Snappy retort

As a mother it’s often difficult to find time to blog. By the time you get round to it, the subject you’ve been mulling over in your head has gone off the boil. 

You guessed it. We’re talking Andrea Leadsom. 

The entire media seemed to have been pretending that when Andrea Leadsom blurted out the dreaded ‘p’ word, she was actually demanding that the BBC assumes a nationalistic agenda with immediate effect. National anthem before every news bulletin.

No-one said what I, as a mother, thought was quite obvious; that the she was provoked by the unrelenting negativity that pours forth from the BBC day after day, and that the ‘p’ word was goaded out of her by Emily Maitlis in a hostile interview, which turned into the proverbial final straw.

Maitlis’s snappy retort left an open goal that was begging for some robust home truths about the BBC’s attitude problem, but instead all we got from the media was a load of manufactured outrage directed at Leadsom for insulting the BBC by casting aspersions on its world renowned impartiality, and for making scandalous demands of the BBC; that it must adopt a nationalistic, xenophobic, Tory-toff agenda -how very dare she.

Anyway I thought the story had been put to bed, but it was plucked from its slumber by the BBC because of an article by ex BBC exec Mark Damazer in the Thunderer section of the Times, (£) which I understand is reserved for that kind of thing. 

The BBC even announced it - as news - in the early morning news bulletin. 

Mr. Damazer isn’t a fan of Andrea Leadsom. 

“It is only just over a year ago that she was deemed to have done outstandingly in a different BBC TV environment. Armed with a bunch of prefabricated pro-Brexit lines, she was pronounced the Brexit star in a mass verbal punch-up at the Wembley Arena — optimistically labelled by the BBC The Great Debate. Within a fortnight, the Conservative Party was teetering on the edge of making her PM. Then came this paper’s celebrated interview in which Leadsom mused on how motherhood gave her political insights unavailable to Theresa May.”

His views on the BBC, the EU and so on are quite clear too. 

 “The broadcasters are there to test arguments, allow multiple points of view to be heard and questioned, and to report the unfortunate and doubtless irritating consequences that derive from the different view of Europe to hers held by governments of the other 27 EU countries. By doing this the BBC provides huge dollops of “soft power” for the UK — which may not be its primary purpose but is decidedly more useful than becoming part of the government’s Brexit team.

Mark Damazer CBE

Needless to say, once again, the drubbing is below the line. 376 comments at the time of writing. Subscribing to the Times is well worth it, if only for that.

Don’t forget Andrea Leadsom’s doomed bid for P.M. 

Maybe her ‘motherhood’ remark was a cack-handed declaration of her personal stake in the future. Maybe she was making an offensive jibe at Theresa May’s childlessness. 

Maybe she thought that absence of fecundity was a guarantee of reckless, selfish disregard for future generations. Who knows? Too many sentences beginning with maybe and you begin to sound like Jeremy Corbyn.

Perhaps Theresa May’s non-motherhood is somehow connected with her inability to shed tears in public, the singular, non-negotiable quality currently demanded of its leaders. Maybe a mum is what is needed, after all? Or, if the the Prime Minister needs to behave as the quintessential mother figure, maybe childlessness is a guarantee of undivided, maternal devotion to the nation.

In its own way, that principle certainly works for this blogger. 

Andrea Leadsom v Emily Maitlis

And here's a transcript of that Newsnight interview:

Emily Maitlis: Andrea Leadsom was one of the most prominent Leave campaigners. She ran for the Conservative leadership you'll remember in the days after last year's referendum, only to be beaten eventually by Theresa May. She's now  the Leader of the House of Commons. And earlier I spoke to her from her constituency in Northamptonshire. I began by asking what she thought of Donald Tusk's allegation that Theresa May's proposal offer risked worsening the situation of EU citizens. 

Andrea Leadsom: I think that in fact what Theresa May made was a very generous offer but equally it's obviously going to be important to the EU Commission that they stick to their side of the negotiations, and you wouldn't really expect them to say, 'Thanks very much, that's wonderful!', so I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the days to come. 

Emily Maitlis: Isn't it funny, though, when you've got Donald Tusk saying it's not good enough, and last night we had the president of the EU parliament telling Newsnight he doesn't have a clue what Britain wants from Brexit. Does that worry you? 

