Gawd save the Queen from getting involved.

If you have a long political memory, you may remember that, during the Scottish independence referendum, those who suggested that David Cameron’s government had intervened to get the Queen to make a statement favourable to the Better Together (remain) campaign were dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists and crackpots. 

That’s OUTRAGEOUS!!!! They were told in capital letters with multiple exclamation marks because if you’re going to affect to be outraged you may as well go the whole hog. The Queen is NEUTRAL!!!! That’s what being British is all about and the fact you can even think to the contrary shows that you are vile, untrustworthy people. How DARE you despicable nationalists impugn the neutrality of Her Majesty who has never, never, NEVER had a political thought in her entire life. Or indeed any thought that didn’t involve horses or protecting her second son from accusations of being pally with a paedophile. (OK, that was a cheap shot, I'll admit but I'm inwardly riled about the whole affair).

What Liz did in response was to tell a random royalist punter that people ought to “think very carefully (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)” before casting their vote in the referendum. This was taken in the spirit in which it was intended by the BBC and the rest of the British media. It was the sort of “you need to think very carefully about that” you’d get from your mother if you had just told her you intended to get a facial tattoo and she knew that if she’d said “For god’s sake don’t be such an idiot” that you’d go ahead and do it just to annoy her. This is because, even though the form of the words “think very carefully” are in themselves studiously neutral, no one has ever been told to “think very carefully” by another person who shares their belief that they are doing the right thing.

That’s exactly how the Queen’s words were presented by the media. She knew that is what they’d do. There was no intervention from the palace to clarify that the Queen meant that both sides in the debate needed to think very carefully, or that what she meant was that she hoped that both sides in the debate should carefully consider their positions. She was quite happy that her intervention should be used as an aid to the Better Together campaign. That’s always exactly how it was intended.

And now we’re hearing reports from the palace that the Queen is channelling Victoria and is not amused by David Cameron’s none too surprising revelation. Apparently there is “an amount of displeasure” about the former Prime Minister’s admission. I’ll bet there is, quite a large amount too. But it’s not displeasure at having intervened in a democratic debate, it’s displeasure at having been found out. Coming as it does on top of the crisis provoked by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s decision to abuse the royal prerogative and prorogue Parliament in order to escape democratic scrutiny, it’s a very bad time for anyone to be shining the spotlight on the monarch’s true role in politics.

We have been told this week that LBJ lied to the Queen in order to prorogue Parliament, when in fact she was well aware of what he was doing and why he wanted Parliament to be prorogued. The dogs in the street knew the real reason. All of Parliament knew the real reason. The judges in the highest court of Scotland knew the real reason. Everyone knew the real reason. It is ludicrous to suggest that a monarch who has been dealing with Prime Ministers since the early 1950s didn’t know the real reason too. Indeed there have even been rumours that the Palace planned the entire affair with Downing Street.

This is far bigger than the decision of a deeply conservative member of the British establishment, indeed the very figurehead of the British establishment, to intervene against Scottish independence. That development was always entirely predictable, and she will do exactly the same the next time round. However the next time round, and there will be a next time, the SNP will be able to assert that there has been political intervention citing David Cameron as evidence that opponents of independence had done it before. They will no longer be able to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists for making the allegation.

What this is really about however, is the systematic weakness of the collection of laws, conventions, traditions, and precedent which together comprise the British constitution. An unelected head of state is not, and cannot be, any sort of guarantee against undemocratic actions on the part of the executive. An elected head of state (our president?) would have told LBJ where to get off if he had approached her or him with the proposal to prorogue Parliament for such nakedly political, anti-democratic and self-serving ends. Instead of placing the protection of democracy as its paramount concern, Buckingham Palace had as its priority the minimisation of damage to the Queen’s reputation.

