I promised myself I would not get involved in any further political noises here, but I am sufficiently shaken by a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph to break my own ruling. Just this once, mind.
The person in the second photo may seem familiar to you. If you can't quite remember the name, or if it seems now like some fleeting practical joke which lost news value very quickly, I must (reluctantly) remind you that this person was - unbelievably - the shortest-lived UK Prime Minister in history. That's right - the one whose primary mission, as far as I can detect, was to make her immediate predecessor look rather less stupid in comparison.
Let us not dwell on the impact her brief stardom had on markets and the cost of borrowing. Although she seems intent on establishing a career as a public speaker (I hope she's very cheap), she has been pretty quiet since her dismissal, but she has now gone into print to claim that she was right, after all, and the world was too dumb to understand.
In particular, she has coined a bogey-man term which is new to me - she has blamed her failure on "the left-wing economic establishment". This is heavy stuff - something new for her readers to tremble at. I suspect that her use of "left-wing" in this context is a rather specialised one, meaning "having a shred of decency", but I hasten to add that I do not wish to know what it is intended to mean, and that I don't want anyone to damage what is left of their mental health by trying to make sense of it.
I am reluctant to post this, and will probably not publish any comments, but I feel obliged to make the point that, if I had a recent history as spectacularly embarrassing as hers, I would be hiding somewhere very obscure. I would not be waiting for Mr Sunak's downfall as an opportunity to leap back into the limelight.
I hope she keeps very quiet and just goes away. If the good citizens of Norwich are happy to keep her as their elected MP, then God bless them. If not, they know what to do about it.
The role model for annoying sixth formers with no self-awareness.
ReplyDeleteCouldn’t top that comment. Spot on.
DeleteIndeed! :-)
DeleteThink they need to inject a fresh gene pool to the tory party.
ReplyDeleteBritish politics in the past year or so goes way beyond anything parodists or satirists could invent. :-)
ReplyDeleteI had a friend, now deceased, who was a successful psychologist, specialising in commercial recruitment. He told me about (what I think is called) the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where people have impaired judgement of their own abilities. The obvious example might be a person who is tone-deaf yet thinks they are a good singer. The same defect which stops them being able to sing in tune also removes the ability to perceive how bad they really are.
ReplyDeleteThere are many people who are confident of their ability to excel at something, often through wishful thinking, and surround themselves with reasons why their unrelenting failure is the fault of others. Ms Truss (for it is she in my photo here, I admit it) seems like a classic case. She and some of her political buddies once wrote a book expounding radical economic theories for how to turn London into Singapore on Thames (though none of them, as far as I know, had any practical experience), and she was so convinced of the merit of these ideas that she subsequently inflicted some of them on the UK's economy in her famous budget, despite dire warnings from experts in the real world. We are still living with the damage caused.
Too stupid to appreciate the magnitude of her own stupidity?
Dunning-Kruger.