattan’s congestion charges, clearly a matter of huge concern to the entire world, he posted “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”  Whaaat!  Keep taking the pills Donnie boy, I think you’ve been forgetting them.

Another critic attributed his stupidity to the fragile ego of a sullen and resentful old man, which seems equally valid.

Meanwhile, with the other evil twin, he is selflessly cutting federal spending and Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE*) is closing government agencies and firing everyone who is still stupid enough to believe in democracy and the rule of law.  The compensation for what we would call the ‘unfair dismissal’ of these people could be astronomical.

Musk is open about suffering from Asperger’s and he shares Trump’s disconnect between the bits of his brain that think and those that speak:  he recently accused Joe Biden of abandoning two American astronauts at the International Space Station for “political reasons”.  Andy Mogensen, one of the astronauts, responded “What a lie …” so Musk called Mogensen “fully retarded” nyah nyah.  (Their return had been scheduled for February but was delayed till March because of delays in preparing the spacecraft by SpaceX).

But is Musk clever or just rich?  He thinks he’s clever, but he’s ‘worth’ $400bn and is 56.  This means that, if he lives to be 96, he can afford to spend $27,400,000 every day if he never receives another cent.  He can therefore throw unimaginable sums of money at his ideas, some of which are successful and bolster his reputation, like Tesla Inc (and SpaceX – see above), and some of which are stupid and forgotten.

However, while he is funding his ideas, he’s giving a lot of money to the people who work on them and supply their needs, from infrastructure to rocket engines, so it’s not all bad.

If only he’d devote as much money to slowing climate change …

*          Remember the Doges of Venice were the rulers of a city which is sinking slowly into the mud.

Stupidity, unBrexiting, Ig Nobel prizes and roadside smiles

16 September 2023

One wonders if political leaders are born stupid it or whether they acquire stupidity to get to the top.

Back in 2020, when he was in charge of the money, Rishi Sunak was asked for funding to rebuild seven hospitals which were structurally dangerous.  He blocked all but two of the requests, leaving five hospitals where the risk of “catastrophic” collapse had been assessed as “likely”.  Doesn’t he realise that, if things go wrong, most patients in private hospitals get transferred to the local NHS hospital which has emergency facilities?  Can’t you just imagine bleeding Sunak (sorry, haemorrhaging Sunak) waiting on a gurney in a corridor wondering if Chicken Little was right.

As I flitted past the TV last week while it was entertaining my wife with Prime Minister’s Questions, I thought how futile (and expensive) the whole charade is.  Keir Starmer asks specific questions which Sunak ignores, replying with some very selective – and utterly irrelevant – information about how wonderful the government is.

Then, on the following day, we heard the good news that Britain is at last being allowed to rejoin the EU Horizon programme for scientific collaboration (as an associate member) after a 5-year hiatus while Britain was setting up the patently nonsensical £14bn Pioneer programme which was supposed to make us a scientific “global superpower” all on our own, without any collaboration with experts across the water.

We’ve already seen a step back in the ‘Windsor accords’ over Northern Ireland which allow NI to effectively remain in both the EU and the UK markets (and NI now has the fastest growth rate of any UK region outside London).

Plans for a new ‘UKCA’, a UK-branded kitemark, have also been scrapped after businesses pointed out that stuff being exported to the EU would still need the EU-kitemark, the CE, and proposals to scrap 4,000 EU-inspired laws en masse have disappeared.

Some small steps towards recovering what the UK lost to Brexit.

I don’t know how GBNews has reported these about-turns but was interested to hear that some advertisers are boycotting the right-wing channel because it’s facing multiple investigations by OfCom.  Surely there must be advertisers that actually want to appeal to the sort of people that watch it?  Don’t we have free speech and reporting any more?

Actually, it seems we don’t since we also learnt this week from a former head of Sky News that Buckingham Palace censors news reports.  Live reporting is obviously uncensored but the Palace then forbids certain images from being repeated later.  At this point, my imagination starts to run loose.  What would they edit out?  Prince George yawning?  Camilla adjusting her knicker elastic?  Andrew groping a young woman?  Anything with Harry in it?