It is one thing when an extremely expensively funded head of state has no political influence and is merely a decorative figurehead. It is quite another when that head of state does have political influence, but those of us who pay for the privileges and luxurious lifestyle of her and her family are not allowed to know what that influence is. Then the monarch shifts from being merely a massive waste of public money, to becoming a massive waste of public money and a danger to democracy. The real scandal here is not that LBJ lied to the Queen, it’s that the entire British constitution rests upon the lie that the head of state has no political influence. The real scandal is that the Queen is a sham head of state. She cannot act as a constitutional president and force rival politicians to look for ways out of a national emergency. She cannot insist that the prime minister obeys the rules, because there are too few rules in Britain and too many fuzzy, unenforceable conventions.  And the trouble with conventions is that they can be twisted by any leader unscrupulous enough to insist that others must obey the conventions they break. Once the Brexit crisis is over, there will be an enormous job of work blocking up the loopholes that have allowed LBJ to abuse his power. Assuming, that is, we ever get out of the Brexit crisis and have the energy left to tackle any job of work again.

The Hall Walk

A walk to look forward to and a favourite circular route for many. It includes two ferry rides (from Fowey to Polruan and Fowey to Bodinnick, or vice versa), two Cornish seaside villages (Polruan and Fowey) and a good stretch of the legs along the Fowey estuary. Excellent weather and a very palatable lunch half-way round at the Old Ferry Inn in Bodinnick.

It's called the Hall Walk because it started as an ornamental from Hall Manor, just above Bodinnick, to Penleath Point. It dates back to at least the 16th Century and later the path was extended to Polruan. The full length of this is now known as the "Hall Walk" but originally the name would have probably just referred to the promenade to Penleath Point

The route was jsut over 5 miles and started and ended in the car park above Polruan, possibly the steepest village in Cornwall. The walk is described as 'moderate' in some guides but, in my humble opinion, some parts of it would merit being described as 'strenuous' - just look at the profile.

This photograph from our starting point shows our route almost in its entirety. Tracing the edge of the estuary, then crossing the Fowey via the Bodinnick ferry, walking back through Fowey and then taking the foot ferry across to Polruan.

A fair stretch of the walk was in woodland, made very pleasant by the sunlight dappled shade.

Steps, of which there were many - up and down.

The creek we walked up is called Pont Pill and is thought by many local people to be part of the inspiration for Mole, Ratty, Toad and Badger's adventures in The Wind in the Willows because author Kenneth Grahame holidayed in nearby Lerryn. Of course, the locals in Lerryn claim that their creek was the inspiration.

Despite its tidal location, the quay at the head of Pont Pill became important for trade between farms of this area and other coastal communities. Imports were roadstone, bricks, coal, manure and flour; exports were grain and logs. The name "Pont" refers to St Willow's bridge at the top of the creek: the Cornish word for bridge is pons but in Old Cornish it was pont. 'Pill' is the dialect word for creek.

The location of Fowey close to the mouth of the estuary made it vulnerable to attack by sea. The town was destroyed by fire during invasions by French, Spanish and other pirate ships in 1330, 1380 and 1457. Following the 1380 raid, blockhouses - the ruins are still there - were built on either side of the estuary mouth. A chain spanned between them that could be raised to close the channel in times of need. The chain was later confiscated by the King after boats from Fowey and Polruan were convicted of Piracy, a common enough occupation in these parts in those times.

The large castellated building next to Fowey church is Place House. Place House was built around 1260 by the Priory as their headquarters within Fowey and soon after became the ancestral seat of the Treffry family. Sir John Treffry fought under the Black Prince at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and captured the Royal Banner of France. In 1457, French marauders besieged the house, but met with Dame Elizabeth Treffry who gathered men together and poured melted lead, stripped from the roof, upon the invaders. The house incorporated fortified elements designed to repel any attacks including what was described in Tudor times as "a right fair and strong embattled tower". The building still includes 15th and 16th century fabric but was largely rebuilt in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There has been a ferry link between Fowey and Polruan for centuries. The road journey, via Lostwithiel, is still a slow, long and winding one and takes the best part of an hour. For most of the period that the ferry has been running, the ferry itself was a rowing boat. Passengers could save the one penny return fare and travel for free if they did the rowing themselves. Nowadays the cost is £2.30 per person, and saving money by rowing is not an option.

An infra-red across into Fowey.

Another from our starting point, looking up the estuary.

Rudd -erless and still up s**t creek without a paddle.

