Bread, European war, and circuses
What bothers you more, a few clandestine slices of cake or the dangerous slide to European war?
What bothers you more, a few clandestine slices of cake or the dangerous slide to European war?
If you are in the media, the answer is surely the former. As of writing on Tuesday 25th January, prominent outlets are going with Cakegate as their leading issue. The BBC, The Mail, the Telegraph and the Guardian are all very excited by the specifics regarding the Prime Minister’s potential birthday bash last year.
With the Metropolitan police set to start investigating the matter, navel-gazing among the journos sealed within the M25 is reaching some kind of fever pitch. To many, it looks more and more like a coordinated attempt to topple the PM.
Heaven knows there are already enough reasons besides a bit of icing and sponge cake. Yet, as ever, the media and our inept journalist class avoid topics of import. Thoughtlessly supine and obsequious to the end, the ovine herds of Fleet Street continue to disappoint.
After all, as this party and cake nonsense is going on, a war of words – quickly evolving into a war of action – is playing out, with the potential of embroiling Europe into a war. Speaking to Parliament, the Prime Minister warned that many Russian sons would not return home in the event of Moscow’s incursion into Ukraine. Our support for Kiev, too, would increase, most likely in the form of increased contributions to NATO battlegroups.
The risk of war continues to be ratchetted up. We could be reaching a point where we ask men and women to put their life on the line to prop up Kiev. It’s a useful foil for the Prime Minister, who now finds himself embroiled in one petty drama after another.
There is in my mind, however, little more gut-churning than the sight of a politician whose personal failings are so clear, and whose moral malleability so manifest, play the role of latter-day Churchill, embroiling the United Kingdom in a war of zero strategic benefit. Thinking himself akin to a grand statesman of the eighteenth century, Johnson increasingly takes on the appearance of one of Rome’s more insane emperors.
‘Global Britain’ was the battle-cry of Brexit. Few who supported that policy could have imagined it would mean the possibility of getting ourselves into a conflict in a far-off country that few in the UK could point to on a map.
Not that it matters. Eastern Europe was the graveyard for tens of millions of dead amid the tides of war in the last century. Only the foolish and the arrogant would assume the future is free from a repetition of such horror.
I’m being silly, of course. I am ignoring the crucial matters of the day. Let’s talk about wine and cheese in Downing Street some more. Panem et circenses.
