The Sunday Ishmael: 05/05/2024

O Scotland! Scotland!.... If such a one be fit to govern, speak:

Fit to govern? No, not to live - O nation miserable! With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd, when shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?                                 (l.100-105, sc.III, Act IV, Macbeth)

Steady on, mrs ishmael - untitled, why, yes indeed - yet another unelected First Minister; and Scotland - yep, miserable nation, that's true, and he's certainly not fit to govern, but I'd hardly call John Swinney a bloody-sceptred tyrant. More likely he'd have you gnawing your own leg off with boredom than smiting you on the pate.

At 60, this sweet, bald old tortoise is a veritable youngster  compared with the octogenarian President of the United States and his 77 year old rival on whom Biden is determined to hang a criminal conviction to scupper his chances of election. Dear little old Swinney is even one year younger than Ancient Ralph Fiennes. But you know how they say age is just a number? And Swinney was born ancient -

Here he is, aged six months, having a tantrum.

and is careful to present himself as thoughtful, loyal, financially astute, a subdued performer, a safe pair of hands and in possession of a "deep Christian faith". He even got an annulment of his first marriage in order to marry his current wife in the Catholic church.

He has been around forever - MSP for North Tayside from 1999 to 2011, then MSP for Perthshire North from 2011 to the present. He was Leader of the SNP from 2000 to 2004, when he was censured by colleagues who said there was no room in Scotland for his brand of extreme nationalism and Alex Salmond advised him to resign in exchange for senior party figures not calling openly for his resignation, so he did, triggering a leadership contest, which Alex Salmond won. Funny how things work out, eh?

Swinney then held various Cabinet roles under both Salmond and Sturgeon, where he entirely failed to distinguish himself,* and held the post of Deputy First Minister from 2014 to 2023. Which places him right in the centre of the senior SNP figures interrogated by the police as part of their Operation Branchform investigation into the embezzlement of SNP funds - which resulted in the resignations of Sturgeon and her husband, Morrell, who was recently formally charged with embezzlement.

* In August 2020 he was subject to a vote of no confidence in Parliament, with the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all accusing Swinney of creating an exam results system which "unfairly penalised pupils at schools which had historically not performed so well". The Herald newspaper reported that: "Mr Swinney endured a deeply uncomfortable hour in the Holyrood chamber, as opposition MSPs said he had been a serial failure at the education portfolio, and he knew it." The motion was defeated by 67 votes to 58 resulting in Swinney surviving the vote and remaining as Scottish Education Secretary.

*In March 2021 Swinney was the subject of a second motion of no confidence. As the minister in charge of liaising with the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints, Swinney twice refused to publish legal advice requested by the committee. After two votes in Parliament failed to persuade him to publish the advice, opposition parties announced a motion of no confidence in him. Swinney u-turned and published the advice; the Scottish Greens declared they would not support the motion of no confidence and it was defeated by 65 votes to 57. (Bloody Greens again)

*Also in March 2021, Audit Scotland published a report concluding that the results of Swinney's efforts to reduce the poverty related attainment gap in Scottish education were "limited and [fell] short of the Scottish Government’s aims. Improvement needs to happen more quickly and there needs to be greater consistency across the country." In 10 Scottish council areas the attainment gap between the richest and the poorest children increased.

Despite all this, the SNP establishment has decided that he is the man of the hour, will repair the relationship with the Scottish Greens - who like him - (see above) and take the SNP forward into greater triumphs. Kate Forbes, who was dithering about, considering standing herself, was bought off by the promise of great things in a Swiney Government. He's warned off other potential candidates, saying they would: "delay the ability for the [party] to start its rebuilding". He accepts that the party has had a "difficult" two years. I'll say. "Difficult" is typical mealy-mouthed, Swiney-esquery. Despite Swinney issuing understated threats like a Mafia boss, 'tis rumoured that Graeme McCormick, extremist nationalist, is gathering the 100 votes necessary to announce his candidature. Deadline is Monday noon. Central to McCormick's campaign is that "a majority vote will result in SNP MPs being instructed to dissolve the union, establish the sovereign government of Scotland, advise the UN that the union is ended and that Scotland will adhere to the terms of the Vienna Convention on the dissolution of a former state. Under international law, this is the "how" of delivering our nation statehood.”

Oh dear.

In the midst of all this nail-biting, edge of the seat Scottish stuff, England has been holding elections for local councils. Unsurprisingly, the Tories have tanked and Labour has done pretty well. Suella Braverman, wearing a magnificent Labour-red suit,

appeared on the Laura Kuenssberg show this morning to vent her spleen, dish up some cold revenge, and basically go: Ha Ha, Ho Ho, Hee, Hee. God, she was as magnificent as her suit. Clearly not at all resentful that Sunak had dismissed her as Home Secretary on 13th November 2023 and replaced her with Big Black James Cleverly (she only mentioned a couple of times that she was not a member of the Cabinet, not part of Sunak's team and had no say in his policies), Suella (named after Sue Ellen Ewing in Dynasty, because her mum was a fan) listed Sunak's failings as Prime Minister which included migration, gender ideology, and the European human rights convention. And she regrets ever supporting him. So there.

