There's none so blind as those who will not see

 

Subject: There’s none so blind as those who will not see.





In the film ‘Zulu’, Shaka, the Zulu king strikes his shield with his stabbing spear and stamps his foot to a deep resonating grunt from his warriors.

Outside 10 Downing Street in London a very different kind of leadership. The skins are set aside for an stylish suite, heavy horn rimmed spectacle’s, the Etonians  penchant for academic  phraseology learnt over a decade or more of expensive private education but the result is the same, a very heavy defeat.

I said all along that Liz Truss was not up to the job of Prime Minister and repeated my earlier prognosis that Boris Johnson would fail due to his character failings. 

Being Prime Minister seems to require more a John Gielgud’s actors skill, to elevate the language and give it a theatrical flourish, perhaps in the process deliberately diminishing its meaning.

Johnson had too much flourish, Truss none at all and it’s taken the smiling mandarin

Jeremy Hunt, (married appropriately to a Chinese woman) to steady the ship.

Being Prime Minister is not all about acting but it helps to keep the parliamentary show on the road week in and week out. Selling stuff others wouldn’t touch with a barge pole while continuing to prod us with a regular sound bite.

Tony Blair was a master of hyperbole,  Gordon Brown not so. Margeret Thatcher brilliant in the set piece, John Major too honest and charitable. An actor could take any of their scripts to make them work, he could manufacture the villain whilst wooing the heroine, he could make the implausible plausible simply by laying extra emphasis on the syllable.

Politics is a parody of real life, it promises the impossible, it derides the sensible, it is the worst friend to have and best villain to stay away from. It practices deceit like it were philosophy and philosophy like it were calumny and yet we trap ourselves in its rhetoric, we believe politician  when they malign the truth and applaud them when they defame the honest truth teller.  

The film director Ken Loach has just been talking about his life’s work, telling the story of hardship amongst working class people specifically in this country. His socialist ideals were often out of tune and struck a jarring note with the comfortable sensitivities of the middle class who didn’t want to look under rose briar cottage image of England. He turned the cinema into the dock to publicise the inequity of it all. 

Cathy come home, I Daniel Blake, Sorry we missed you, Kes, are all riveting and mournfully sad stories about hardship and struggle amongst the working class. Stories never told from the floor of the House of Commons, it not being part of a politicians script.

It takes a film legend to regale, in all its pathos the tragedy of life for so many people. 

The king makers, the political illusionists are there performing a different play to a different audience but there’s  none so blind as those who chose not see.