Andrea Leadsom: Not at all. No. As I've said, when you are in a negotiation you don't immediately jump around clapping your hands with glee at the first sign. In fact you do the opposite. You say, 'No, that's not good enough. We need more. We need more'. And that is what you would expect...

Emily Maitlis: (interrupting) But this should be quite a simple one, shouldn't it? This should be a pretty simple place to start, and we are a year on, as you've said, from that vote, and they can't agree with the first thing they're trying to talk about. You think it's just politics, do you? 

Andrea Leadsom: Well, Theresa May give her very initial comments to the meeting of the EU Council to explain to them the generous offer that we will be making, which is right that we should do that. We want to do it. And of course EU negotiators will start off by saying, You know, we need to see the detail. It's a good start but...'. You would expect that. I think we're going to see a lot of the negotiations and the handling of negotiations is going to be a challenging time, but we are determined to continue with a good relationship with our EU friends and colleagues. 

Emily Maitlis: We're weaker than ever before. She's gone to the country. She didn't get the mandate she wanted, and she doesn't have a strong position from which to negotiate. That's the blunt truth.

Thought for the day

Don’t you just hate it when otherwise respectable people punctuate their conversation with “D’you know what?” I realise they do this for dramatic effect, but in my opinion it just makes them look a bit of a prat. 

But it’s a contagion so no doubt I’ll do it myself sometime. Whatever. 

The News is like news-on-steroids at the minute. I’ve been binge-watching politics all morning, and d’you know what?  I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it. It’s so mad that even the normal norms are abnormal, if that’s not too Rumsfieldian for a Sunday lunchtime.

Oh yes, and by the way, I’ve been thinking about Andrea Leadsom and motherhood and apple pie, and although I’ve been thinking about it - as a mother myself - I haven’t come down on one side or another in that binary way we often talk about. 

Andrea wasn’t the only one who kept saying “as a mother” during the run-up to the referendum. Gisela said it too. I thought they were saying it so as to appear human, rather than robotic and self-serving  “as a politician”. But now it seems that the experts are interpreting it as some kind of weird gloating. If that’s the case maybe I should be peppering my conversation with As a mothers and D’you know whats,  to lend credibility to myself.

What do I want with credibility anyway. Who needs it? Who would even want to be a politician? More important, who would want to be Prime Minister, after Tony Blair and Chilcot. I’m sure most of the people who say ‘After Chilcot’ haven’t read it, including me. I promise I haven’t read it, but I have read about it, if that’s of any significance.

Think back. Tony Blair must have been popular once. He was elected, anyway, and was the Labour Party’s longest serving Prime Minister.

What put me off him was the synthetic and disturbingly emotional speech he made when Princess Diana died. (People use ‘emotional’ as a euphemism for ‘tearful’.) That speech confirmed my suspicion that he was crap. Apart from that, much of his and Alistair Campbell’s spin was effective.

Tony Blair and Jack Straw epitomise spin. Tony’s cronies and so on. It was the era of peak spin, but we kind of knew all along that we were being manipulated but we couldn’t resist. 

I think they managed to make the case for going to war with Iraq seem reasonable. The pacifists were against it, but they would be, wouldn’t they? Their job was to go on protest marches and chant slogans about oil.

Back then no-one apart from experts on the Middle East knew much about the clash of civilisations, though the public vaguely knew that somewhere there were some primitive and unsophisticated religious people who could resign themselves to the most devastating personal tragedies because of their belief that everything was ‘the will of Allah.’ 

We were told about a pattern of violent atrocities and we believed the solution was to topple the tyrant. The Iraqis, whoever they are, must be “people”  ‘just like us‘,  so as soon as Saddam was removed, we assumed they would establish a Western style democracy and live happily ever after. 

Remember the previous Gulf war? (Desert Storm) It arose after Saddam’s aggressive invasion of  Kuwait. It was the first time the practice of using ‘human shields’ came to the world’s attention. Although Saddam appeared to be visibly evil ’we’ left him in power, claiming the war ‘wasn’t about regime change’. Nobody fully understood why we couldn’t simply finish him off there and then. 

Why, then, did ‘we’ suddenly decide the opposite in the second Gulf war?

Was it because Saddam had murdered hundreds of his own people? 

Was it because of Saddam’s ruthless brutality and the murderous escapades of his sadistic sons Uday and Qusay?

