I have often noted my friends on the Left tend to place a tremendous value on being right. When a candidate such as Jeremy Corbyn is defeated, for months or even years afterwards they will point to various issues on which Corbs had called it so right, and has now been vindicated.
ven though Corbs was actually quite wrong about several things (he was basically a Brexiteer, for example) his followers insist his rightness exacerbates the tragedy of his losing not one, but two general elections.
I on the other hand am of the view that in politics, as in life, being right about everything doesn’t necessarily make you happy. That in politics, not losing general elections is very important indeed, perhaps even more important than being right about everything. And that to win elections these days you need to be pretty good on television.
Mick Lynch, the trade union leader of Britain’s striking rail workers, is pretty good on television. In fact, he is great.
There are many ways in which you can do it, but Mick’s way is probably the best. He somehow gives this authentic version of himself on camera; he speaks his truth regardless of the harassment of interviewers and opponents ranging in style from Piers Morgan to some Tory minister who he will quietly but repeatedly call “a liar”.
As it happens, the truth he is speaking is one that most of us can recognise as being devastatingly accurate so every time his big bald head appears on the screen he ends up defining the broken spirit of the age.
Perhaps the fact both parents are Irish gives some extra dimension to his overview, yet he sounds like someone out of EastEnders, except for this: he doesn’t engage in loud arguments, but instead manages to remain deeply calm in the face of the most inane provocations.
Piers Morgan, high on his own hackery, blew a few minutes of an interview trying to make a federal case out of the fact that Lynch’s Facebook profile picture is that of The Hood from Thunderbirds — the villain in that show. Lynch had to keep explaining to Piers that Thunderbirds has nothing to do with the rail dispute, that his vague facial resemblance to a Thunderbirds character might just be regarded as amusing.
Here we could see a world of tabloid hackery in motion, this turgid attempt by Piers to monster the union boss — they’ve been doing that thing for ever, and always it has worked for them. So it must have been startling for Piers and for shameless hacks in general, to see how easy it was for Lynch to pick it all apart — or rather how easy he made it look.
He kept saying these really obvious things — the governor of the Bank of England calling for “pay restraint” is himself “on 600k a year, as is the head of Network Rail… there are railways bosses taking home millions of pounds every year… people are stripping money out of the railways, they’re stripping money out of the economy…”
All the man was saying is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and that that’s not a great idea. Yet so complete is the victory of the oligarchs, this idea taken from Page One of the Book of the Bleeding Obvious seemed to throw some of Britain’s leading TV personalities into a kind of mania.
Lynch even had to explain on Sky News and to the British people in general — as if he was talking to children — what a picket line is, and what it is meant to achieve.
In exposing all these strata of society in the relaxed style of a London cabbie chatting to his passengers about Tottenham Hotspur, he showed up that entire class of operators in politics and the media who proceed on the basis these great issues have been settled a long time ago. That it all comes down to this now: whatever rich people want, they must get.
Against the clarity of that “philosophy”, all Lynch is doing is saying something of equal clarity: No.
He is saying there is another way of looking at the world, according to hard-won principles that were established a long time ago, yet which seem like some sort of outrageous blasphemy when spoken on breakfast television in 2022.
Indeed it is a sign of the comatose state induced by this surrender to the corporate overlords, that no interviewer challenged Lynch early doors with something that might really have hurt him — like Corbyn and others of the British Left, Lynch has a soft spot for the old Brexit.
With that one hit, Morgan could have cost his opponent a whole heap of people who had just fallen in love with him. But Piers was too far gone into the Thunderbirds.
Lynch is seriously wrong about that, yet he probably would have batted it away too, effortlessly. He might even add that being right about everything doesn’t necessarily make you happy.
Cheney trying to train smoking gun on Trump
Let’s say we wake up some morning next week and there’s a picture of Donald Trump in bed with a horse. “This is it,” we’ll say. “They have him now”.
After the initial euphoria, the familiar doubts will start to niggle. Yes there is probably some obscure crime that has been committed here, but it’s still hard to indict an ex-president. There could be full-blown civil war.
Certainly it is not a good look for anyone to be pictured in bed with a horse — any horse. But Trump’s supporters will claim the picture was doctored by his enemies. Soon a “sensible” commentator will say: “There is no smoking gun.”
And then the moment will have passed, like all the other moments.
The January 6 Committee has been laying out a narrative of Trump’s delinquency on a heroic scale, and yet at the end of Tuesday’s session Liz Cheney made a public request to former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to testify. Cipollone, who is said to have behaved in an exemplary fashion throughout Trump’s attempted coup, must be the man with the smoking gun.
But then any sane person looking at the powerful work of this committee would think there must already be more smoking guns than you’d find in the last scene of Bonnie and Clyde. Always, though, with Trump it seems there’s a Pat Cipollone knocking around, this need for just one more sliver of absolute proof.
So what is protecting Trump — and not, as it were, the horse?
A Mick Lynch-type analysis might point to that episode of Succession in which members of the oligarchy and not some lesser force such as “the voters” effectively get to decide who is president. Indeed billionaires and major corporations are still donating tons of money to Trump-endorsed candidates selling the Big Lie.
Oligarchs who are buying everything from Twitter to western democracy itself, still want Trump. And you know the rule: whatever they want, they must get. Indeed I would join with my namesake Mick in musing how that kind of power can protect you from a lot of things, even if you’re as guilty as Donald Trump.
But that would be so juvenile, wouldn’t it?
World Cup woes wiped out by the super-rich
The World Cup, another thing taken from us by the super-rich, would now be reaching the end of the group stage.
The regime of three matches a day would be tapering off into the knockout rounds, and the human heart would be saddened by the realisation that all this will soon be over.
It is a terrible feeling, a mounting sense of dread that even as the importance of the games is growing, their number is diminishing until soon, all too soon, there will be nothing. We have been spared that feeling this year because they’ve left us nothing to begin with.
Which really is the only good thing about Qatar buying the World Cup.
