The Sunday Ishmael 16/10/2022: "There may or may not have been trees."

 

The Tory Wild Hunt

Another fun week in politics. You really couldn't make it up - there was Kwasi, a thin sheen of sweat on his not-inconsiderable dome-piece, assuring the American TV viewers that he wasn't going anywhere - when bish, bash, bosh, he suddenly was going anywhere, summoned back to Downing Street to be encouraged to fall on his sword. 

and now we have a new Chancellor - Jeremy Cunt,

who assured Laura Whatsername this morning that he'd been enjoying himself on the back benches, doing the odd stint as Santa's love interest, but he was prepared to step up to save the country from the shitstorm that Kwasi summoned up. Jeremy Cunt - fuck me sideways - him again.

 

 'Twas Radio 4's Today programme that gave Jeremy his nickname - Justin Webb and James Naughtie both referred to him as Cunt, as did Andrew Marr on his Start the Week programme. They all subsequently claimed it was a slip of the old lingua, but the fact is that Cunty is a bit of a dodgy bastard. "Don't confront me with my failures", he might say, "I have not forgotten them." Indeed, not - how could he?

Jeremy's recipe for saving Britain for the Tories is the tried and trusted one of squeezing the poor and reducing public sector expenditure: drink up your bitter medicine.
Head of School at Charterhouse, Cunty went on to read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became Conservative MP for South West Surrey in 2005. He got into a bit of a muddle about his expenses, being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner in 2009, who found that he was in breach of the rules and that "his office arrangements were at best disorganised."   Hunt paid back £9,558.50, and a further £1,996 wrongly claimed for household expenses. Expenses and other scandals are so much a part of Parliamentary life that none of this got in the way of Hunt's career and  following the 2010 general election, Hunt was appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport in Cameron's coalition government. Given the quasi-judicial power to adjudicate over the News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB, Hunt chose not to refer the deal to the Competition Commission, announcing on 3 March 2011 that he intended to accept a series of undertakings given by News Corporation, paving the way for the deal to be approved. Following a series of scandals concerning phone hacking, a House of Commons motion was planned that called on News Corporation to abandon the bid. The bid was eventually dropped. Hunt was alleged to have had improper contact with News Corp. Emails released to the Leveson Inquiry detailed contacts between Hunt's special advisor Adam Smith and Frédéric Michel, News Corp's director of public affairs and therefore a lobbyist for James Murdoch. The revelations led to calls for Hunt's resignation, but Smith, Hunt's special adviser, took the bullet for the boss, resigning on 25 April just before Hunt made an emergency parliamentary statement in which he said that Smith's contact with Michel was "clearly not appropriate".

Hunt appeared before the Leveson inquiry on 31 May 2012, when it emerged that Hunt had himself been in text and private email contact with James Murdoch. Journalist Iain Martin claimed that at a 2010 event held at UCL he saw Hunt hide behind a tree to avoid being seen by journalists. Hunt later told the Leveson Inquiry that "I thought, this is not the time to have an impromptu interview, so I moved to a different part of the quadrangle... there may or may not have been trees!"

Onwards and upwards for Cunty and in 2012 he was appointed Secretary of State for Health. He has long held certain views about the NHS, having co-authored a policy pamphlet in 2005: Direct Democracy: An Agenda For A New Model Party which advocated denationalising the NHS to replace it with "a new system of health provision in which people would pay money into personal health accounts, which they could then use to shop around for care from public and private providers. Those who could not afford to save enough would be funded by the state". Hunt later denied that the policy pamphlet expresses his views  - but, by their actions shall ye know them, and under his stewardship, an estimated 10% of the NHS entire budget was diverted to a private healthcare bureaucracy and more than £3bn of contracts were awarded to private firms. Amusingly, Virgin Care sued the NHS in Surrey after it awarded an NHS contract to NHS providers, and ended 2017 with a £1bn haul of NHS contracts.

As Health Secretary, Hunt was criticised for controversial reforms, manipulating figures and increased privatisation. He declared patient choice was not key to improving NHS performance.
A few career high spots:

• The reduction of NHS beds by 15,000, reducing capacity in hospitals across England by five million patients a year, thus nicely positioning Britain to deal with the global pandemic which had been regularly predicted by analysts and eventually hit Britain in 2020.
•  Cuts of £22 billion in the guise of savings.
• Dropping funding levels to 1950s levels. 
•  In February 2016 he was polled as the most disliked frontline British politician.
• The closure, amongst others, of 31 hospital units, nine GP surgeries, seven mental health units, six A&E departments, six walk-in centres, and four maternity units.
• Staff reductions: in consequence of real-term pay cuts and the scrapping of nursing bursaries, the NHS is currently short of 40,000 nurses, and there has been a 10% increase in unfilled vacancies across the whole of the service, whilst under his stewardship, there were 1,200 fewer GPs than when he took office. Under the crazy remuneration system, it pays G.P.s to reduce their working hours and to retire early. In consequence of understaffing, at the height of the Covid crisis, it was impossible to staff the Nightingale hospitals thrown up in a hurry and at great expense in 2020, some two years after he left office, yielding the post to the unfortunate crying Matt Hancock.

To top it all, in 2022 he had the cheek to publish  a book with the catchy title: Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS. (See Sunday Ishmael passim 15/05/2022) Interviewed by Sophie Raworth, he said:  “It was not about rogue staff or a rogue hospital. It was about a rogue system. A rogue system that I, as health secretary, sat at the top of.” His  book sought to explain how and why he was not able to turn the NHS into an efficient, transparent, affordable health care system. It was everyone else's fault, of course. I particularly liked this quotation: “Too often managers who had failed were recycled to jobs in a different part of the country, where they continued to make the same mistakes. ” That probably explains the phenomenon of Ministers of State fucking up one job after another, as they flit about, hither and yon, in each Cabinet re-shuffle. 

 

And now he's back. A proper Tory. A safe pair of hands. Yeah, right.

I really don't approve of this. Nor do I approve of the lax security at the National Gallery that allowed these two muddle-headed girls and a phalanx of reporters/photographers (clearly seen in the picture) anywhere near the painting.  Why target Van Gogh's Sunflowers? The national flower of Ukraine, a country enjoying much popular support in its struggles to resist attempts to fold it back into the embrace of Mother Russia. Was it a pun? Being an oil painting? Just Stop Oil, indeed! What will we do instead, girls?

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Now Available

 
Now that we have clearly reached the End of Days, should you need something  to cheer you up, look no further than  Ishmael’s Blues - which is now published, in both paperback and hardback editions; both editions are immediately available from lulu.com.  The paperback is also listed on amazon. Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack, the first two books in the sequence, are also available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.
Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
 Unless you’ve done this already, please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
The book’s full title is "Ishmael’s Blues – further Chronicles of Ruin", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of blogdog Buster retiring from the fray, cat gloating from a safe distance. The cover is the same for both editions.
Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

I simply don't believe I'm having to do this again.