Twenty six years after he was caught by a hot mic denouncing the Eurosceptic “bastards” in his own cabinet, John Major has proved that he has not lost his knack for making news – and this time he very much knew the microphone was on.
Maybe we’re too busy laughing to see it. Perhaps it’s the jokes and memes that Donald Trump generates in abundance, the gift that keeps on giving, that blinds us to a chilling fact that we’d rather not face. Put simply, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation is behaving like an authoritarian dictator, one who threatens democracy in his own country and far beyond.
Here’s a thing they teach in campaign school. If you’re about to make a political promise, first check the calendar. Just to avoid a clash that could make your policy proposal look utterly wrong-headed, inept and at odds with the available evidence.
All we need now is for Boris Johnson to praise Mark Field, the government-minister-cum-self-appointed-close-protection-officer who thought the best way to deal with a peaceful distributor of leaflets was to ram her into a pillar and grab her by the neck. If Johnson lauds Field as “my kind of guy”, then the already long list of similarities between Britain’s near-certain next prime minister and Donald Trump will get longer still. Compiling that list might once have been an amusing parlour game for politics nerds; now it is essential preparation for what is to come.
Not one of the candidates came away from Tuesday’s debate looking ready to lead
Vince Cable, the other party leader stepping down this summer, looks like a man ready to hand over. In the Twickenham home he has lived in for 45 years, a table is covered with piles of notes and clippings from the Financial Times – “horizontal filing,” he calls it – research for a new book he is working on. It is a study of how major politicians “have changed the way we do economics”, from Alexander Hamilton to Margaret Thatcher and, although he has not made a final decision on this – because who knows how the story will end? – Donald Trump. He will soon have more time for that project. Unlike Theresa May, the 76-year-old leader of the Liberal Democrats did not have to be dragged from politics’ front line. It was his decision.
Vince Cable, the other party leader stepping down this summer, looks like a man ready to hand over. In the Twickenham home he has lived in for 45 years, a table is covered with piles of notes and clippings from the Financial Times – “horizontal filing,” he calls it – research for a new book he is working on. It is a study of how major politicians “have changed the way we do economics”, from Alexander Hamilton to Margaret Thatcher and, although he has not made a final decision on this – because who knows how the story will end? – Donald Trump. He will soon have more time for that project. Unlike Theresa May, the 76-year-old leader of the Liberal Democrats did not have to be dragged from politics’ front line. It was his decision.
Strange to say this of a country with a Tory government, but Britain lacks a conservative party. There are instead two revolutionary parties of the right, firmly set on a path that could be described as nationalist or populist. But it is avowedly not conservative. And now they are locked in a struggle that is dragging the older, larger party ever further from the values that are supposed to define it.
No one would cast Robert Mueller as the lead in a romcom. And yet watching him deliver a statement on Wednesday regarding his inquiry into Donald Trump, Russia and obstruction of justice was to experience a sensation familiar to all romcom devotees.
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