Suella was the best bit of the whole local election shindig. The next best bit was the opportunity Kuenssberg seized, on the excuse that Labour had won Redditch, to include Jacqui Smith on her panel. You do remember her? No? Here's a few facts:

Jacqui Smith gained a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from 

 Worcester College of Higher Education. Working as a school teacher, she taught economics at Arrow Vale High School in Redditch from 1986 to 1988 and at Worcester Sixth Form College. She served on Redditch Borough Council from 1991 to 1996, and was selected through an all-women shortlist as the Labour candidate for Redditch, winning the seat in the 1997 general election. She employed her husband, Richard Timney, as her parliamentary aide on a salary of £40,000 (equivalent to £75,396.00 today). He earned his hefty salary by writing letters to the Redditch Advertiser, pretending to be an ordinary member of the public impressed by Jacqui Smith's outstanding performance as the local MP. Despite an income that most people would regard as generous, he entered a Parliamentary expenses claim for viewing two pornographic films and two other pay-per-view films on the television in their family home. 

 In January 2020, she and Timney announced they had ended their 33 year marriage. I'm truly surprised it took that long.

There was also the matter of  her investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over allegations that 

she had inappropriately designated her sister's home in London as her main residence, despite stating in her website that she "lives in Redditch" .The arrangement had allowed Smith to claim over £116,000 (in then money) on her family's Redditch home since becoming an MP. When asked whether it was fair that she made claims for items such as a flat-screen TV and scatter cushions, she said that analyses of her receipts had been very particular and they were picking on her because she was a woman. In October 2009, it was reported that the Standards Commissioner, John Lyon, had looked into complaints over her expense claims. He concluded that, although her London home was a genuine home and she had spent more nights there than in her Redditch home, her constituency home was in fact her main home, and that she was in breach of Commons rules, despite "significant mitigating circumstances". The claims for pay-per-view films were also found to be in breach.

Then there was the decorating scandal. On 24 August 2011 it emerged that Smith had arranged for two prisoners on day-release to paint a room in her house, when they were supposed to be undertaking work to benefit the community. The Ministry of Justice launched an internal investigation into the matter, and Smith made a donation to the charity overseeing the scheme.The episode was condemned by Matthew Elliot of the TaxPayers' Alliance, who stated: "It's a disgrace that a former home secretary has used prisoners as her personal handymen".

It is a wonder that the woman can hold her head up at all, let alone appear on national television on a serious political show. Maybe a Kuenssberg producer of a Conservative cast of mind thought it would mitigate the Labour local election landslide by reminding us what Labour politicians used to be like, back in the day. Balance, you know. And hope that mrs ishmael would extract this delightful piece from the ishmaelian archive:

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY, WHAT'S COOKING? A NAZI FEMINIST SPEAKS.

The Grauniad, Saturday 11 July 2009

By Simon Hack, Cookery correspondent.

Jacqui Smith is bounding through the corridors of Filth - through the mighty central lobby, where eminent journalists such as Sir Michael Kneepads Wight fellate shabby, scumbag politicians in exchange for a bit of unattributable gossip, past the ancient subsidised bars, down the stairs to her somewhat shabbier office. She seems so different from the hardened home secretary who made glum pronouncements on terror –everybody’s under suspicion - and migration control – wogs go home, unless you can donate large sums to Labour plc. She laughs, and tells me I'm not the first to have mentioned it. "This sounds a bit naff, but I've always been quite stupid, dull, flabby, and there's something about being a disgraced and wholly incompetent home secretary that suits me perfectly," she says. "But it was much worse over the past few months."

Disgraced cookery teacher, Jacqui Schmidt, the most mediocre home secretary in history, was talking to the Arsebridger Grauniad, the home of well-paid media celebrity and all things correct.

The Smith Gang of Two

Asked about her marriage to her employee, Mr Richard Wank; the girl from Redditch, an overspill town for Birmingham’s burglar community, says: One of the worst things is that newspapers are going around friends saying we know her marriage is on the rocks. "That's horrible. And it isn't, no. It’s off the rocks and down in Davy Joneses locker" No, she didn't force him to sleep on the sofa, he always did that, from choice, and yes she has forgiven him. “I fully intend to keep my husband on as my employee at forty thousand of your pounds per year. Who else would write nice letters about me to the papers and pretend he was a complete stranger?” It’s one of the great strengths about our marriage, the lies we tell. And his wanking.

The trouble is, she says, the government underestimated the public's reaction to expenses. "We should have recognised there was a problem coming and covered it up, sharpish. But then recognising problems is hardly government business, is it, not here, on Planet Hindsight? I and others were saying, no this isn't the thing that people will be worried about, what they'll be really worried about is the economy, which, thanks to us, is completely fucked."

