Rwanda

 Rwanda, really?

You might have dreams just as weird as I do. I doubt it and I hope you don't but none of us could have dreamed of Rwanda even in our wildest. It's as if this fag-end of a government has put all their money on Sheffield United to win the league title. It can't possibly happen, not least because it can't both be a deterrent to make migrants think they might be sent there while also having to pass a law that says it wouldn't be a bad place to be sent to, not that many would be even if the plan, or one single aeroplane, could get off the ground.

It is a shame that Rishi, who is at least a more serious and honourable Prime Minister than his two predecessors, has to struggle on in such a fashion, more humiliated and far more hopeless than such previous inheritors of busted flushes like Gordon Brown or John Major had to. It's cruel. By all means give the Conservative Party back to Boris with Nigel Farage as his Muttley and then we might see some realignment of the political parties come about because Workington and Bolsover aren't going to be fooled again by the same pack of lies they fell for last time out.

 

The series of Conservative governments we've been presented with in recent years would be genuinely hilarious if it had only been a satirical TV drama but it's been true. The review of the Covid pandemic that Boris kicked down the road has finally come around to reveal him as just as vague, grandstanding, vacuous and forgetful as he always was. It's not clear when we should have locked down and when we shouldn't have, I'll give him that, but it is ostensibly much better to be in debt than to be dead and the government were far too keen to save the economy, such as it was, than save lives.

It's not just the boats. The thing to do about that is get in amongst the gangs organizing them and take them out.

Brexit wasn't an achievement. No deal of Boris's was ever 'oven ready', it was barely half-baked and he left his usual mess behind him for others to patch up as best they could.

Inflation wasn't going to stay in double figures. Halving that was no more of a government target being met than when Boris was credited with the vaccine.

My MP, Penny Mordaunt, put a leaflet through the door a couple of months ago saying she was sorry she'd missed me and would like to hear my views. Well, Penny, it's a secret ballot, isn't it, so, No, I can't tell you if I'll be voting for you but having opposed Rishi last time and sided with Liz Truss and Boris once your own chance had gone the two times before that, none out of three is definitely bad so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

 

I don't imagine everything will suddenly be fine on the morning that Keir Starmer, let us hope, forms his first government. I remember staying up all night when Blair got in and genuinely thought the world would be a better place. It won't be but maybe the rate at which it is declining might decelerate in the same way that the Daily Express seemed to interpret a fall in the rate of inflation as making things cheaper and us all better off.

My favourite Prime Minister in my lifetime was Harold Wilson, as is Keir's, and of all-time, surely it must be Attlee. I'm not as good at poetry as my favourite poets (Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Donne); I wasn't as good at football as George Best, at cricket as Derek Randall and it was an achievement that I even became a good enough cyclist to even take part. Keir will have a job on, and no mistake, with his left wing no doubt intent on making as much trouble for him as Boris did for Theresa or anybody else who had a job he wanted, but he will be a massive improvement on what went before him whatever he does and I'll trust him to do his best for the country rather than for himself. I've never voted for the winning side in any General Election or referendum and I'm 64. I hope I get one chance to be on the winning side and, if I do, I won't have got it wrong.