It’s Monday, and there’s yet more crazy in the ever changing kaleidoscope of crap which is British politics. (Ex-)Cabinet Minister Amber Rudd has announced her resignation from the cabinet and from the Conservative party, citing the fact that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a lying toad who’s hell bent on turning the Conservative party into a bunch of right wing populist English nationalists. Which the rest of us have already known for quite some time, but thank you for catching up, Amber. Next week she will write an anguished column for the Guardian in which she tells us of her shock on discovering that Elvis is dead.

What has prompted her resignation is her disgust at the treatment of her 21 former colleagues who were unceremoniously expelled from the party last week by her erstwhile boss. Never mind Brexit. Never mind people who fear for their medications, putting food on the table or losing their sole source of income because of a no deal Brexit, 21 Tories have had to resign from the party - and now it's time for Amber to protest. That’s the real tragedy here.

But Amber is also concerned that she has seen little evidence that the government is actually working to get a deal. All she has witnessed behind the scenes is a government putting all its efforts into coping with a no-deal Brexit. This confirms what we’ve all known for ages. LBJ has no intention of getting a new deal from Brussels and is hell bent on a no deal exit in order to mop up the electoral threat from the Brexit party and ensure that he remains Prime Minister after a General Election. This is a revelation which is way up there with the news that Elvis is still dead.

But having been a bit churlish, let’s not be too churlish. Better late than never. Amber Rudd’s resignation is significant because it points to deep divisions running right through the heart of the Conservative party to its very highest levels; divisions which are not fixable. Politicians are used to internal party divisions. As shown time after time, the greatest enemy of your average politician is another politician within his or her own party, not the Opposition. However the Tory party is no longer capable of containing those divisions.

This is all the more striking because we are still in the early months of a new Prime Minister, one who has only faced the House of Commons for a week, and who in the normal run of things would still be enjoying a honeymoon period. At this stage in Theresa May’s leadership the Tory party were still hailing her as Thatcher 2.0. The meltdown of LBJ’s leadership within such a short period of time has led to serious questions about the future of the Conservative party. This is a party whose leader is allowing speculation to mount that he might break the law because it’s a political inconvenience for him. Citing the will of the people as an excuse to break the law is the first rule in the despot’s playbook. The Johnson government is very quick to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of being like a South American dictator, but they’re the ones who are behaving in a dictatorial manner. The MPs who voted for the law that LBJ is considering breaking were elected by those people whose will he cites.

On Sunday Dominic Raab, who always looks as though he's in a rage about something, took to the TV to inform us all that the Prime Minister is going to obey the letter of the law, but will “test its limits” as far as possible. Along the lines of, “Sorry officer, I wasn’t driving at 75 mph in a 20 mph zone, I was testing the limits.”

His partner in not-a-crime-at-all, Sajid Javid, told Andrew Marr that the Government would of course obey the law, but would not ask for an extension to Article 50. He didn’t reply when asked how the Prime Minister not asking the EU for an extension to Article 50 counts as obeying a law requiring the Prime Minister to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50. Instead he waffled on about trying to get that deal that everyone knows that LBJ is making no serious attempts to get.

However the truly gobsmacking thing here is that despite the complete meltdown of the Government, despite the fact that it is led by a blatant liar who is manifestly unfit for the job, the Conservatives are still well ahead in opinion polls asking about voting intention in the coming General Election. Where is the effective opposition? And why isn't Labour benefiting from the disarray? Why, with the country falling apart around our ears, do people still feel that a vote for Jezza could make things worse?

Everywhere you look in British politics, ever larger chasms are opening up. Something has to give. 

And lest anyone has any sympathy for Amber, just remember how illiberal she was as Home Secretary. She might have left the government but she was still heavily involved in the excesses of previous administrations. Some would say that her actions are too little, too late.

As I was saying before the break......................

All over the weekend the media have been discussing the chances of a British Prime Minister refusing to obey the law and having to serve jail time as a result. This is the crazy that passes for normality in British politics nowadays. This is because the British Parliament has passed a law compelling the Prime Minister to request the EU for an extension to Article 50, and the Prime Minister has said he’d rather die in a ditch.

