Falstaff in the Headlights

This rant has been brewing for a couple of days and I've been finessing it,so here goes...

Boris Johnson has been indecisive, contradictory, confused and confusing; jovial when he should be grave, muddled when the nation desperately needs clarity. Granted it's an unprecedented emergency, but even Gove does a better impression of a PM than Johnson.

He is a man who has lied to every employer he has ever had and lost 3 jobs because if it; a man who has demonstrated weapons-grade disloyalty to every leader under whom he has ever served; a man who has lied to both of his wives and all of his mistresses; a man who wasted £600m of public money as Mayor of London (Garden Bridge, Bendy Bus, Cableway Estuary Airport, the New Crystal Palace, etc); a man who is renowned for not grasping detail and notoriously incapable of reading anything longer than half a sheet of A4; a man who has a love child; a man who illegally prorogued Parliament; a man who has shown he will do practically anything to avoid scrutiny; a man who idiotically shook hands with patients in a Covid ward, against his own advice, and subsequently contracts it himself (see previous point); a man who, in 2017, voted against scrapping the NHS 1% pay cap and now hypocritically stands clapping the NHS' commitment.

At least Boris is a laugh - pragmatism and gravitas would have been so boring during this pandemic. Each evening, before contracting the virus himself, he came on television and said a random series of words, interspersed with burbles and Cheshire Cat grins, giving us the fun of putting them in the right order so we know what we’re supposed to do.

Why do people fawn over this serial-lying opportunist and populist charlatan who doesn't demonstrate a single, traditional, Conservative value - values such as family, marriage, respect for the law, hard work, tolerance and financial responsibility? How far do people's moral compasses have to veer before they come to their senses and realise their alleged Churchill is actually a Falstaff caught in headlights.

Anyone criticising the above, please point out the errors in my analysis before huffing and puffing with righteous indignation.

Meanwhile the radicalised Brexit Taliban in Leave.EU, within their disinformation bubble, are calling for avoidable Brexit misery to be piled on top of unavoidable Covid misery and claiming, contrary to all logic and expert opinion - including the former head of the WTO - that immediate WTO will be best for Britain. The only saving grace is that the smaller Brexit havoc will be hidden within the much larger Covid havoc.

The irony is that the Covid pandemic will facilitate those with huge wads of cash to spare (those who first conceived of the idea of Brexit as a money making wheeze and financed it) even greater corporate raiding opportunities than Brexit ever could, thus negating the need for Brexit in the first place.

Anyone who only reads news or opinion from publications or websites renowned for the promulgation of propaganda, misinformation, outright lies or twisted truths is part of the problem and certainly has no solutions. Such sites use four established and effective disinformation tactics; dismissing opponents, distorting facts, distracting from the central issue and dismaying their audience, all in the furtherance of Truth Decay - the lowering of trust in respected sources of factual information - and where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia. The arch proponent of such tactics is Boris' own éminence grise, Dominic Cummings.

Regarding corporate bailouts during the pandemic; Nasim Nicolas Taleb, the author of Black Swan and who himself made millions from various financial crashes since the '80s, was critical of the bank bailout following the crash of 2008. He argued that investors and speculators were rewarded by governments (tax payers) for not having sufficient liquidity reserves - they took no risk, and risk is what investing is about. Similarly, in this instance he believes corporations and investors who did not have a backstop of reserves, but instead laden their companies with cheap debt and give all profits to shareholders, should not be bailed out, especially as a pandemic of some shape has been forecast for a long time. Instead he maintains the focus of any financial aid should be citizens, not corporations.

The first question to be asked of companies requiring a bailout is; "Why - what happened to all your your profit over the years?" Then point to companies that were prudent enough to amass emergency reserves and still paying their employees while laid off. Compulsory purchase of the profligate companies' assets by government would enable them to be sold to the virtuous, thereby bringing good, prudent management and saving jobs.