I was fascinated to hear that Kim Jon-Un travelled in an armoured train to meet Vladimir Putin.  What a brilliant way of keeping their Dear Leader safe – drone attacks would just bounce off it.  What about a drone destroying a bridge over a deep ravine immediately ahead of the speeding train?  Anybody think of that?

Seeing the northern lights is one of the things on my bucket list but those likely to be visible in Britain this week aren’t expected to be seen this far south.  Shame.  By the way, did you know that the colour of the lights depend on which gas molecules are hit by the particles hurtling into our atmosphere on the solar wind?  When they interact with oxygen, the light is green while, with nitrogen, the light is red.

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were announced this week and included Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from Southampton University, who revealed that, while the 18th-century Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino use to lick rocks to identify the minerals them by taste, modern geologists wet rocks show the contrasts between different minerals more clearly.  Those of us who habitually pick up stones on the beach to admire them and lick dry ones to bring out their colours could have qualified for that award.

The award for medicine went to researchers who counted the number of hairs in each nostril of cadavers to see if people had the same number on each side.  Imagine what you say when you meet the king and he asks what you do:  “I open the noses of dead people to count the hairs in them”.

The literature prize went to researchers looking into why common words become meaningless when you write or speak them several times (try it:  write or say the word ‘moon’ repeatedly 30-40 times and see what happens.)  They described the feeling rather cleverly as ‘jamais vu’.

Our reactions to words are interesting.  For example, puns are often derided but clever ones can raise a smile, or a groan.  In Colorado, the Indian Hills Community Centre near the town of Morrison, has a sign by the roadside where a sign shows messages intended to make people smile.

Here’s an example that doesn’t need a pun:

THE BMI CHART

ON MY DOCTOR’S WALL

SAYS I’M TOO SHORT

And here’s one that does:

IN SEARCH OF

FRESH VEGETABLE PUNS.

LETTUCE KNOW

The creative force behind these signs is Vince Rozmiarek, a Colorado native and volunteer at the community centre.  It started as an April Fool five years ago but they were so surprised by the reaction that he now changes the signs once or twice a week.

“It is hard to keep coming up with material,” he says “but I do try.”

There are lots more on their website (and circulating on WhatsApp and the internet) but here’s one of my favourites:

WHAT I IF TOLD

YOU

YOU READ THE TOP

LINE WRONG

And, for more serious-minded readers, here’s a tip for people who clean their cars:  a dab of mayonnaise on a cloth apparently removes tar spots from cars.  I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it because my approach to cleaning cars is – much to the despair of our petrolhead son-in-law – similar to Joan Rivers’ view of housework:  “I hate housework:  you make the beds and do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”

Monarchs, politicians, Ukrainian talent, sewage and creative writing

6 May 2023

The coronation of King Charles III took place earlier today and no deaths were reported.  Years ago, it was thought he might be King George VII but he obviously changed his mind at some point (monarchs allowed to reign under any one of their given names – so David became Edward VIII and Bertie became George VI).  It was also thought that his environmental concerns might mean he and Camilla would cycle down from the palace, taking a short-cut across St James’s Park to avoid the crowds, but this too seems to have been overoptimistic and anyway it rained on their parade.

Charles has previously said that, while he remains “a committed Anglican”, the sovereign has a “duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals.”  He added “By my most profound convictions … I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.”

What rather spoilt the day was the stupid suggestion that, all over the country, people should pledge allegiance to the King.  I know it wasn’t his idea but what a load of bollocks.  Shouldn’t he be pledging allegiance to us?

There were also some local elections this week in which the Conservatives were thrashed.  In some areas, local Conservative candidates had even preferred their commitment to the greater good of their party over their own personal ambitions (not) by standing for re-election as Independents because they thought they stood a better chance of holding on to their seats that way. 

I realise that, of course, they just wanted to carry on doing good things for their community and self-aggrandisement didn’t come into it but it does remind me of Saki’s description of somebody who was “one of those people who went round doing good to people;  you could tell them by their haunted looks.”

