Conduct unbecoming

Subject: FW: Conduct unbecoming.

 

When I was growing up, a slob was, in part defined by his demeanor, appearance or bearing and one absolute no no was to walk about with his hands in his pockets. To have your shirt hanging out especially at the back when wearing a suite was also a sign which distinguished the slob from someone who was respectful of others as he was of himself by confining his dress code and his conduct within the social norms of a society which judges people in part by the way they look.

There have always been exhibitionists, the dilettante, the avant garde  people who stand out in the way they dress. The effort to look different is an art form and can be respected but to thrust your hands in your pockets as you walk being interviewed by the press with the cameras on you, well it might go down as normal on the streets of an impoverished housing estate but on the streets of Whitehall and when the slobbish behavior is exhibited by no less a personage than the future Prime Minister, then we must all shudder as to how low we have shrunk as a nation proud of our ability to at least look the part.

If the dress and the shambolic answers to questions were the affectations of some eccentric, then all well and good but when Boris Johnson effects to present himself as our future leader then I think we have all gone a little mad entertaining the man and what worries me even more is the wholesale buying into the charade by so many who I would have thought of as sober intelligent people. How can I see a dissembling fool and they the messiah, the leader out of the wilderness.

In his so called toe to toe debate last night, with his rival for the job Jeremy Hunt on ITV  he avoided so many questions with the bluster and obfuscation that characterises him. That silly stupefied grin, a sort of Jack Benny stare (Jack Benny was a famous American comedian who's trademark was the deadpan look) but which with Benny was part of the joke, with Boris, it makes him the joke ! He refused not only to give straight answers to questions but when he did answer it was pure drivel, pure waffle, pure nonsense yet the audience lapped it up. It's like a tragedy is being performed but the TV audience have been misdirected into the wrong show and believing it's a comedy, laugh their selves silly.

It's inappropriate, that's the only word to describe it, its inappropriate that at a moment in our history as a nation, when wise heads are required, we are given a jester. 

The jester was there as a counterpoint to the serious business of ruling a country, the jester was always the fool in the court to the assumed wise head of the King and never never taken seriously.

Of course what I don't do is take into consideration the ideological imperative of the Conservative faithful to win the next election. Party politics is a dirty game with so much of what a non politician would see as fair and reasonable only to be trashed by the professional politician who sit in a rarefied environment we call 'The House of Commons.