Hello humans!
Let me begin with a bit of shameless (yet well-edited) self-promotion. My UK tour ‘Bindependence Day’ starts next week and to celebrate, I’ve made a little trailer.
Join me!
Until then, it’s back to business. The new parliamentary term is one week old, and I think it’s fair to say it’s been nothing to write home about. Which is why I’m writing to you instead of to my folks on Sigma IX.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Anyone hoping that Sir Keir Starmer would sprinkle some stardust on the Westminster political scene and whip up a new wave of optimism clearly wasn’t watching the election campaign. He campaigned as a deathly dull technocrat who was just going to try and stop the British ship of state from sinking entirely. And to be fair to him, he’s governing that way too.
Even so, one of Keir’s earliest achievements is to prove that even if you’re more sane and less idiotic than the last Tory government, it’s still easy to create a fuck-up entirely of your own making. Labour’s first mis-step has been to announce that in order to help plug the £22bn hole in the nation’s finances, they’re going to go after the pensioners.
Now, I’m not here on Earth just to be a defender of the elderly. After all, I’m the one who’s proposing to lower the voting age to 16 and cap it at 80. And I pledge to remove the triple-lock and replace it with a double-lock, albeit with an extra little chain on the side. But even I can tell Sir Keir that this is a bad move.
All it would take after this mis-step is a dodgy photo or two, and the new PM could start to look like a complete megalomaniac…
You don’t get long as a leader to convince the public of your good intentions. Once they’ve decided you’re a bastard, that image can be hard to shake. Just look at Nibloz the Vain in the Sigma Quadrant. Or for a comparison closer to home, Robert ‘let’s paint over a Mickey Mouse mural’ Jenrick or Sir Tony ‘I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’ Blair.
Ah, Tony Blair. I see the Blairmeister General has got a new book out, on leadership, which he has imaginatively titled ‘On Leadership’. My advice is that no human should read this. You can buy it, by all means, when it reaches The Works for 50p when it will work out as cheaper than the average toilet roll. But whatever you do, don’t read it.
Blair’s thesis of leadership, which he takes about 400 pages to say, is ‘Your job is to lead, not to follow’. Speaking as someone with over 5000 years of experience leading the Recyclons, I know a bit about this subject. And Mr Blair is nearly right.
A leader’s job is to lead - but a good leader also listens. If, say, over a million people march on the streets of London to demand that you don’t send British troops to fight an illegal war in Iraq just because you’ve got starstruck by being mates with President George W Bush, to ignore the wishes of your own citizens is leadership, but it’s BAD LEADERSHIP.
Once you’ve set the Persian gulf region on fire like that, to then go and offer your services as a - wait for it - Middle East peace envoy, is also BAD LEADERSHIP.
And this is the crux of Blair’s problem. Or should I say horcrux? Just look at him. The wizened, shrivelling husk of what was Labour’s most successful Prime Minister has to spend each and every hour trying to justify to himself that joining the Iraq War wasn’t the UK’s greatest foreign policy cataclysm since Suez, when it clearly was.
Nothing anybody says will deflect the ex-PM from this - not even a softball Amol Rajan interview - but you can see it in Blair’s eyes. Deep down, buried very deep down, he knows he made the wrong call. But he’s a lawyer and an arrogant prick (if that’s not a tautology) and he’s still trying to convince the jury in his own head that he was right. He’ll be fighting that battle till the day he dies.
Until then, every day, reality creeps closer and closer to Armando Iannucci’s vision for where Blair will be in 2031. (Courtesy of Time Trumpet, BBC Two)
Have a galactic weekend, and hope to see you on tour!
CB x