Thursday, April 14, 2022
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
BoJo & His Chums: EXPECT THE WORST
Lie, deny and move on – how much longer will the Johnson mantra plague British politics?
Partygate, bullying ministers, groping MPs and insider lobbying: the Tories have polluted our entire system of government
Boris Johnson was never going to resign if he didn’t have to. This is all about the Tory party’s view of him now. The party knows as well as you or I that Johnson lied about the lockdown parties. It knows that the lies hit middle Britain, conscientiously obeying the lockdown laws, in the gut. It knows the Tories will take a hit for it in the local elections and eventually the general election too. Yet, remarkably, when it weighs all this up, the Tory party thinks this does not matter all that much.
The ostensible reason now being offered is that a prime minister is too important to be dumped during a war. Britain’s own history shows how specious this claim is. Margaret Thatcher was ousted during the build-up to the Gulf war in 1990; Neville Chamberlain during the second world war in 1940; and Herbert Asquith was pushed aside during the first in 1916. Actually, you could argue that a war is a good time to ditch a failing prime minister, not a bad one.
And besides, who says we, Britain, are at war? There has been no declaration of war of the kind that Asquith and Chamberlain made. Nobody appears to have told the House of Commons either. Johnson is doing many good things in support of Ukraine and in helping to isolate Russia, but he has not sent a single British soldier, flyer or sailor into harm’s way. There absolutely is a war going on, but a large part of Johnson’s war is a pantomime version performed by a pantomime prime minister.
The facts are more prosaic. The party knows that Johnson is mortally wounded. But, since the complacent self-destruction of Rishi Sunak, it isn’t sure who would now win an election that Johnson would lose. How extraordinary it is that, among the 358 other Tory MPs, not one of them thinks they could do better. Instead, the party sits on its hands, making the craven calculation that there is more gravy to be made out of being in government, knowing full well that if a Labour prime minister had done this the indignation on the right would now be at ramming speed.
But the Tory party isn’t sitting on its hands about Johnson’s rule breaking alone. It is also complicit in the breaking of the rules – in the sense of the moral code of public life – itself. By saying it is better that Johnson should stay – better for the Tory party, better for the MPs, that is – the party is, in effect, asserting that this prime minister, uniquely, can lie to parliament without consequence, and break the law without paying a political price. That’s not merely shocking, but stupid . . ."
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JUST IN TIME: "Operation Mincemeat", the Real-Life Scheme Cooked-Up by British Intelligence
Wheeeeeee! A welcome time-out break for a Movie Review
Operation Mincemeat review – Colin Firth heads starry cast in wartime spy caper
Stiff upper lips abound in this stranger-than-fiction tale of second world war espionage, with Firth and Matthew Macfadyen in charge
Operation Mincemeat was the bizarre real-life scheme cooked up by British intelligence in 1943 to fool Nazi Germany into thinking the allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than their actual target, Sicily. The corpse of a tramp was dressed up as fictitious “Capt William Martin” and carried elaborate bogus plans for this nonexistent invasion; the body was dumped into the sea so that it would wash up in Spain where the British were confident this phoney intelligence would be obediently passed to the Germans.
Screenwriter Michelle Ashford has adapted the nonfiction bestseller by Ben Macintyre about this extraordinary adventure and John Madden directs, with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen playing the stiff upper lipped chaps in charge, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley. And Johnny Flynn plays naval intelligence’s brightest spark: Lt Cdr Ian Fleming (the future creator of James Bond, who possibly had the idea in the first place) in an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek performance.
In many ways, the most important figure here is the MI5 clerk Jean Leslie (played by Kelly Macdonald) whose photo was placed on the body to be the fake captain’s imagined “girlfriend”. Leslie’s supporting role is part of the way this film is striving for a rather modern emotional intelligence: it is less callous and more caring about the wretched homeless man being used in this way, and the leading players are pondering, like artists, their creation and the light he casts on their own stress and loneliness. It is a bit different from the previous film about Operation Mincemeat, The Man Who Never Was (1956), which was adapted directly from Montagu’s own published memoir, and created a human-interest angle with an entirely fictional and slightly noir-ish subplot about a pro-German Irish spy who investigates the phoney girlfriend, played by Gloria Grahame.
Did the real Operation Mincemeat do any good? This film doesn’t commit itself, but hints at all sorts of spycraft double-bluff which may finally have done the job. This is another of the “home front wartime” Britfilms, such as Munich: The Edge of War, Their Finest, The Imitation Game and Darkest Hour, all probably inspired by the Oscar-winning success of The King’s Speech, which have their emphasis on domestic morale, strategic ingenuity and political shenanigans, rather than battlefield action. Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.
Operation Mincemeat is released on 15 April in cinemas."
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