Friday, June 13, 2008
David Davis is Dudley Moore
The resignation of David Davis combined with the bizarre prospect of a by-election in which he may end up standing against a few nutters reminds me of a great Beyond the Fringe sketch. It is World War II. Peter Cook is telling Dudley Moore to go over to Germany and get killed - 'We need a futile gesture at this stage, it will raise the whole tone of the war.'
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
he always struck me as the archetypical right-wing, double-hard, mean bastard. now he's got a heart afterall. quick, someone get a stake!
ReplyDeleteIt is a futile gesture, but will only raise the tone of the Labour Party. Bizarre.
ReplyDeletei don't understand politics but from the page you link to he comes across as someone taking a stand for what's right, whereas Brown comes across as a cheap, opportunistic huckster.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that Brown dismisses it as 'a stunt' - it obviously isn't a stunt for Davis - it seems, rather, that Brown is incapable of understanding that one might damage one's career for any reason at all, so for him any such gesture must be 'a stunt', some kind of cunning scam. You can imagine Brown dismissing the Crucifixion as 'a stunt' or 'spin', because that's all anything is for him.
People give a lot away in their accusations...they accuse themselves also.
Well said elberry, not because you have commandeered my own thoughts - although you have - but you remind us all of the moral gulf that exists between people of principal in public life, and the stock career-politician that is now personified in the figure of Gordon Brown and his numbing utterances. Rhetorical flair, now an almost vanished skill, we can rub along without, tho' I miss it - but the absence of moral fibre makes us all the poorer
ReplyDeleteMahlerman
I can't believe Davis could be so naive that he didn't anticipate that Labour would simply say that they wouldn't put up a candidate. Now we face the prospect of Kelvin MacKenzie running for parliament, backed by The Sun... There really just aren't enough words. I just despair.
ReplyDeleteBest not to write it off yet. Broon may call it a stunt and the Tory Boys may shake their heads, but both sides are equally careerist and shallow. There's a lot of sympathy for the underdog and a lot of anger out there at the way of the world; and at heart "surveillance Britain" is about bossy, spendthrift government which distrusts and disrespects the people. The danger is that Davies - unwittingly - may spark off the kind of popularism that can get very ugly pretty darn quick.
ReplyDeleteStill, the better news this week will be Ireland telling the EU to fug off.
Is this the beginning of the end of Gordon's streak of bad luck?
ReplyDeleteWell, Brown has at least one fan in Hollywood
Sure, David Davis is guilty of a stunt, in which base political motives probably lurk beneath the nobility of his cause, but, for God's sake, what about Murdoch, Rebecca Wade, and MacKenzie cooking up MacKenzie's 'cheeky chappie' candidacy at the the tail end of Ms Wade's birthday party. That 'process' tells you all you need to know about our 'culture'.
ReplyDeleteIf I was a MP on Tuesday night I would resign too, the place does not just stink it wreaks of shit.
ReplyDelete6 weeks without charge is without doubt the most evil thing I have ever heard come out of our so called elected chamber, in my life, we are now at the same level as the terrorists themselves.
"we are now at the same level as the terrorists themselves"
ReplyDelete...of course, as we know terrorists always release hostages after 42 days, and then compensate them for every day they were held.
It may be ludicrous, but I like it. This country seems to be lurching into some Kafka-esque place of petty and not-so-petty tyranny. We are run by pygmies who would be better suited to running bickering student unions. They have no grasp of reality at all. The media's response is bizarre too. It may be comedic at one level, but detention without trial for so long is not. And now the Irish have stuck two fingers up to our "leaders" too. Let's hope the tide is turning...
ReplyDeleteThe People vs. Larry Flynt
ReplyDeleteThe most telling line of the film is when Flynt says to reporters on the courtroom steps, "If the law protects a scumbag like me, then it protects all of us ...
Elberry, I hope if you are ever arrested the police actually do have evidence and not just suspicion against you.
Of course terrorists don't release you after 42 days, but the main point is they should not take you hostage in the first place, how do we set an example in order to have the moral high ground? 42 days without charge is not it, is it?
and we have the high moral ground the state has a right to legal personality.
Hard to think of an MP who's more against civil liberties, has he had a change of heart, or is this just an ill considered piece of Tory ( or personal) PR which has backfired spectacularly?
ReplyDelete