According to The Telegraph, the Prime Minister has now written to Conservative party members and doubled down on his refusal to obey the law, saying, “They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.” If he is true to his word, and we must not forget that this is a man that this blog refers to as LBJ for good reason, he’s only got three choices. He can pull some wizard wheeze out of Dominic Cummings’ increasingly discredited arse, he can resign or he can go to jail for contempt of court.

Certainly it’s the first option which would be LBJ’s favoured move. The problem is that no one can think of anything that has more of a chance of happening than Jacob Rees Mogg speaking normally. Some have suggested that LBJ send Michael Gove to do the deed, but that doesn’t get around the obvious objection that it’s still this Government which will have broken its oft-repeated promise to leave on 31st October do or die. Or the possibility has been aired of the UK refusing to appoint an EU commissioner, which means that the UK will be in breach of EU laws and so would be expelled. But that’s such an obviously transparent ploy that anyone could see through it. The EU would simply find some accommodation and LBJ’s predicament would not change.

Resigning would mean that LBJ becomes the shortest serving Prime Minister in history. Usually it takes at least a couple of years for a Prime Minister’s career to end in disgrace, LBJ would have managed it in a few weeks. After having schemed and plotted and developed an entire Boris persona with the sole aim of getting himself into Number 10, he’s not about to give up on his dream of being World King quite so easily. Resignation would be an utter humiliation, and a tacit admission that he could not deliver the promise he’s made repeatedly. It would then be up to Jeremy Corbyn to go to Brussels to ask for the extension. The extension would most likely be granted, as it would allow the UK time to hold a General Election, and LBJ would then have to go into the election without having achieved the exit from the EU that he’s been promising. That leaves him open to attacks on his right from the Brexit party and would seriously threaten his chances of gaining a majority in an election that’s going to be close anyway.

Which brings us to option three, a refusal to obey the law. LBJ is precisely the kind of over-privileged posho who has a rock solid belief in his own entitlement, possibly the only belief that has been constant and firm throughout his life. It’s the closest he has to a religious conviction, and he himself is god. He comes across as the kind of individual who can’t really believe that laws should apply to him. It’s the little people who should obey. It’s the little people who ought to do what the rules say. For LBJ there’s always an exception. He’s the World King after all. Deep down in what passes for his heart, he thinks that he can break the law, because the law doesn’t really apply to him.

A long time ago, while he was still at Eton, his school housemaster Martin Hammond wrote to his father Stanley Johnson expressing his concern that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was irresponsible and paid little attention to facts. The teacher wrote, “He honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.” All these years later he still believes that it is churlish not to regard him as an exception to the rule of law.

Has any other British Prime Minister ever threatened to break the law? It’s a surreal state of affairs that we should even be discussing this. But that’s where we are. We live in a state which has no written constitution, which is uniquely vulnerable to unprincipled politicians who are prepared to trash the conventions, understandings, and traditions which pass for a British constitution. We are in fact in a state where it is perfectly possible for a Prime Minister to act unconstitutionally, but not illegally. It’s a short step indeed from ignoring the conventions and precedents which constitute the British constitition to ignoring a law.

The Prime Minister is after all the embodiment of the rule of law, the leader of the government which sets and determines the laws that all citizens must obey. It is unthinkable that any Prime Minister should imagine that a law specifying what the Prime Minister must do under a certain set of circumstances could be broken because the Prime Minister finds the law politically inconvenient. Should that happen, the UK ceases to be a country defined by the rule of law. It would spark off the mother and father of all constitutional crises.

The question then becomes, what remedies are available should the Prime Minister take this step. In theory he could be found in contempt of court and dragged off to jail. Which would be the second favourite choice of a great many people for what should happen to LBJ after the being found dead in a ditch one. Some Brextremist MPs are even urging the Prime Minister to allow himself to be sent to prison, so that he will become a martyr to the Brexit cause and act as a totem for those who want a no-deal Brexit. However that scenario depends on a judge being brave enough to put a serving British Prime Minister in jail. It is far more likely that the judge would seek to kick the issue back to Parliament for it to sort out by holding a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. But Parliament can do nothing if it has been prorogued for five weeks.

