Skip to main content

Honour, Respect, Dignity.

Three little words that mean so much to so many - and yet are used to mask so much.


It's coming up for midday on the post-Referendum UK now.

I can't pretend I'm not deeply affected by the outcome. Disappointed, yes; Somewhat angry, yes, but calmer now; Truly surprised? Not entirely.

And that honourable man, David Cameron, has done the honourable thing and respectfully, with dignity, has proffered his resignation.

Because, as we all know, David Cameron is an honourable man. Indeed, this covey of triumphant politicians - Mr. Duncan Smith, Mr. Gove, Mr. Farage, and above all Mr. Johnson - are all gentlemen of honourable intent.

The Prime Minister has said 'The British people have voted...and their will must be respected'. And he is a respectful man.

Mr. Johnson has said 'This is a glorious opportunity...for the UK'. And he is an honourable man.

Mr Farage has called today 'our independence day', with all his usual reserve and dignity, and with the candour that comes from his honourable nature has rebutted the claim that the money that goes to Brussels will now be spent on the NHS.

Honour, respect, dignity.

Oh, one word I omitted: Courage.

The PM courageously sanctioned a referendum that was wanted, in reality, by very few, apart from the honourable, respectful, dignified, courageous gentlemen on the right of his party and that honourable, respectful, dignified and courageous purveyor of media, Mr. Murdoch.

When the votes were cast and the results read out, Mr Cameron strode in dignity to the lectern outside no. 10 and, respecting the fig leaf of the National Will to hide his honour, resigned, courageously leaving the job that, in all reality, he has been trying to get out of for at least the last two years with his own, self-regarding dignity intact.

Honour, respect, dignity, courage.

Mr. Johnson, that honourable gentleman who enthralled us with the dignified manner in which he descended a zip wire, is a man of great respect - for his manifest belief that he should lead this country.

Mr. Farage, a man who has never known want, or fear, or insecurity, respectfully stands in front of a poster of a line of refugees, and courageously lies and lies and lies.

Mr. Gove maintains his calm dignity in front of each camera, and demands respect, and lies and lies and lies.

These fine and honourable gentlemen shall sleep soundly tonight, convinced of their worth.

I would not buy their treacherous honour, their trifling respect, their flaccid dignity, or their hollow courage for all the money that allegedly goes to the EU, and which they sold their souls for.

Honourable gentlemen all: You have sold your country for the sake of your personal aims, and a terrible day will come when you truly realise what you have done.

Still, done it is, so now my friends, we must consider what we should do next.
Let us take back these words - honour, respect, dignity and courage - and let them be our watchwords for the day ahead.
Let us add one more: Love, because that is what we need above all these - what we all need.
Let us not be fractured as a nation of nations by the greed, by the vanity, by the hubris, by the mendacity of these few honourable gentlemen.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Same old day

 Well, of course it isn't, but as this is meant as a companion piece to the previous post, it seems only right to link the titles. So, I hope you weren't left with the impression that I am always in the deepest throes of anxiety: I am not. While I recognise it as the climate of my mind, it is nevertheless not actually the weather, as it were. Sometimes, the sun shines: at others, storms rumble and tear across the skies of my psyche. The good thing is that I have been able to forecast the problems a lot more accurately as I've grown older, and so I've developed several coping strategies which work, more or less. Not always, but they mitigate the worst moments and mean I climb out of any spiral just that bit faster. It'll blow over So the first thing is what I've alluded to in my meteorological metaphor - these moments when things are bad are temporary and they will pass. They always have done before, and there's no reason that they won't again. That is a ...

All in it together.

This has been quite possibly the five most depressing days in the life of the British body politic. Well, it seems the Prime Minister was right when he said 'We're all in it together'. It was just that he crucially omitted to mention what the 'it' was. It seems I may well have been right when I said that senior politicians were playing a game with the referendum, but it is now apparent that the Opposition also need to pile in and play Silly Buggers, too. There's an Ex-Prime Minister, presumably pining for the fjords of Chipping Norton or whatever, meekly bending over in Brussels to have his bum deservedly kicked by other European leaders; Labour's front bench resigning and Jeremy Corbyn so desperate for a cabinet that he's phoned IKEA; Boris Johnson and Michael Gove looking as abject and useless as a pair of opened condoms in a lesbian orgy; Farage shouting Ya Boo Sucks in the European parliament; and only Nicola Sturgeon seems to have any form o...

No Word For Water

I’ve been reading Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill, ‘The Churchill Factor’, and I have to say that I’m quite enjoying it - it’s zippy, well-paced and entertaining, written with Johnson’s typical brio and zest. I’d certainly recommend it - if you like your history having a bit more emphasis on the ‘story’ bit. Johnson, being a journalist, knows how to write, and as the saying is, he doesn’t always let the facts get in the way of a good yarn. To be fair, he does state, quite early on, that he ‘isn’t a historian’, which should be enough to put the reader on their guard. He is also, quite clearly, a bit besotted with his subject: The book teeters on the edge of fanboy fiction, and it’s also obvious that Churchill, journalist, politician and serial self-publicist, has been a profound influence on journalist, politician and serial self-publicist Boris Johnson. He races through the life of his subject, placing Winston under the relatively lightest of scrutiny and conveni...