We Are Not Worthy
As the shadows begin to fall, a normal impulse is to look back on one's career and, even in the most successful cases, to regret what one did wrong and consider how it might have been done better. Analysing the deplorable outcome of his own career, Hitler regretted that he had permitted the Jews to force him prematurely into war, and blamed the German people for not being good enough for him. Given the present interminable farewell to Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher might be forgiven for regretting that she resigned so soon, besides her more obvious oversights of being too soft on the unions and too accommodating towards Brussels.
In a similar ruthless spirit of self-castigating intellectual honesty, the Vicar of Downing Street has deplored the effect of the soundbite on political culture - much as, in his whimsical fashion, Vlad the Impaler may occasionally have wondered whether anal penetration with a sharp stake was really as much fun for the recipient as it obviously was for him. "Politics is about communicating things to people, you want to communicate one thing but you lapse into humour or irony," his reverence informed fellow comedian Stephen Fry. "And never try to do irony - I have tried it once or twice and it has never worked," his reverence continues, modestly omitting from mention such famous satiric gems as "foreign policy with an ethical dimension".
His reverence also notes that the round-the-clock news media places "enormous stress and strain" on public debate and prohibits reasoned policy argument, which must be the reason for all those dinners with Rupert Murdoch and reasoned press releases like Forty-five Minutes from Doom. "The 30 seconds that people see of you on the evening news is what you have done that day so far as they are concerned. So if you make a remark that is maybe a bit off-line and that is there, then you might have launched a new education initiative, tackled a particularly knotty crime problem, you know, done whatever you have done for peacemaking or otherwise in the world, but actually that is the 30 seconds that they see." Peacemaking or otherwise is another fine touch; but seriously, what can you say about a nation whose idea of work-life balance has room for only thirty seconds a day of Tony Blair?
In a similar ruthless spirit of self-castigating intellectual honesty, the Vicar of Downing Street has deplored the effect of the soundbite on political culture - much as, in his whimsical fashion, Vlad the Impaler may occasionally have wondered whether anal penetration with a sharp stake was really as much fun for the recipient as it obviously was for him. "Politics is about communicating things to people, you want to communicate one thing but you lapse into humour or irony," his reverence informed fellow comedian Stephen Fry. "And never try to do irony - I have tried it once or twice and it has never worked," his reverence continues, modestly omitting from mention such famous satiric gems as "foreign policy with an ethical dimension".
His reverence also notes that the round-the-clock news media places "enormous stress and strain" on public debate and prohibits reasoned policy argument, which must be the reason for all those dinners with Rupert Murdoch and reasoned press releases like Forty-five Minutes from Doom. "The 30 seconds that people see of you on the evening news is what you have done that day so far as they are concerned. So if you make a remark that is maybe a bit off-line and that is there, then you might have launched a new education initiative, tackled a particularly knotty crime problem, you know, done whatever you have done for peacemaking or otherwise in the world, but actually that is the 30 seconds that they see." Peacemaking or otherwise is another fine touch; but seriously, what can you say about a nation whose idea of work-life balance has room for only thirty seconds a day of Tony Blair?
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