Gutter politics

There is a terrific amount of hot air about at the moment.

Some of it is blasting us, heat-wave or no heat-wave, from the general direction of the Bunker, specifically out of the mouth of the customarily mendacious Mr ‘Take That Post Down Immediately’ Balls.

But Balls is not alone.

The rise in air-temperature is not helped by people like political jokemeister Quentin Letts and the very reverend and very irreverent Tam Dalyell complaining (Today, this morning) about Conservative politicians lowering the tone. There is much earnest hand wringing about ‘reducing Parliamentary debate to personal invective’, what with the leader of the Opposition pointing out that the Prime Minister’s dogged claims and continually-morphing verbal statements to the House contradict both his own government’s written statements and cruelly self-evident fact. Poor Mr Letts is getting bored. The continued blood-letting does not offer grist to his professionally witty mill. Perhaps his editor is complaining that his own copy is beginning to lack freshness. Perhaps Mr Letts finds Mr Cameron’s hammering away about the Prime Minister’s dishonesty and unfitness for office insufficiently comic to his own urgent and important purpose. In 1986, Mr Dalyell famously and with deliberate purpose called the then Prime Minister a liar. But that was all right, you see, because, in his view, she was. Perhaps he can in no circumstances be persuaded by any evidence whatsoever that the Leader of his own Party could possibly deserve the very charge which he levelled with a clear conscience at the then Leader of the other Party? And now ghostly old lags who never heard any MPs in their day so much as mutter the words, ‘lying bastard’ in the bars of the House of Commons, are emanating from the wainscoting to wail, gnarled hands all a-quiver, that they are shocked, SHOCKED, at the unfortunate turn recently taken in our public political discourse.

Even the estimable Morus is wondering whether Cameron’s persistence in demanding that the Prime Minister correct himself might not prove electorally counterproductive… But then, one can so easily understand that the priorities of a desperate tabloid sketch-writer and a superannuated Labour grandee might not coincide precisely with those of an electorate concerned to have honesty in government as a sine qua non. As for Morus, bless him, he is just a betting tipster and not trying to influence events. At all. But yes, one can quite see that they would deem it proper that the first concern of the Leader of the Opposition and candidate Prime Minister be to provide Mr Letts with comic copy, and his next to assure an insufferably patronising former Labour MP, whose most recent claim to our attention (despite his personal wealth) was his application for £8,000 of our money with which to purchase some rather excellent bespoke bookcases in which he wished to house his priceless collection of books, that he is indeed more righteous than any other politician of any party whether living or dead and that therefore he alone may be forgiven for calling a sitting Prime Minister a (brace yourself) ‘liar’when he or she is, er, lying...

Tam Dalyell, earlier today

One can see it, but I beg to differ.

When the Prime Minister of the day is demonstrably and beyond any dispute lying, that is, deliberately and repeatedly telling blatant untruths, and on the basis of those untruths directly causing grave harm to the nation, it is the overriding duty of the Leader of the Opposition to say so using whatever Parliamentary terms are available to him. If this bores witty Mr Letts, tough shit, and likewise if it offends the hypocritical nose of the unlamented Mr Dalyell.

When the electors can see for themselves that the Prime Minister is lying in his teeth and that his ministers are lying, too, and when, as has been made appallingly clear, the liar’s closest friends in government include immoral, egregious thugs of the sort one could not previously have imagined being allowed to pollute the air of polite society let alone being brought into government and who plot to dive to hitherto unplumbed depths of nastiness in order to make mad the wives of their enemies on their masters’ behalf on the customary basis (of course) of deniability, one may be forgiven for telling the Prime Minister, his colleagues and their contemptible associates, when they complain about ‘gutter politics’, to look in the mirror before they fuck off and die.