In the end, the Tories were gratifyingly humiliated but, of course, local elections are not reliable in forecasting the results of general elections.

While I’m talking about self-interest, I couldn’t help but notice that South West Water has just been fined £2.1m for a series of environmental offences across Devon and Cornwall which mean I can no longer swim safely in local rivers or on our beaches.  The problems were caused, according to the Environment Agency, by “numerous common deficiencies in the implementation of SWW’s management systems”.

Now we have to guess whether SWW’s management will pay the fine out of their own pockets because they were to blame or whether they’ll increase their salaries and the fine will be passed on to those of us who pay SWW for water and sewage disposal.  I wonder if they could be sued for breach of contract for not disposing of our sewage properly…

But to happier news.

A Northumberland couple, Sheilagh Matheson and Chris Roberts, offered accommodation last year to a Ukrainian mother and her two daughters.  Having heard they were a musical family, they offered the use of their honky-tonk pub piano but, a few days before they arrived, they were sent a video of Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, then 14, playing Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto (a very pretty work but beyond the reach of beginners).

Matheson realised they obviously needed a rather better piano so she asked around and has said “the musical fraternity in Northumberland, of which I am not part, were incredibly helpful. A couple contacted us and said, ‘We’ve got a Steinway upright that you can have.’  That was duly delivered.”

Khrystyna, now 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Sasha, her 12-year-old violinist sister, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School near Leatherhead in Surrey.

Another happy thing is that every one of us is supposed to have an unwritten novel inside us.  I’m not sure who said this but I don’t think I have, though I did wake up at 3 the other night with the outline for a great novel and repeated it to myself so I wouldn’t forget it, then went back to sleep and forgot it.

But there are other ways of writing that offer different challenges, and take much less time (something I consider an essential for anything I take on). For instance, a couple of years ago I took up a local challenge to write a 500-word story on the subject of ‘Memory’.  Keeping it that short was quite hard but I did it.  I naturally didn’t win the competition but I was quite proud of wot I’d writ.  Another even greater challenge is to write a story in 50 words.  Many years ago, I organised a competition within a branch of a charity I used to work with and the entries were remarkably good.  (I was hoping to include one of them here to show you what can be done in 50 words but I can’t find them.)

It’s not the quantity of words that matter, it’s the quality.  Did any of you ever see the show STOMP?  I saw it twice and loved it.  No words – it’s all mimed while complex rhythms are hammered out on radiators and kitchen sinks and scaffold tubes – and it’s very funny in places: quite brilliant.  If you ever get a chance, hie thee to the ticket office.

I also read recently of a performance by the Colin Currie quartet which involved 4 drummers, one in each corner of the auditorium, which also sounds quite an exciting concept.

Another interesting way to write within a given structure is to pick a line from … any existing song / poem / novel … and write a piece that leads up to and ends with the line(s) you’ve chosen.  Examples could be:

“Do you still see my silhouette, when your lashes start to close?”  (Graham Weber)

“She said to her father ‘No questions, no lies’;  she drove a T-bird with the top down, cold beer between her thighs.”  (Sam Baker)

“Last time I felt like this, I was in the wilderness, and the canyon was on fire.”  (Emmylou Harris)

It won’t make you rich – or even get published – but it’s a great way to spend wet Friday afternoons.

Apology, Sidmouth, voting, royal money, Labour and Tory saboteurs, cromulence and a cobra

8 April 2023

A friend who isn’t a crossword fan failed to spot the significance of the date on last week’s mutterings and didn’t realise that they weren’t all entirely accurate.  My apologies to all those who didn’t get the clue in the first paragraph that was supposed to lead to ‘a cross tick’ (“an angry parasite”, geddit?), or ‘acrostic’, thereby inviting people to read the first letter of every paragraph in order.  It wasn’t meant to make people feel stupid, it was just intended as a bit of fun, so this week’s is deadly serious. 

