COMBAT DIARIES: Nice piece of satire from Anne Treneman (see article on Eric Pickles in June Archive Box). British politics is still essentially a cross between the Mad Hatter's tea party and a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. It is acted out by names such as Mogg, Hogg, Tristram, Balls, Darling, Dingle, Foot, Woodrow, Bamber, Mingus, and Peregrine, apparently the name of an ancient Scotsman who went mad. There is also someone called Black Rod. amazing. If the discovery of electricity and the invention of the steam engine are items absent from the well-educated English literary imagination, then the half-educated parliamentary mob have hardly heard of windmills. Eric Pickles, for example, is from an even earlier epoch. He is straight out of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. As fogey cartoons these preindustrial types are a rare species. They are met with nowhere else in the world. In this last feudal mind of Europe called England, Intellectual ability is regarded as some perverse thing characteristic of Jews, Germans, the detested French, and all things south of Gibraltar. In England, most Geniuses and Moderns are thankfully disposed of in the mouldering West Wing, as once were imprisoned unspeakably deformed children.



The general Parliamentary atmosphere is reminiscent of the hayseed provincialism of Forster's Howards End, with a touch of comically foppish latter-day neo-Edwardianism. It follows that not a single one of these half-leisured folk know anything at all about science, engineering or technology. Not a single one of the Etonians (of which there are many) in particular could hang flock wallpaper in a whore's bedroom. The bisexual decadent gentility of Aubrey Beardsley lives alongside Grubb Street corruption for which at least four MP practitioners of such are now being prosecuted for fraud.

The height of incompetence was reached some days ago by one MP about to be prosecuted for misuse of public funds. He failed to kill himself by jumping into the path of a high speed train. Of the managerial class, he couldn't even manage his own annihilation, never mind something useful, like a local newsagent.

Only that chinless wonder who is the British Prime Minister has a touch of the inferno about him. Unashamedly he confesses to having once been a Television "executive," whereupon he should arrange to have "Whore of Babylon" engraved indelibly on his well-bred forehead as soon as is practically possible. Of the circles of Media Hell, this is one level above the category of Television "personality."
He should know here and now that his artificially-roughed-up accent, his small house in Ladbroke Grove and his bicycle outside Portobello Tesco's fools nobody at all. A mere glance at his immense but deeply camouflaged summer residence is guaranteed to draw a proletarian breath.

Paradoxically, there are a few who have managed to escape the English hatred of intellect, such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. On occasion such escapees produce masterpieces: Alice in Wonderland, the Industrial Revolution, and Tristram Shandy come to mind. This makes us all profoundly grateful, if we are grateful for naught else England produces, such as Morris Dancing, a fossilised monarchy, a game called cricket, and the worst food on planet Earth.
The present generation of Parliamentarians know as much about the world as a Portsmouth spider knows about a type 45 destroyer. It would be best to retire the entire Parliamentary assembly and let the Etonians go back to Hampstead, where they could quietly die watching TV in the traditional British manner. The more enterprising could write novels about Jeremy and Julian having most unfortunate queer adventures in the Home Counties.
The untermensche ex-Tesco managers could be left to collect the rubbish, worship the Queen, watch Reality TV and bury the the vast hosts of the viewing dead.
CB

Postscript 14th July 2010
If these country bumpkins kill Trident they will severely injure us. If they get rid of Tanaris (see below) as the Communists killed the TSR2, we are finished.