Was it because of the regime’s constant obstruction of Hans Blix’s team of weapons inspectors? 

Did Saddam have a stash of WMDs, or was it a charade? Why was he acting as if he had something to hide?

I don’t believe we went into Iraq solely because of the sexed-up dossier and the unsubstantiated claim that we could all be nuked within hours, though Saddam did seem like the kind of guy who would do something so reckless on a mere whim. 

  

All of those things contributed to the decision to go ahead with the war, and with hindsight it was the aftermath that was our biggest failure. I’m sure there were people who could have foreseen the disastrous consequences of simply removing Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Why didn’t they warn the government and why were our Prime Minister and the POTUS so unprepared?

On the other hand,  we’re very, very sorry that no WMDs were found. 

(And what was Saddam supposed to have used, other than weapons of mass destruction, when he gassed thousands of Kurds?)

What if they had found WMDs? What if we had not only found, but destroyed them? Would we, in that case, have been very relieved, and very pleased with ourselves?

Would we, in that case, have left Saddam in situ, without WMDs but making preparations to re-stock? 

Or, as is likely, would we still have ferreted him out from his rabbit hole and dispatched him to meet his maker, whilst thoughtlessly leaving the very same power vacuum - the situation that, with hindsight, we now regret?

It seems obvious that the same disastrous aftermath would surely have unfolded either way, WMDs or no, but would the invasion of Iraq still seem so futile and worthless if the justification had actually been tangible and substantive?

I mean, if the war had verifiably prevented a possible Saddam-inflicted nuclear armageddon, would the disastrous aftermath, the power vacuum, the Muslim on Muslim slaughter and the religiously motivated barbarity still make the invasion of Iraq seem futile and worthless? Weigh it up.

I watched David Davis on the Andrew Marr show. My initial response to him was why waste your time on retrospective revenge. If you’re going to punish Tony Blair, why not also go for Tony’s cronies, who I notice are all furiously trying to dissociate themselves from the whole business.   Impeach them all, why don’t you, instead of getting to grips with urgent matters in hand, like trying to deal with Brexit in a competent manner.

Anyway. D’you know what? I  think the choice between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom is between the worst and the least worst. Or the other way round. Who cares? If you ask me the Tories are starting to make Labour look good. 

Here endeth the sermon.

Miscellaneous observations

There’s a bit of a ‘grateful for small mercies’ flavour to some of the responses to Shami’s antisemitism report. John Mann and Jonathan Arkush both seemed reasonably satisfied with it. 

We’ll have to see how Keith Vaz and his merry men handle it tomorrow.

Incidentally, Ed Stourton began the interview by mentioning the death of Elie Wiesel.

The BBC’s obit was respectful, but the early morning reports of his death on radio 4 bulletins - not so much. For some reason they shoehorned something about Wiesel’s critics (who doubted the enormity of the Holocaust) into the report  Work experience guys on night duty I suspect.

*******

Did you read Fraser Nelson’s review of Andrew Marr’s interview with Andrea Leadsom? 

He called it a ‘scratchy job interview” (I wonder if Speccie writers make up their own headlines) I didn’t think it was scratchy at all - at least any scratchiness came from the direction of the interviewer rather than the interviewee. 

This business of trying to destroy ‘Leave’ people by bashing them over the head with a wet Nigel Farage is beginning to grate. The media has managed to toxify Nigel Farage so that letting slip the merest whiff of agreement with anything he’s ever said or done is to commit virtual suicide by association. The very mention of “That Poster” is enough to trigger sufficient unsafety to reach outer space. My god. It’s almost like “Settlements” 

Mention “Settlements” and you’re finished.  Poleaxed by misdirected outrage.

*******

My constituency MP, minister for DEFRA, has come out in favour of Michael Gove. Good for him. 

The media has been really mean to Gove, amplifying the back-stabbing label for all it’s worth. I actually believe his version of how events panned out with Boris.  As Gove says, Boris could have stood if he really wanted to. The downside of it all is that it reveals a lack of judgment on Gove’s part - or at least a prolonged case of hope triumphing over experience.

I think the media despises honesty whenever they suspect an MP is suffering from it. They want their MPs to be back-stabbing, ruthless and robotic. I don’t know why. That’s my honest opinion and, for now, I’m sticking to it.