Sidmouth is a pretty town with crumbling cliffs on the coast of East Devon which has hosted an annual folk festival for longer than some of us care to remember and is a good resting place on the South West coastal path, attracting thousands of visitors every year so the town’s last bank, Lloyds, will be closing in September (HSBC and Coop have already closed their branches).  Do you think their call centres have a recording saying “Thank you for holding.  Your call is important to us.  But not so important that we’re going to hire extra staff to reduce your waiting time.”?

Everybody wanting to vote in person next month must now have photo ID even though there were no prosecutions for voter impersonation last year.  According to the Electoral Commission, there were just seven allegations of ‘personation’ at local and mayoral elections and the six by-elections throughout the UK in 2022 and no police action was taken in any of these cases either because there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, or none at all.

Downing Street’s defence of this utterly pointless exercise said it was “to guard against the potential for wrongdoing”.  If you listen carefully, you can hear Rome burning.

The Guardian has disappointed me this week with what appears to be a republican campaign, estimating how much the royal family gets and what it owns.  They have to estimate the numbers because, even though we pay them, the family refuses to disclose their income and assets (“it’s private” they say). 

As far as we know, they’re not even the richest family in the UK and we give money to all the others as well for the stuff they sell us (like pageantry and vacuum cleaners), or they stole it from us in the past.  Since it now seems polite to apologise for our great⁶ grandparents’ part in the horrors of slavery, doesn’t it sound reasonable that we should ask various dukes and other nobles who inherited stuff to give back the land that was stolen from people like us by their great¹² grandparents?

However, the Windsors do have one big advantage in that they are exempt from tax, even though some of them voluntarily pay what they think they should.  Wouldn’t it be better if they were subject to all the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, including capital gains and inheritance taxes?  They could always give Cornwall to the National Trust if they haven’t enough spare cash to pay what should have been paid on the Queen’s estate.

I’m not anti-monarchy but I do worry that the Guardian’s coverage looks more like a republican campaign than a simple desire to expose the inequities of rich people.

And now the government is giving £8m to allow every public authority a free portrait of King Charles.  You can tell the ministers who decided this by their brown noses.

Luckily for them, Labour has attempted political suicide by using ‘knocking copy’ which accuses the Tories in general and Rishi Sunak in particular of not imprisoning paedophiles.  This has been welcomed by the Tories and condemned by clear-thinking lefties. 

But the Conservatives have their own saboteur in the form of Suella Braverman.  She claimed “almost all” members of grooming gangs were British Pakistani men even though a 2020 Home Office report concluded that most child sexual abuse gangs comprise white men aged under 30 and there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest members of grooming gangs were disproportionately more likely to be Asian or black.

When challenged over the 18-hour delays at Dover, she also denied it was anything to do with Brexit even though Doug Bannister, the port’s chief executive, admitted a year ago that Brexit was causing longer processing times at the border.

This week has also seen reports of falling house prices.  Why do people worry about this?  If the values of houses go down across the board and we decide to move, we’d get less when selling and pay less for our new house.  People with second homes and Buy To Let landlords would lose out but who cares about them?

Suppose all property prices reduced by 90% and became worth only 10% of what they were last week.  It wouldn’t make any difference to those of us who already own our houses and would make it much easier for first-time buyers.  My first house cost about 2½ times my salary;  the same house would now cost about 25 times what I would now get doing the same job I did back then.

Mortgages could then also be reduced by 90% so it stopped people with mortgages going into negative equity.  The cost to lenders would be funded by cancelling management bonuses and taxing the Windsors …

I had a slight attack of schadenfreude when Donald Trump announced that he was going to be “indicated” [sic] and he duly was, looking rather grumpier than usual. 

Sounds cromulent to me (a new word created for The Simpsons in 1996 meaning legitimate or acceptable, which I heard for the first time this week).

And, in South Africa, a private plane flying four passengers at 11,000’ made an emergency landing at the nearest airport after a 5-foot cobra slid past the pilot’s thigh and curled up under his seat.  Everybody left the plane safely, the snake slept on, and the pilot was rewarded with a handful of Valium tablets. 