Has Labour missed Tony Blair? "Of course. Yes, we've missed him individually, and we've missed that ability to communicate." Would he have dealt with this crisis better? "He has a real strength of understanding people's feelings and being able to communicate to people, he bombs them, shoots them, burns them and tortures them and you can’t communicate better than that; Tony Blair really is a pretty, straight guy, although some people say Mr Rupert Corpse of News International has evidence to the contrary. I think he would have got the zeitgeist about expenses and made everybody transparently shred their receipts just as he and Imelda did and then none of this would have happened. One of his strengths is he understands how people feel about things, he identifies it quickly and then he's able to lie about it. Just take his Catholicism, for instance, that’s the most sincere piece of lying from any bisexual freak of his generation. I think he would have been less good on the substantive issue of the last year - Gordon would have had to do that, a pity he didn’t." She calls Blair the greatest British war criminal of modern times, and names Brown second and Thatcher third.

An international criminal and his Moll, Tony

Asked about her future plans Schmidt said that her experience as a cookery teacher at the Leys High School in Redditch –motto, any girl not pregnant at thirteen is an outstanding success for Team Leys – combined with having been the most laughable home secretary in history would stand her in good stead. For now, though, she was spending her time making her famous and delicious Snotbuns and selling them, three for a quid, to the other thieves at the Redditch and Studley CarBoot Sale (for all your cheap stolen goods). The recipe is quite simple, she beamed, suddenly cheerful, take one cup of fresh snot, half a cup of flour and a handful of raisins, mix them all together with your hands and shape into small bun-shaped buns, bake in your John Lewis Oven for ten minutes and serve hot or cold, they are delicious and children and prime ministers love them.

In the longer term, what's the most important thing she has learned from all this? "To not get out of touch with what people think is the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do and when you are definitely doing the wrong thing insist that you are doing the right thing.Y’know, like in Afghanistan." She insists she will stand at the next election, and is far from done with politics. She'd love to have another crack at home secretary. Does she think her constituency will re-elect her? "If the general election was tomorrow, definitely not. You must be fucking joking.”

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mr ishmael later explained: 

As stanislav, a young polish plumber, this writer launched the delightful confection, among others, that Ms Jacqui Smith’s previous career had been as a cookery teacher in Burglarsville High School, Redditch, and it runs to this day, the most inept and mediocre home secretary in history is, in the minds of many, always a jumped-up cookery teacher - and isn’t it the case that, what with the hubbyporn and the bathplug and squatting in sister’s broom cupboard, Schmidt acted in just the way you’d expect of a greedy, belligerent cookery teacher propelled into wholly unsuitably high office? The reality, in Schmidt’s case, has outrun the metaphor. Jacqui Smith; you couldn’t make her up, her taxpayer-salaried husband-assistant writing, under a nom de plume, to the local paper, praising the local MP, pretending she wasn’t his Mrs, that he was just a regular guy, spontaneously commending his elected representative. Since I was paying him, not the Labour party, that - the crass, cynical, illicit propagandising - for me, was the graver SchmidtSin, and in a proper country he’d go to jail.

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Oh, yes, and she appeared on Celebrity Come Dancing. Was voted off in the first round.

What's on at the Theatre?

Another outing from the shouting, spitting and running around school of acting. That's What.

Macbeth

Rafe Fiennes was ridiculously old for the part and for some peculiar reason he chose to play the whole thing bent double, with a pronounced case of bow-leggedness. He had one note and that was a loud one. There was nothing of the heroic soldier, of calm intelligence, of thoughtful reserve as Macbeth struggles with the conflicting demands of conscience and ambition.. Nope – he just went straight into crazed, evil, bent-over-shout mode and stayed there. He did manage to calm down a bit for the Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech – if he hadn’t I might have left the cinema at that point. Lady Macbeth was, as usual, angular and unwomanly. When she claims to have given suck, one thinks, aye, right, what with? The three witches were badly-dressed chubby teenagers with too much make up.

The Porter was cut out completely. No Porter. Cut out. Gone. They had to have someone to open the door to Macduff, so they gave a couple of lines to one of the Murderers. But all that lovely stuff about equivocation went into the shredder - it would have supported a view that Macbeth was not just embodied evil.

I keep going to Shakespearean productions hoping for something wonderful, some actor who can dignify the words. I want to be moved by nuance and ambiguity. But I just get shouted at. Apparently, they could hear the shouting out in the corridor.

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Here's the Youtube vlog I promised mr mongoose. 

We've had the restoration of a derelict wooden house in the forest in Belarus, the off-grid stone hut rebuild in the Italian Alps, and now we go to the Shahdag mountains in Azerbaijan, where a middle-aged couple tend the land and cook huge quantities of food in the open air on wood fires. 

Enjoy, as the waitresses command these days.

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The four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre, collected and curated by editor mr verge, is available on Lulu and Amazon.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are 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 :

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.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

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.