Here we go again.

I've pinched the above cartoon of the prorogation ceremony from the internet. Oh sorry, it’s actually a picture.

Anyway, twice in the last month, we’ve had to sit through Black Rod mumbling some antiquated nonsense, and a row of ermine clad ne’er do well toffs doffing their caps, as Boris manages to once again shut down democracy with the connaivance of Elizabeth Saxe Coburg Gotha.

Why they do all this dressing up in strange costumes and taking their hats off (mostly men it seems) heaven only knows. Maybe there is a reason hidden in the mists of time and tradition. Maybe there isn’t and they just like dressing up in strange clothes. Who knows when it comes to the English aristocracy? I was going to say, “who cares?” But I do. All these people, after all, are highly paid and/or on massive expenses and I help pay for them and their costumes which are doubtless expensive too. And what is it all about? Why can’t the Speaker and Lords' Speaker just read off a sheet that parliament is suspended until Monday by order of the Queen and then everyone can go home, or wherever it is they go in London?

Well, of course, what it is for this time is so that on Monday our Toytown Prime Minister can have his party political broadcast read by the queen, who presumably will have had to come back from Balmoral, also at considerable expense (ours), to read his list of promises, from her golden throne, after arriving in procession, accompanied by page boys, ladies in waiting and all manner of pomp.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the promises that have been made over the last few weeks, and which will presumably to be included in this Clown Speech from the throne, are utterly unaffordable given the shitstorm of no deal that we are about to enter. Presumably, if she is paying attention to current affairs and/or has half-way decent advisors, Liz will already know that it's a pack of lies, but will, nonetheless, read it out anyway.

So all the nonsense about 40 new hospitals (that, on closer inspection, quickly became 6) and massive spending on infrastructure ....you know the sort of thing… well, we can forget it. Tax increases and spending cuts to pay for this fool’s Brexit are going to be the order of the day. Still, it is comforting to know that, no matter how bad things get, the Brits will always find enough money for ceremony, tricorn hats and weird rituals.

Quo vadis indeed.

 

There’s Dungeon and Dragons, there’s Minecraft and there’s World of Warcraft, but Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s favourite game is The Stupid Blame Game. The EU has clearly had enough with the not-so-clever clever tactics of the British Prime Minister, driving Donald Tusk, the Polish politician who is the President of the EU Council, to use some very undiplomatic language in a tweet. He tweeted: “@BorisJohnson, what’s at stake is not winning some stupid blame game. At stake is the future of Europe and the UK as well as the security and interests of our people. You don’t want a deal, you don’t want an extension, you don’t want to revoke, quo vadis?”


Interestingly, and here we go with yet more of the Latin, Donald Tusk finished his quote with the Latin tag quo vadis? Quo vadis is Latin for “Where are you going?” and as such ought to resonate with our famously Classical snob of a Prime Minister. More importantly in this context the phrase was also the title of a very famous Polish novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who is one of the giants of Polish literature.

Set during the Roman Empire, the story deals with a meeting between St Peter and the infamously crazed Emperor Nero. The novel’s title comes from the question put to Jesus by St Peter, who appeared to him in a vision as the saint attempted to flee from Rome. St Peter asked “Quo vadis, domine?” "Where are you going Lord?". To which Jesus replied, “If thou desertest my people, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time” and shamed St Peter into returning to Rome to accept martyrdom.

The question quo vadis doesn’t just ask where a person is going physically, it’s a question about their moral and ethical destination. In the present context, it is a question about the ethics and morals of the British Prime Minister. It’s saying that Johnson is putting himself and his own interests before those of the UK. It’s not so much a question as it is a statement calling him a coward and a hypocrite. Boris Johnson is fleeing from his responsibilities. This reference would be very clear to a Polish audience and that's why Tusk used it. It's a not-so-subtle dig at LBJ.

And it’s not just Donald Tusk who has reached the limits of their patience with the game playing of the British Government. Angela Merkel seems to have had enough too. Until now, the German Chancellor has been one of the strongest voices within the EU calling for patience with the UK, but today we learned that there was apparently a “frank exchange” between her and Johnson in a phone call. A “frank exchange” is diplomatic speak for an argument. According to reports, the German Chancellor told the British Prime Minister that a Brexit deal was looking “esstentially impossible”. Which is pretty much what we’ve all known all along.

This is not a Prime Minister who wants a Brexit deal. He wants the UK to crash out without a deal, in order to shore up the Conservative party’s vote amongst leavers and prevent them from drifting off to Nigel Farage in the General Election that is coming soon. He just wants to ensure that it’s the EU which gets the blame for it. The entire economic and diplomatic future and reputation of the UK is to be sacrificed for the short term electoral interests of Boris Johnson and the Conservative party. Quo vadis, indeed.

What makes this all the more galling is that the British Government is risking all our futures in pursuit of a lie. Crashing out of the EU without a deal is not “getting it done”, it is not “getting it over with”. Crashing out of the EU without a deal means disruption and a frantic process of trying to negotiate some sort of deal with the EU from a position of extreme weakness. Crashing out with no deal guarantees that Brexit and the UK’s relationship with the EU will dominate and toxify British politics for many years to come. Quo vadis, indeed. Usque non gerens paxillum in statione erat cacas, eh Boris? Up shit creek without a paddle. That's where. 

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.