Monarchies and republics

11 September 2022

The Queen died on Thursday. 

From the palace’s announcement at lunchtime that her doctors were concerned, it was obvious that her death was imminent but it was still a shock to hear the word when somebody reminded us that Prince William is now heir to the throne because his father is king.  We’ve known the queen for so long that the word ‘king’ gave me a jolt.

Charles had obviously had advance warning because he was in Scotland and able to get to Balmoral quickly so he was with her as she died which is, somehow, rather comforting.

Rumours that she only hung on for as long as she did to receive Boris Johnson’s resignation are likely to be the product of a warped mind.

She certainly hung on for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations so as not to spoil the event for everybody else, and to confirm Liz Truss as the new prime minister;  48 hours before she died, she got up and dressed and stood to welcome Truss with her usual beaming smile, despite what one doctor thought was a bruise left by a canula on the back of her hand.

The initial tributes were predictably sombre with Truss and Keir Starmer appearing to have agreed that the former would cover the boring platitudes while the latter gave a much more human and impressive eulogy.  It was then open house for other MPs to pay their own tributes.  Boris Johnson spoke very well, showing that he can actually talk without erring and umming when he’s done his homework, and Theresa May amazed everybody by making the chamber laugh with a personal anecdote of an encounter with the Queen. 

Other tributes poured in from around the world, including a touching message from Vladimir Putin in a letter whose contents were released by the Kremlin.

My mother used to say the Queen had one of those faces that made her look severe when she was actually just relaxed but she had the most wonderful smile (and laugh) and, had she not been a monarch who took her job very seriously, she’d just have been described as a nice person, which is surely the highest praise anyone can give.

A number of people writing about the Queen’s sense of fun have mentioned the American tourists taking a selfie of themselves with her protection officer, her having tea with Paddington Bear and being parachuted into the Olympic games (it was apparently her idea to greet Daniel Craig as “Mr Bond”).  My favourite story about her came from someone I knew when I worked for one of her son’s charities.  As he’d walked into the room to see the Queen, he tripped over a corgi and was mortified but the Queen said “Don’t worry, it’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet”.  What a graceful way of putting someone at ease.

I’ve never had any strong views about the different arguments for monarchies or republics.  I was an admirer of the Queen but the times they are a-changin’.  In the last few days, we’ve been shown ceremonies that have never been publicly seen before.  The pomp of the public parades was certainly impressive but they are for show.  Any power the monarch has is exercised behind closed doors and tends to influence the beginning or the end of parliamentary decisions, but they do have some real power.

One assumes that a British republic would impose similar limitations on the powers of the president so the basic choice could perhaps be reduced to a simple question about whether one has greater faith in nepotism or elections.

In companies, nepotism has proved almost without exception a singularly inefficient way of choosing the next boss but this may be because there is competition and you know my belief that anybody who actually wants to be in a position of power is, by definition, unfit for purpose.

Now we’ve given up regicide and importing foreigners, there’s a fixed hierarchy within the royal family which determines who’s going to be the next monarch so there’s no competition, or choice.  For example, if 58,496,132 Brits all suddenly die, I’ll be king. 

This makes the system dependant on who gets born when but they’re brought up for it from when they first grimace and cover their ears as a bunch of planes thunder overhead so they know what’s expected of them, and that stability is essential.

Presidents are elected for fixed terms more or less democratically and they are part of a political process so their actions and popularity depend on the mood of the moment which is often (always?) influenced by or linked to events outside the country concerned over which neither the presidents nor their governments have any control. 

Even presidents who elect themselves for a life-term in the job rarely die in post and there can be political – and all too often violent – disturbances when they step down or are removed.  A president should have the internal and international respect – and the humility – of somebody like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but there aren’t enough of those to go round.

The advantage of British hereditary monarchs is that they are above politics and can provide an impartial sounding board for the leader of whichever party was disliked least in a general election.

The other problem with presidents is how to choose them.  We live with a broken electoral system that allows small minorities of voters to form governments and even smaller minorities to be completely unrepresented in parliament.

