The Worst Prime Minister Since...No, Just the Worst

I wrote in a previous blog that I thought Gordon ‘the Joker’ Brown was the worst prime minister since Frederick, Lord North. I think I owe an apology to Lord North; the Joker actually makes him look good in contrast.

I fully admit my bias: I despise New Labour; I despised Tony Blair as much as I despise Gordon Brown. But I also try to be fair. Looking over the historical records, looking at the conduct of the people who have occupied this office all the way back to Robert Walpole I simple can find no prime minister as disastrously bad as the Joker. Walpole was corrupt, yes, but he was a great political manager. There are one or two mediocrities like Aberdeen and MacDonald but all showed some leadership qualities, some understanding of what leadership was about.

And now consider the Joker, consider his latest ‘triumph’. It is now openly admitted that he and Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, did not want Addelbaset Ali Mohamed al Megrahi to die in prison; at least that’s what they told the Libyans. The families of the victims of the Lockerbie were being told something quite different. The double-dealing is bad; the hypocrisy is worse; the cynicism is worst of all.

Bit by bit this government sinks into fresh depths of turpitude and incompetence. I can’t honestly be sure how much further this will go, but I now believe anything to be possible. Brown’s appeasement of Gaddafi does not just make him look bad; it makes the whole country look bad. He’s been asked by David Cameron to ‘come clean’ on the whole issue, but he can’t, he simply can’t. He can’t criticise the SNP administration because they did precisely-and objectively-what he wanted, assuming he was sincere in his comments to the Libyans. He can’t say that this was something he did not want because it makes him look like a liar as well as a fool. He is now responsible, moreover, for the most serious decline in Anglo-American relations in decades.

It will pass, I know, these things do, but how much more damage can the Joker do before next June? I can just picture him in Downing Street, after the cold bath and the salty porridge, hiding under the sheets when confronted with some tricky problem; hoping that if he says nothing it will simply go away. As I have said several times now, leadership is not just about decisions and high office; it’s about moral courage. The Joker has none.

Twittering Twit

Do you know anyone who uses Twitter? I certainly don’t; none of my friends do. It seems to me-please forgive me for being so direct-a form of narcissism for the middle-aged, full of matters of no particular consequence, just endless babble and pointless self-promotion. When I say I don’t know anyone who uses it I simply mean I don’t anyone personally. I certainly know of people who tweet; people like Stephen Fry, the destitute person’s Oscar Wilde. Oh, and there is also Joker Brown, supposedly tweeting from Downing Street, and his frumpy wife, Sarah.

I have absolutely no interest in reading what the Joker tweets about, no desire to listen to his particular dawn chorus. I’m aware just how desperate the poor man is to appear cool, like some acutely embarrassing father. He’s a fan of the Arctic Monkeys; he watches Big Brother; he has time to congratulate our cricket team; he appears on You Tube; he twitters here, there and everywhere. But when it comes to the big issues, the things that really matter, the little bird simply refuses to sing.

We have a Prime Minister, a leader, who has not the first idea of what it takes to lead, no idea that leadership is not just about taking decisions; it’s about moral courage. On issue after issue the Joker has simply tried to hide behind his dour Presbyterian façade; issues like the conduct of the execrable Damian McBride, or issues like Parliamentary expenses. Oh, he always manages to do the ‘right thing’ in the end, but only after days of doing the wrong thing.

Now, after more wasted time, more wasted opportunities, he’s finally opened his beak to tweet about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al Megrahi. He tweets, yes, but not very forcefully and not very loud. Once again his lack of action led to days of speculation, days when the nation drifted without a note from Downing Street or wherever the Joker happens to be. He now criticises the reception of Megrahi in Tripoli but he dare not say any more; he dare not enter a constitutional battle with the Scots; he dare not offend the Americans and-I have to stress this once again-he dare not offend the Libyans, not in any fundamental way.

As I said quite recently on my Gaddafi blog this whole issue has nothing at all to do with morality, with what is right and what is wrong: it’s about oil and it’s about gas; it’s about done deals and secret negotiations. I stress my point once again: this government is mired in gross moral turpitude. I am in dissimulation Stepped in so far that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Why do I call the Joker the Joker? Well, I’m sure most people have seen his You Tube performance. Remember that bizarre smile? Now try to conjure up the figure of the Joker from the Batman movies. :-)

J’accuse

I accuse the present Labour government in England of being the most criminally incompetent we have ever had.

I accuse Tony Blair of involving my country in one of the most unjustifiable and unnecessary military adventures in our history, worse, even, than Suez. We went to war in Iraq in pursuit of non-existent terrorists and illusory weapons of mass destruction. We found a bad situation and we made it infinitely worse. We removed a secular dictator, only to allow the worst forms of fratricidal and religious conflict to emerge. Blair's administration, in its embarrassment over the lies and deceptions that took us to war in the Middle East, tried to hide the true facts, and may very well have hounded an innocent man, Dr. David Kelly, to his death. Going to war in Iraq also meant losing focus in Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to make a major comeback, the source of our present troubles.

I accuse him of dismantling of the United Kingdom while passing ever more powers to the European super-state, a threat to English liberty in every way as great as Napoleon or Hitler. I accuse him of allowing unprecedented levels of immigration, including the arrival of thousands of bogus ‘asylum seekers’, into an already overcrowded Isle. I accuse him of losing control of the criminal justice system, presiding over the steady disintegration of social order, which continues to this day. I accuse him of introducing levels of cynicism and manipulation into British politics far in excess of any previous prime minister; he turned principle into spin, manipulating the whole system of government into his own self-serving ends. His greatest achievement-arguably his only achievement-was to give way to the utterly charmless Gordon Brown, a brilliant exercise in self-promotion, which has served to make him look good in retrospect, casting a fog over his deep moral turpitude.

I accuse Gordon ‘the Joker’ Brown, of being the worst Prime Minister of the worst government we have ever had, worse, even, than Frederick, Lord North, and that really is some achievement. I accuse him of mismanaging the economy, both as Chancellor and Prime Minister, to the point of taking this country to the threshold of bankruptcy. I accuse him of losing control of the whole banking sector, which descended into the deepest levels of fiscal irresponsibility. I accuse him of lying to the people of England about the precise causes of the present economic downturn.

I accuse him of perpetuating the Blairite culture of lies and spin, adding malice to the venomous mixture, numbering on his staff the utterly vile Damian McBride, a man with all of the poison but none of the intelligence of Josef Goebbels. I accuse him of starving the British Army of the men and equipment necessary to complete the task it has been given in Afghanistan. The fact that the army is underfunded, underequipped and understrength is contributing to the growing level of casualties.

I accuse him of surrendering even more of our sovereignty to Europe in the Lisbon Treaty, the Constitution by any other name rejected by democratic votes in both France and the Netherlands. Beyond all else, I accuse him of being absorbed by double-speak and spin, of not having the wit or the intelligence to see how meaningless his own words have become.

Oh, how I wish the Joker could be called to account for all of the cowardice, the lies and the incompetence that have been such a feature of his administration; how I wish he could be called to account in the same fashion as, say, Lord North!

To this government I would simply repeat once again the words Oliver Cromwell used in dismissing the Long Parliament in 1653;

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!