Wednesday, 24 October 2018


AN ELDER STATESMAN RUMINATES –

 

We shall fight them in our britches

We shall fight them in our trews

We shall fight them in the ditches

We’ll fight them bloody well how we choose!

 

          So much for the froggies etc. And, as my co-Americans would say, E Pluribus Unum, which jogs the old brainbox to remind myself to remind you of my scheme for a bridge spanning the North Atlantic connecting London with New York and Washington DC, thus binding together ever more closely what my predecessor in the affairs of state Winston Churchill called the two ‘English-speaking peoples’ (leaving aside the odd watermelon-eating piccaninny imported from Pago Pagoland here and there, spouting his own colourful gibberish). This astoundingly epochal bridge will be the Great Flyover, though when the magnificent President Trump inaugurates it by travelling here from America for our bromance love-in, it’s somehow already got fixed in his mind that it will be the Great Walkover. And it’ll be festooned with gardens and those tea-shoppe places as along our motorways which our ordinary people call something-or-other. I couldn’t say as I never travel on motorways. The old bike and my shorts aren’t allowed, and in any case I prefer the soaring silver birds of the skies that have whisked me, when in office, to Afghanistan and all points wherever, and for short hauls those whirligig thingies that make a hell of a racket but by golliwogs they land you right where you want to go! Carbon footprint, my bum. We’re all made of carbon anyhow, so what’s the stink?

          What this country needs from its leaders is leadership. Everyone knows I have that by the shedload, leaving the details to the policy wonks and bean counters. Winston knew I had it, even back when I sat as a wee nipper on his venerable knee. Winston didn’t know who I was, or had momentarily forgotten, but even so I’m sure he instinctively knew I showed a precocious potential for leading this imperial 2.0 nation in its darkest hour of need in the decades ahead. Great men of any time of life think alike, although ‘thought’ is a humongously overrated commodity. What matters is an instinct for survival, as I told the vice-president or vice—minister or whoever of the aforesaid Afghanistan when I paid him a flying visit to pass up an unimportant and inconvenient House of Commons vote on some runway or other in west London. Although I stand foursquare behind our present fragrant Incumbent with absolutely no intention of staging the old coup, heaven forfend, unless the need becomes so pressing that the vox populi clamour for a true leader becomes so unstoppable that I am whirlwinded into high office, as in the dark days of 1940 when England Stood Alone, of which I have scribbled at enormous and authoritative length. Cripes! You’ll see some changes then! Stand aside, I shall command:

          There are bridges to be built!

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