As I write this, I realise I’m talking myself towards being a monarchist, but only faute de mieux.  We’ve been lucky enough to have had an incomparable monarch in E2R.  Let’s hope C3R does as well.

So why don’t we make all royals subject to the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, let them stay in power and see how it goes.

Choosing a PM, a short history of UK politics, a moral gulf as described by Leonard Cohen and another greedy pig

17 July 2022

People who desire power are, by definition, unsuited for it.  Last week, 11 Conservatives admitted they wanted to be prime minister and have, within a week, been whittled down to five by those who know them best.  Three more will now get excluded, leaving two who will now have to wait for 7 weeks before they know which one of them the party’s 175,000 members vote think won’t do quite as badly as the other.

These 175,000 members are, of course, the same people who, last time they were asked, got the answer so terribly wrong and elected the worst prime minister in living history.

One of the things that worries me is that Boris Johnson filled his umpteen cabinets with incompetents so he wouldn’t look as stupid by comparison.  Wouldn’t it therefore have been more sensible to exclude anybody who’d ever been in one of his many cabinets from the process so there’s at least a chance of finding someone who can take a new look at the future?  (I realise this cuts both ways but could they do any worse that they have in the last 5 years?)

Anyway, of the 11 original applicants, three didn’t get enough support to enter the race.  Rishi Sunak was the clear winner in the first round with the support of 88 of the 358 Tory MPs who remain after various resignations, dismissals and by-election defeats.  This means that, if he does ultimately win the members’ vote, he will know that 270 of his party’s MPs didn’t actually want him as prime minister.

As I write, five people are still in the race but, by the time you read this, there’ll only be four, then two more will have been excluded by the end of next week, leaving just two to use their summer break to big themselves up and slag the other off. 

What a palaver.  Why didn’t they just put all 11 names on a ballot paper and let all party members put a X against their favourite?  Other elections are done on that basis and it would have let the Tory MPs blame the membership if they picked the wrong person again.  

(Isn’t it sad that, after Johnson, I don’t really care who wins because I don’t think anyone could do worse.)

Actually, I have a slight preference for Tom Tugendhat since he was apparently the only one of the five contenders at Friday’s debate who unequivocally admitted that Johnson tells lies (one of the others said he “sometimes” did and the others, including Rishi Sunak, just waffled).  And the bookies love it when an outsider wins so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

But no, I don’t think Tories have got the bottle for that, especially not for a person who’s willing to be that honest about the failings of another on the same side.

I rather like the name Kemi Badenoch, not because I know anything about her politics but because she accepted what sounds like a Scottish name from her husband.  They appear not to pronounce it in Scottish but say Bayder-Knock and 30-seconds of detailed research on the internet doesn’t show Hamish’s ancestors as having any links to Scotland – though ‘Hamish’ isn’t a common name in Merton – so the Wolf may not be one of his ancestors.

In order to understand why modern politics is so confrontational, it’s interesting to look back at its origins.

In the beginning – and I oversimplify things slightly for the benefit of those with short attention spans – anyway, in the beginning there were monarchs and barons and squires and serfs.  Then there were the Tories.  Then, in the 17^th century, there was trooble at t’ court and differences over the constitutional (or not) role of the monarch based, naturally, on religious differences, and the Whigs formed an opposition party which gained the upper hand in the ‘glorious revolution’* in 1688 and sidelined the Tories for more than a century.

As the Whigs’ original motivation became increasingly irrelevant, the party fell apart in the mid-19^th century and most members merged with the new Liberal Party, though some joined what became the Conservative Party.

So far, so good, but things got complicated by the industrial revolution that led to the creation of large-scale enterprises and the days when Lady Squire would do the rounds every Christmas, pat their estate workers on the head and give them a plum pudding faded into the already murky depths of the past.

As factories and mines and canals grew and James Watt invented the steam engine while preparing a cup of tea, the division between the people who ran them and those who did the work became increasingly obvious.  At about the same time, there was increasing pressure not to send young children down the mines to hack at coal seams by candlelight and some people came to realise that the profits are not made solely by the owners but depend at least as much on the people who processed the raw materials and that they too should get their fair share of the profits.

