Hhh-hancock

When I detected the signs of the feeding frenzy over the Hancock malarkey I thought at first they had discovered some more old tapes in a BBC backroom. But in this case, the boy himself is not the esteemed but tragic Tony, it is in fact the creepy Matt edition. But, seriously, who cares? I commented recently on how individuals in the public eye dare not say a word unless it has been scrutinised and sanitised by media advisors at any hint it might be weaponised. Thus it is little wonder that people are getting excited over nothing.

Covid, schmovid, as far as I’m concerned. Nobody is getting any of those days back and we can't resurrect the dead. And in any case, flu-like viruses have always taken away the elderly to their often overdue rest, and will continue to do so. Hancock is not in government any more, every country in the world seemed to struggle to cope with the pandemic and the really important thing to remember now is that everybody is an expert after the fact.

Not me, though. I claim no expertise in pretty much anything. In fact the more I learn the more I recognise what I do not know, to the extent of realising that my unknown unknowns exceed by an incalculable amount the sum of everything I know I know and everything I know I don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld, eat your heart out. Apart from playing the utterly pointless, bird-flown, horse-bolted blame game what is to be gained from this rather uninspiring ‘scoop’?

Sometimes I think the collective press needs to pack up and spend a few years living among the people they write about. They would find that real people are neither ‘amazed’, ‘astonished’ nor ‘incandescent’ about very much at all. The emotive words used by reporters to make what is often a non-story into some sort of scandal is at best childishly naïve and at worst fomentive of unrest in people who were otherwise disinterested.

So I genuinely don’t care about the trillions of  words in billions of WhatsApp messages; messages that would have been sent, ad-hoc, in the heat of the moment, between people I know little about and respect even less. Of course there were fuck-ups; and many of them. We hear today that Dominic Cummings had to explain percentages to Boris Johnson, but really, is anybody surprised? Project Boris was always about the aggrandisement of the straw-barnetted buffoon, but he would have got away with everything had the pandemic not struck and had Brexit ever actually happened.

Surely nobody, by now, expects any better from the UK government? After years of mocking the Italians and the Belgians and their corrupt ways is it any wonder that we find the exact same farces being played out over here? Haven’t commentators across the centuries warned that you simply cannot trust a single person who actively seeks power? Until the professional politicians are replaced by a meritocracy based on actual competence in the areas that matter we can expect no better.

Just a little prick...

The areas that matter? Oh, you know, just the minor things. While world leaders argue about pronouns, science none of them understand, global economies beyond the power of politicians to influence positively, journeys to the stars and whose god is top god, we little people busy ourselves with the almost trivial matters of eating, working, keeping a roof over our heads, not dying… little things of little consequence. Not that the media will ever notice.