So we’re back to square one, with a political and constitutional crisis, a looming Brexit deadline and a Parliament and a Government with no idea what to do about any of it. The Prime Minister is gleefully vandalising the constitution, and there’s little to stop him. I don't think that it's hyperbole to say that the British state and constitution are unfit for purpose.Where do we all go from here? However it plays out, politics will never be the same again.

The sun will still rise after Brexit.

Inspired by someone today who quite rightly suggested that we needed a bit of a break from the madness that is the UK government, Boris, Jake the Mogg and Breaksit, here are a few random images from the internet to remind us that the world will still go on after whatever happens in the politlcal sphere (but I wouldn't be saying the same about climate change).

Summer in Greenland.

A bat.

Grand Teton, Wyoming.

A kitten.

A Mountain Lion with flowers.

A dog.

Oronsay.

Amazing flat iceberg in Antarctica.

Alaska.

A young Chimpanzee.

A Fox.

A Black Panther.

A Red Squirrel.

Romania.

Yellowstone.

A Green Lynx Spider.

A Firecrest.

A bear.

OK, you can go now. I’m having a shower.

When you are in a hole, stop digging

Yesterday afternoon there were yet more steps in the clownshoes of British politics. LBJ gave a speech in front of massed ranks of police. It was like Police Academy 6 when the franchise had gone long past any pretence at comedy, only not as funny. LBJ may fancy himself as the modern incarnation of Churchill but he’s really more Captain Mainwaring. Only when Captain Mainwaring makes us laugh, it’s because the scriptwriters did it on purpose.

LBJ sounded as incoherent and rambling as his doppelganger Donald Trump, leading many to wonder whether the police ought to have arrested him for being drunk in charge of Brexit. Because if that’s not an offence, it should be. He was so incoherent that when he met US Vice-President Mike Pence today, Pence was left wondering if he’d gone to the White House by mistake. The speech to the police was so bad that, at the end of it, there was an announcement on the TV screen for a helpline: “If you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme …” Apparently, 60 million people tried to call it.

Obviously winging it, it was equally obvious that this is a man who is completely out of his depth. This is what happens when you surrender control of the UK to a tiny self-selecting group who judge one another on their poshness. He’s only had to deal with the Commons for a few days and he’s already lost his majority, lost control of the Brexit process, been refused an early General Election and been stabbed in the back by his own brother.

This is a man who has just realised that the job that he’s been scheming for for so long isn’t just another opportunity to exercise his own privilege and entitlement. He’s actually got to work. That’s not how it played out in his imagination when he was daydreaming of being world king. He’s rapidly discovering that he’s got something important in common with Gordon Brown (remember him?). His only real talent lay in scheming to get the top job, not actually in doing the top job once he’d got it. Although even Gordon managed to last three years as Prime Minister, LBJ will be lucky to last another three weeks.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom told the assembled press, “Waaaffaah waugh fnaugh fnaugh waugh Pericles waaaffaah.” And that’s a direct quote. He wifflewaffled on at such length that he even managed to make a policewoman sick to her stomach in a literal and not a metaphorical way, something that he’s been successfully doing to a lot of us for months now.

The highlight of the speech was when he averred that he would rather be dead in a ditch than ask the EU for an extension to Article 50 and half of the UK went to themselves, “Oh! Is that an option? Is it too late to add that to the bill? At last, an idea from LBJ that we can all get behind.”  And sparked off a wave of enthusiasm for politics that hasn’t been seen since I can't remember when. Well, I say it was a highlight. We were all talking about it, but for all the wrong reasons. Now LBJ has effectively just vomited all over his chances of getting the opposition parties to agree to a General Election.

It was quite an Orwellian image. There he was, the unelected Prime Minister of the UK, standing in front of a phalanx of uniformed police, saying that he’d be prepared to break the law. And people are still saying that Dominic Cummings is a genius at political strategising.

The bill that was passed by the Commons on Wednesday obliges the Prime Minister to ask the EU for an extension to Brexit. The bill which then got passed by the Lords that night after the Government threw in the towel and abandoned its efforts to get pro-Brexit peers to filibuster the bill. Possibly they threw in the towel because that towel was needed to clean up after LBJ vomited all over the constitution.