Having depended on slave labour, adults and children, both home-grown and abducted from other countries, the owners were none too pleased about this and, because there was (is) no way to measure the value of the labour force against the cost of the resources provided by the owners, refused to consider a fair allocation of total profits between the two.

The workers became increasingly pisst orff and restless and, at the end of the 19^th century, Keir Hardie started the movement demanding fair pay and conditions for everyone that became the Labour party.  This was of course at the same time as people were urging more representative government and ultimately gained votes for all men and, for the first time, women.

The Labour movement grew and became powerful enough to introduce things like the NHS and free education that were run and paid for by the state for several decades, until the Conservatives gained the upper hand and started selling public services and charging for university education.

Hence the confrontation we have to live with today. 

Politics is now polarised between those on the right, who think money is the most important thing, and how much profit is made is the only way success can be measured, and the those on the left, who believe people are the most important thing and success can only be measured by the well-being of everyone in society (including the bosses).

This is of course terribly over-simplistic but it illustrates the vast moral gulf between people who think underpaying staff, moving money and shares around to pay less tax and trousering as much money as possible are justifiable, and people who are happy to sacrifice income, give money away and pay more tax to make to make things better for those who don’t have enough money.

Leonard Cohen summarised the contrast neatly when he wrote “When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.  When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.”

Which inevitably leads to another Greedy Pig Award.  Prêt à Manger (which doesn’t use the accents in English) lost £255m last year despite demanding another £200m from its shareholders and being given £31m in rates relief and £100m in furlough payments by the government during the pandemic.  It also cut staff paid breaks in half so they now get 6% less for the same 8-hour shift.  All of which would have been OK if its chief executive Pano Christou hadn’t taken a 27% increase in his salary so, with a share bonus, he extracted £4.2m from the company last year.

I don’t know how he votes.

Meanwhile the Resolution Foundation, a charity (which means it must not take any political position), has found that the average British household gets £8,800 less than those in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.  Their report coincided with calls from the Confederation of British Industry and the Treasury select committee for the government to produce a coherent growth strategy, but who cares about them?

*          Never mind how many people died, it was definitely glorious

Enfeebled PM, gambling, the monarchy, greedy pigs and one of the ungreedy

12 June 2022

The greased piglet is bacon.  Maggie Thatcher and Theresa May both faced ‘no confidence’ votes and got off considerably better than Boris Johnson did this week but they both gave up fairly shortly afterwards.  Jacob Rees-Mogg kindly explained that one vote is enough to win which is, of course, technically correct but completely ignores the political implications of losing the confidence of some 40% of your own MPs.  When May’s vote showed much more confidence in her, Rees-Mogg described this as “terrible” for her.  Well, why should we expect consistency from our politicians?

Even the ultra Conservative Daily Telegraph headlined the result “Hollow victory tears Tories apart”. 

Elsewhere, the law firm Harcus Parker (what a pity the other partner wasn’t called Parkus because then they could have been magicians) has filed a bunch of claims exceeding £18m from 1,500 investors who believe Link Fund Solutions* failed in its duty to protect investors who knew their capital was at risk.  Another law firm, Leigh Day, has already filed a claim on behalf of some 12,000 other investors.

The fund that went bust had been managed by Neil Woodford (see my blog of 30 June 2019).  For many years, he had been seen as a star stock-picker and was championed by the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown.  Woodford himself isn’t the target of the action because he was fired when even his bosses realised he had made some remarkably stupid decisions and had no particular skills, it was just his luck had run out.

What’s interesting about all of this is to look at who actually made money out of the debacle.  Peter Hargreaves, who helped a friend set up Hargreaves Lansdown in 1981, is now a billionaire;  Neil Woodford is a multi-multi-millionaire;  and the lawyers are going to make a mint.

