Djokovic offered Cabinet post by UK Prime Minister

 I expect Private Eye will have a similar idea but, if not, you heard it here first.

The spate of 'perfect storms' that developed into a pandemic in journalism and media interviews might be abating in the same way as some sources say the omicron variant is just about to but there is no let up in the 'that's a good question' variant. A few days ago I heard one interviewee use it three times in one interview. He was hopelessly addicted and possibly beyond any known cure.

Interviewers are supposed to ask good questions, they aren't government back bench stooges planted to ask the Prime Minister if he agrees with them that he's doing a wonderful job. Why bother, this Prime Minister long ago broke the link between question and answer, completely ignores any question he doesn't like the sound of and repeats one of his old mantras like a 1960's Hare Krishna devotee.

Irrelevant though sport really is compared to real suffering and attempts to prevent it, the top news item yesterday was that a tennis player was allowed into Australia to go and play tennis. No ordinary tennis player but the best in the world but, sadly, also one of a libertarian persuasion who saw his personal objection to vaccination as something over and above Australia's rigorous attempts to restrict the plague. As such, for him, it becomes a restraint of trade issue. For others it matters less whether he can bash the ball back over the net. Tennis might be important to him but even Emma Raducanu isn't that important to me.

A perfect fit seems to me that Djokovic could be appointed to a position in the Johnson government for at least as long as there remains such a thing with special responsibilities for arranging booze-ups for those who have decided that rules are things that apply to other people but not them. They are not only a perfect fit but are exactly the sort of people that make perfect storms possible.

 

It is to be hoped that the honourable, perfectly sensible but less strident Mr. Starmer can extend his isolation until after tomorrow's Prime Minister's Question Time. We can have more of the tremendous Angela Rayner Show. All she has to do is lean on the dispatch box and say,

Mr. Speaker, Prime Minister, Where do I begin.

 

It won't make any difference to the Prime Minister, nothing ever does. It won't be anything Labour do that will dethrone him, it will be his own right-wing who gleefully put him there to serve their purposes who will do that. He'd still be one of them, causing trouble for Theresa or any other incumbent, if he hadn't so dismally got the job at the worst time possible for an incompetent scoundrel (* footnote) to achieve his greatest ambition.

Labour's best bet is to keep voting for the Prime Minister and against his own right-wing to keep him in power because he has gone from weirdly popular, especially in places like Workington and Bolsover, to electoral liability. He's served his purpose as far as they're concerned and now they're wondering, like some crucial parts of America did, Good Grief, What Have We Done.

Being 'of a certain age', I can remember the unlikely advice from Enoch Powell to Vote Labour. Then, like now, Europe was a bigger issue than left or right. In the unlikely event of the Conservative Party allowing themselves to be led into the next General Election by their current leader, one could even imagine Dominic, the maverick free-thinking equivalent of Enoch, saying the same thing.

If nothing else makes me feel better, it is being able to translate it into politics I once thought I understood. Dominic is Enoch, Angela Rayner is Barbara Castle. It less easy to translate the Prime Minister because, in the same way that George Bush the First didn't think that French had a word for 'entrepreneur', there's not been anybody before quite so shifty and hapless to compare him to but even if poetry sometimes makes far too ambitious claims for itself, it helps here.

John Cooper-Clarke's penultimate and ante-penultimate lines,

They can't find a good word for you
But I can

 

build towards the one word last line of a poem that is also its title. It is by no means a complete assessment of the Prime Minister but it's a start.

 

Footnote * 'incompetent scoundrel' is not a description I can claim the credit for. It was Matthew Parris in The Times well before the truth of it was given the opportunity to be highlighted in even higher profile.