Welcome to Hell

Well, last week's post insisted that nothing happened. This week everything has happened, though not necessarily to me. The Tour de France and Ireland's corking start to the Test match against some no-hope newcomers called Ingerland or something has anaesthetised me to some extent from the pain of a heatwave and the installation of the Johnson administration.

Maybe I'm getting old (44 last week) but I look at this shower and don't see statesmen and women: I see a bunch of overwhelmingly male, white, privately-educated Oxbridge graduates who've honed their one-liners at the Oxford Union debating society, done a couple of years in the cellars of a think-tank, strolled into parliament where they've deployed precisely the same kind of I-speak-your-weight Hayekian nonsense that got the young gentlemen rolling in the aisles back in the day. I really mean this: perusing the various books, speeches and tweets of this crowd, you get the sense that they have never met anyone outside their own circle worth considering, and there isn't a reflective bone in their collective bodies. What you get instead is the self-regard of a group that thinks – like the various Spiked magazine alumni infesting the body politic – that a good policy is the one that sounds most out of step with public opinion or good sense, one that, to use a phrase currently in vogue in the colonies, 'owns the libs'.

Priti Patel (one of several ministers returned indecently quickly after being justly sacked for disgraceful behaviour) with her obsessional regard for capital punishment; Sajid Javid and his proud boast that he's only read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (the film of the book is his favourite movie too); ministers for the environment, housing, welfare, Europe and so on distinguished only by their hostility towards their charges. Actually, that's not fair: Robert Jenrick, the Housing minister, owns two multi-million pound London homes and lives on an estate. A country estate, but still, it gives him an insight into the lives of others I'm sure. I'm not one to sentimentalise the past, but I'm already mentally rehabilitating Gauke, Hammond and Co: while their policies were vile, they at least didn't behave like governing a major country is a student prank. Douglas Adams nailed them spectacularly in Max Quordlepleen's monologue in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980):

“And thirdly,” he said, “thirdly a party of Young Conservatives from Sirius B, are they here?”
A party of smartly dressed young dogs stopped throwing rolls at each other and started throwing rolls at the stage. They yapped and barked unintelligibly.
“Yes,” said Max, “well this is all your fault, you realize that?”

While we're on the Hitchhikers' analogies, they also remind me of the advertising-executive contingent on the Golgafrincham B-ark, the useless section of a species sent off to found a colony on earth where they can't bother anyone, and from whom we're all descended. Gavin Williamson isn't an ad executive though: he's the Number 2 who declares war on some trees, just in case.



As you can probably tell, I'm not taking this at all well. The installation of a bunch of ultra-rightwing liars and cheats (including Grant Shapps, whom I personally thought I'd dispensed with last time, as the Guardian reported and euphemism his lies as 'overly-firm denial') is not a good background to resit marking, course admin and dealing with student complaints. I'm old now. The thought of saddling up once more and hounding these crooks and shysters just exhausts me, and there are so many of them.

I haven't even had much time for reading this week, only struggling through John Barth's proto-postmodern The End of the Road. I'm fine with the style, but the protagonist is so unpleasant that even while admiring the way he's put together, he's hard to spend any time with. The sexual politics have really, really not aged well either. I'm not sure what's next - I had planned to read or re-read some texts I've put on next year's syllabus, but rearrangement of the teaching duties mean I won't be teaching them. I've got some Carol Ann Duffy to catch up on ready for a conference I'm contributing to in September, but I might resort to closing my eyes and picking at random from the Room of Unread Books. This isn't an exaggeration for comic effect either: I literally have a room full of unread books, plus more in several locations. I haven't bought any books this week though, so I'm winning through. I just have to live to 109 to get through the ones I already own.

Enjoy your weekend. I was going to savour Ireland's defeat of England but they've just collapsed to 38 all out and lost the match. Just the last stages of the Tour de France to keep me going.