Investors don’t see themselves as gamblers but the only real difference is the people who risk their money.  Investors are people (and organisations) with too much money who want more.  Investors use vehicles like investment funds who buy things with other people’s money, hoping to get lucky, taking fat fees for the themselves on the way whether or not they’re successful;  gamblers are people who are so poor they need a big win to survive but don’t believe how heavily the odds are stacked against them.  So the investment managers, agencies like Hargreaves Lansdown and the bookies are the only ones who end up rich.

I asked my Conservative-voting friend recently if they still thought Johnson was a good prime minister and the right man to lead his party and the country and they said ‘yes’ (note tactful absence of exclamation mark).  Following Monday’s no-confidence vote, I asked how they felt about the result and my friend said they felt no sense of either relief or disappointment at the result.  I thought this rather went against their earlier claim that Johnson was the best person to be prime minister, but who knows?  Maybe they actually don’t care who runs the country and have just been trying to wind me up.

The latest plan to encourage people to vote Tory is to let occupiers of social housing buy their homes at large discounts blatantly ignores the social and economic problems caused by Maggie Thatcher’s first bash at doing this which transferred almost 2 million units of social housing into private properties.  A 2017 survey published in Inside Housing magazine found that 40% of the former social housing was then being rented out by private landlords who were charging more than twice the rent charged by local authorities and average property prices were twelve times what they had been in 1980.

Only 5% of the stock sold off by Thatcher has been replaced, which is why we have an ever-expanding vicious spiral and some very rich property developers.

Turning to the equally disastrous policies of gun control in America, I recently learnt that the Washington Post humourist suggested a “Gun Control Plan” back in 1976, which would have required everybody’s trigger fingers to be amputated at birth.  He said “The constitution gives everyone the right to bear arms but there is nothing that says an American has to have ten fingers.”

I was talking to another friend this week about the monarchy after my comments last week.   They’re staunchly republican but, as we talked and I thought about it afterwards, I realised I get much more exercised by the distribution of wealth than about whether we have a monarch.  Royals do of course cost us money but only on a tiny scale compared with the money stashed in the mangers of very rich dogs who want to defend them against the people who actually need it to stay alive.

(Prince Charles himself may have swayed people’s feelings about the monarchy this week when, in a private meeting, he apparently described the government’s decision to ‘process’ asylum applicants in Ruanda as “appalling”.   Of course he was right but, until now, royals have never commented on political matters so this may be the beginning of the end.  Or possibly a move towards taking more power into the monarchy which, with the frightening things Johnson’s government has done, from removing rights to peaceful demonstrations, to refusing to make the rich help the poor, to increasing police powers, to immigration generally, to breaking an international law that has its own signature on the bottom, to cronyism and corruption, to its clear wish to move power from government into the hands of the prime minister, might not be a bad thing.)

So this week’s Fat Cat / Greedy Pig awards go to Dominic Blakemore of Compass, John Pettigrew of National Grid, Simon Roberts of Sainsbury and Steve Rowe of Marks & Spencer.  Blakemore was given £3.2m, Pettigrew £6.5m, Roberts £3.8m (triple the previous year) and Rowe £2.6m plus shares worth, at today’s share price some £4.1m that he can cash in over the next few years.

However, M&S showed their magnanimity by increasing their shop workers’ minimum pay to £10 an hour in a year when it made a pre-tax profit of nearly £400m, equivalent to more than £25 per hour for every single one of their employees worldwide. Ummm.

But worms are turning.

Morgan Curtis is a scion of a wealthy family descended from first and early settlers in what wasn’t then called New England.  In her mid-20s, she realised that her wealth and privilege were “inextricably linked to what has been stolen from the labor of enslaved African people, the rights of workers, lands of Indigenous people and the health of ecosystems” and decided to do something about it to help build “a more just world”.

After deciding she had a moral obligation to redistribute her wealth, she gave her money to grassroots social movements and now lives at Canticle Farm in “occupied Ohlone territory (known as Oakland, CA)” where she works to build “communities and movements in service to justice, healing and reconciliation”.

Morgan my hero, I love you.

*          I decided years ago that any business incorporating the word ‘solutions’ in its name wasn’t to be trusted to solve anything.