Anyway, having passed successfully through the Commons and the Lords, the bill is due to be signed into law by Liz at Balmoral on Monday. That means that the Prime Minister will have a legal obligation to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50. It is no longer a matter of political choice. It’s the law.  If LBJ is not actually dead in a ditch by the time of the EU Summit on 17th October, he will have no option but to either ask for an extension, or resign as Prime Minister.

Now the opposition parties have another motive for refusing a General Election until after the EU Summit meeting and a request for an extension to Article 50. If they continue to refuse him his wish for an early election, they can force him to have to choose between lying dead in a ditch, resigning, or asking the EU for an extension. Schadenfreude, pure schadenfreude.

It seems clear now that the Government and its, ahem, genius advisor hadn’t actually counted on the opposition parties refusing an early General Election. The plan had been to provoke them into voting down the Government, and then LBJ could go to the polls saying that he wanted to deliver Brexit but those pesky remainer MPs were standing in his way. Now that the opposition isn’t playing ball until a no deal Brexit is very firmly off the table, the options for the great strategist are looking increasingly limited. LBJ’s and Dumb Cummings’s big mistake was to think that the opposition parties were just as egoist as they are themselves. Which admittedly, given that we’re talking about Westminster politicians here, wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. All that’s left is to keep calling Jeremy Corbyn a big girl’s blouse. That’s what counts for a British Government strategy these days. There’s your mother of parliaments for you.

That ditch must be looking ever more attractive

Our very own LBJ

Ben Jennings: Guardian: 2nd September 2019

Well, that was pretty pointless, wasn't it? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s speech in Downing Street was just like Theresa May’s much hyped announcements that turned out to be content free nothingness. Boris is an affectation, a character he plays. He’s called Al by his family and friends. But he’s no friend of mine. Actually he’s probably no friend of anyone except his ego. The USA once had a president with the surname Johnson. Lyndon Baines Johnson, known to one and all as LBJ. He was a truly awful individual too.  Now, we in the UK have our very own LBJ. Only it stands for Lying Bastard Johnson. A bit strong, perhaps, but prove me wrong.

If you had delayed having your dinner in order to hear what he was going to say, at least you can console yourself with the fact that he delivered a load of tripe for you to digest. LBJ marched out from Number 10 and told us absolutely nothing that we didn’t know already. He asserted that he was not going to let anything get in the way of the UK leaving the EU on 31st October. He insisted that there was no way that he was going to ask the EU for another extension to Article 50. He said that we didn’t want a General Election, and then he marched back in again without taking any questions.

Yet, even in that short speech he still managed to cram in a few lies. He doesn’t have a plan to get a deal. The chances of the UK getting a better Brexit deal from the EU are not increasing. They remain exactly the same as they were yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Those who are campaigning against no-deal are not damaging his negotiating position. He doesn’t have a negotiating position other than making unrealistic demands and expecting lashings of an everlasting cherry cake. And the EU certainly doesn’t have a clearer idea of what the UK wants. And he was lying when he said that the rest of us don’t want a General Election. We do, LBJ, we do. The best part, the most honest part, of the speech was the sound of protesters outside chanting, “Stop the coup.” Not that you would see the crowds of demonstrators on the BBC News.

What he didn’t say was what he was going to do if, as seems increasingly likely, he loses the vote in the Commons tomorrow. If there is legislation passed forcing him to ask for an extension to Article 50, he can’t disobey it otherwise he’s breaking the law. That would certainly end up in the courts, and it most likely wouldn’t end well for him. So it remains highly likely that there’s going to be an early General Election. What LBJ’s speech was all about today was establishing his narrative for that election. He wants to frame it as a vote between him standing up for “the people” versus those nasty politicians who are bent on thwarting the popular will. If you define “popular” as being what you read in the Daily Express, that is. He wants to establish that it wasn’t his choice for an election, but he had no option. That’s what he was setting up today. He definitely wants an election. He just wants someone else to take the blame for it. That was his biggest lie of all. He’s not LBJ for nothing.

Everything now hinges on what happens in the Commons tomorrow. If the Government is defeated, there will almost certainly be an early General Election. We wait with bated breath.