O Tempora! O Mores!

Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Lower Orders.

The Government of the United Kingdom is slowly and painfully falling in on itself. This might not be apparent to, or indeed of interest to, any foreigners reading this tosh. But it is of interest to me because I am sitting underneath the rotten edifice trying to get on with my own dull and unimportant project. Occasionally our work is disrupted by the titanic thud of another career collapsing, or the roar of a political reputation disintegrating. It is like taking tea at the foot of a glacier. There is no danger to such worms as I. And indeed it is a grand spectacle. But it is very noisy and disturbing of one's rest.

And more worryingly, Parliament has as a whole been discredited. No-one believes me when I say I have worked with a fair number of MPs (over a life devoted to public service etc etc ) and most of them seemed to me to be doing their job for the public good rather than private gain. They may be incompetent, stupid, or downright mad, but they are not, in the great scheme of things, corrupt. As a class, they wouldn't generally break the law.

But they live in a strange wonderland, like all legislators. They are isolated from their surroundings, despite the fact that our MPs must meet constituents on a regular basis. At a certain level, even these are insulated from reality. So much so that when they exploited the minutiae of their expenses system (which being mere mortals, they did) it did not cross their minds how incredibly damaging "playing the system" would turn out to be. Well, they know now. Heads are rolling like marbles. MPs are jumping before they are pushed. And every loudmouthed cretin in every pub in Britain, every seething anti-democrat, every cynical fool that ascribed to society their own warped ethics...every one of them is crowing now.

It breaks my heart.

I am not a believer in mass democracy. No-one with as low an opinion of humanity as I could ever support a system so sadly misguided as actually believe Vox populi, vox Dei. But in my own crippled little misanthropic way, I still faintly believed in Parliamentary democracy. I have worked with all the deviousness and duplicity at my disposal to uphold, in my own area of work, the power and perquisites of Parliament against the Government. I have always reminded m' learned colleagues in various quangos that we are not part of Government - but that we were the creation of, and the agent of, the Mother of Parliaments. Some tiny part of me never lost respect for all that history...for the Parliamentary cause. I refer you to past remarks about Cromwell. I know which side I would have been on in 1641.

And these sons of whores have prostituted that establishment for a few hundred quid apiece. Scum.

So I don't feel like being funny, like chatting, like entertaining anyone. I feel like lining people up and shooting them in the head. The truly frustrating thing is that it would do no good.

Ah me...such a bitter little fop tonight. So full of hate. I found myself thinking today of a line in Brideshead Revisited which goes something like "I wonder which is more horrible, Celia's Art and Fashion, or Rex's Money and Politics?" To which I answer that they are both insufferable. A plague on both their houses.

To quote again from Brideshead "My dear, such a pair."

g-g-goodnight, my dears....