Another Sad Little Tale

Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Defence felt compelled to resign this afternoon. Fox Resignation Letters

I pondered this one as I drove home from work. You see what troubles me is that the reason certain elements of our ghastly media were so keen to hound him had nothing to do with his politics and rather more to do with their unlovely desire to whisper very loudly, 'he might be a poof you know.' To which the only proper answer is, so bloody what. But I'm afraid that we have to ignore the ignoble motives of the scum of Wapping and reluctantly concur that he had no choice but to resign. This is the world we have made for ourselves and by its rules he has to go. We have designed a system in which politicians are mandated to be 'professionals', distinct mark you from the wretched amateur, that is to say someone who does the thing for the love of it - someone like, say, a medical GP who abandons his practice to give his soul to public office. Rather like Dr Liam Fox perhaps. A world in which the politicking is the sole preserve of a self-perpetuating expertocracy. A world in which a minister must listen only to those on the state's payroll. A world unfit for any latter-day Michael Heseltine (who always paid his own way in politics) or Dave Nellist (bonkers but utterly admirable trot). A world which finds a serious and dedicated man like Fox unpalatable.

We have been here before. Remember when a bloke called Mandelson got chased out of the government because he had been astute enough to persuade a rich bloke called Robinson to lend him a shed-load of money to buy a property in a rising market. As it happens I was glad when Mandy got the old heave-ho (I was glad each time he got booted) but only because he was so consistently and egregiously wrong on pretty much every issue. It never bothered me where the slimeball raised his money so long as he didn't nick it. But Mandelson should have known the rules of the game, actually he's one of the bastards who wrote them. And so should Fox. And what we should all learn from this is that we should change those rules pretty damned smartish because very soon there will be no interesting or challenging people left in politics. If you want to learn what I mean, find a copy of Richard Crossman's diaries and compare it to the self-serving drivel of the unelected and dreadful Alastair Campbell.

FTSE 100 14 October 2011

But hey look, the markets have recovered again today which must mean I'm wrong about the fate of the Euro. Am I bollocks.