Section:GDN 1J PaGe:5 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 18:56 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Wednesday 31 July 2019 The Guardian •5
Don’t let these
clowns waste
your time
that was before Line of Duty : poor Steve, dutifully
running the gamut from horror to more horror, as events
unfolded exactly as they had last time, only double.
The point is not that we all need to prepare to be cast
in a major new drama series, rather, that we need to
make a few choices in advance about what we’re going
to react to. It sounds like choosing your battles, but that
idea is about two sides at war making strategic decisions
about where to put their resources. So sure, there’s an
element of that, but it assumes a transparency, some
residual martial honour, which is not exactly where we
are. Think of this more like a dark side Tom and Jerry,
with rats instead of mice. If we are caught in a perpetual
state of reaction, we’ll lose, and keep on losing.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is bothering you about full stops
and Oxford commas for a reason: he’s wasting your time
with the precise intent that you have Donald Tusk’s
voice constantly in your ear, muttering: “ Do not waste
this time.” He’s on a mission to vex and exhaust. Next
week he will say something spectacularly chauvinist
about boy children or female dogs, and the week after
something about how nannies don’t really need to be
paid because they gain such a lot from tending to their
betters, and we will all go crazy, and whoever it is that
has to drink 10 pints of Strongbow just to forget, it won’t
be him. Rigorously ignore the trivial. If you see the bright
lights of a Twitter surge in the distance, move along.
I fi nd it quite restful to remember that most of the worst
things this clown show could come up with, they’ve
already said. Somewhere in the cabinet, someone already
believes in the death penalty, opposes abortion. OK, I
wasn’t expecting direct rule for Northern Ireland, but by
and large, there’s not much nefarious intent that isn’t
already a matter of public record. Nobody needs to react
to anything twice. There is no point arguing with anything
that is ludicrous, since it is not delivered as a starting
point for mature discussion, and invites no argument.Sure, counter an outright lie in the moment, but
remember, always, that this is a new kind of speech – its
purpose is not to communicate or persuade, but to
dominate. The existence of a shared set of agreed facts
is democratising, and therefore – for those not in the
business of transparency and equality in the political
sphere – quite annoying. If the lies exist for a purpose,
always go to the purpose rather than the lie. Your purpose,
sir/ madam, is to assert your power with the impunity of
your bullshit. I reject more than the untruth, I reject the
tactic, which I fi nd tinpot and rather dated.
The problem with the new status quo is that it cannot
be static: authority politics keeps getting worse until it
lands at violence. In the US, this is manifested in the
cages of children at its borders; in Italy, in the fi nes
introduced to stop people helping refugees who were
drowning; here, in the Windrush scandal (Theresa May,
bear in mind, is only middle of the road in retrospect;
she was no stranger to absolutism). These acts have a
corrosive eff ect on every citizen who exists alongside
them. To say dim down the reaction, ignore the
quotidian insult, is not an argument for withdrawing
from public life. There has never been a more
important time to engage, but the engagement has to be
practical rather than rhetorical, strategic rather than
argumentative, concentrating on institutions rather
than people.
Anger expended on Boris Johnson’s facile capers is,
as resentment, like taking poison yourself and waiting
for him to die. Time spent critiquing him is time wasted.
Those of us who oppose Johnson ruminate about what
will happen when the prime minister’s wild assertions
meet the red lines of reality; but we have a reality of our
own to confront. The time for argument has passed:
there is no killer point, no reasoned line, no fact that will
change the course of this government. The only way it
changes is when it gets voted out.A
bloodless coup by a parade of
fi gures so extreme their own faces
look like fancy dress; it feels like
I’ve seen all this before in a box set.
Not this precise set of events, but
the emotional [apply Californian
accent] journey. So you’re inside
the narrative arc; it’s the end of
season three; each new turn of events is signifi cantly
worse than the last; you reach for a reaction
appropriate to the moment, and you’re clean out;
you’ve done every response, every combination of
eyebrows, tears and keening, every twitch of outrage
and misery. You’ve emptied your larder; all you have
left is middle-distance staring. I used to think Carrie
in the TV thriller series Homeland had it worst, butZoe
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