Born To Run?

While David Lammy is propagating his legally and morally baseless theory that a genocide required the magic number of one million deaths, the CV fabricator and published plagiarist Rachel Reeves has now claimed that she had resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. Of course, she was never in it. And the once even more absurdly overpromoted Liz Truss has been treating us to her pearls of wisdom about the Budget. Truss may be known mostly for a speech about pork markets and cheese, but she is a disciple of Professor Patrick Minford, who wants Britain to have no agriculture, as would indeed be the “free” market in action. I used to call for Truss and Minford to be made to defend that position on the stump in South West Norfolk, but the desired effect turned out not to need them to do so. Still, with the controversy about this Budget being largely to do with farmers, she should still be asked about it.

What does Truss do? What has any of them ever done? The old “never run a business” line is being thrown at this admittedly unimpressive Cabinet, but there have been 15 Leaders of the Conservative Party since the War, and beyond shareholding, or being married to businessmen, none of them has had any business background worth mentioning, if at all. They have had stopgap jobs and what have you, but nothing more than that, and not even that in some cases. Nearly half have been beneficiaries of the massive public subsidies to landowning. Winston Churchill, toff. Anthony Eden, toff. Harold Macmillan, toff enough. Alec Douglas-Home, toffee toffee toff toff. Ted Heath, full-time politician since university. Margaret Thatcher, millionaire’s wife. John Major, full-time politician all his adult life.

William Hague, full-time politician since childhood. Iain Duncan Smith, paid by the Army to go away. Michael Howard, full-time politician since university, more than 40 years earlier. David Cameron, toff. Theresa May, millionaire’s wife. Boris Johnson, unaccomplished, semi-aristocratic Classicist whom none of his hearers at the CBI would have employed even before he had extolled to them the virtues of Peppa Pig World. Truss, failed at Shell, and then unemployed for several years before a sinecure at a thinktank enabled her to sleep her way into Parliament. And Rishi Sunak, briefly at Goldman Sachs before he became the full-time son-in-law of a foreign gazillionaire. They have no more made a living the hard way than Keir Starmer ever has.

As for the candidates to succeed Sunak, Kemi Badenoch hacked Harriet Harman’s website, an act that carried a potential prison sentence of five years when she did it, and that is about it unless anyone can find anything else that she did before politics, while Robert Jenrick was a jobbing corporate solicitor who ought now to be struck off for his remarks about a live criminal case. And that is before we start about his shenanigans with Richard Desmond and the Isle of Dogs, a story that ought to be far better-known. In 48 hours’ time, one of Badenoch and Jenrick will be the Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, and the members of the Conservative Party will not be to blame. These were the candidates presented to them by their party’s MPs, left to whom one of them would presumably have been Leader for months by now. Run a business? No one concerned could run a bath.