ONE THING people remember about Mussolini was his claim to have got Italy’s trains running on time.
He didn’t of course. Other people put the network back on its wheels after WWI. Young Benito only stepped up and took the credit at the decisive moment.
It was all about projecting an image. Competence and determination, tinged with ruthlessness. Serried Blackshirts. Flaming torches. Trembling railway managers pledging to pull their socks up.
“Bollocks to wishy washy democracy. The people have spoken. Their will is to say arrivederci Roma right on time every time. I, il Duce shall make this happen.”
But a century later in London:
Mary has always been a Labour voter and now thinks she will vote for Boris Johnson. I ask if she likes him (I remember her hating him when he was the mayor of London). “No, I still hate him,” she says, “but someone needs to deal with this fucking mess. He’s a ruthless fucker at least he’ll do it.”
From Britons on Brexit politics – Truepublica.com
How did a blustering chancer, much more The Dunce than The Duce, turn himself into this ruthless fucker able to get people who hate his guts to vote for him by promising to get the trains Brexit to arrive on time?
In another parallel with the Italian train story, he didn’t. His other half did. Dominic.
Cummings’ ideas and style are catnip to prissy or oafish ex public schoolboys without the real brains or balls to back up their ambitions. Gove and Johnson could make a mess all right—of education policy or, in Johnson’s case, anything or anyone he got his hands on.
But they couldn’t make the kind of fucking mess a would-be Duce or Fuhrer would want to be seen sorting out. That took David Cameron and ‘his fucking referendum’. What WWI opened up for Mussolini, the biggest unforced error in modern British political history handed to Cummings.
Since then, the ultras and Tory hard righters have done everything possible to use the Withdrawal Agreement to turn Brexit into the biggest f***king mess you could or couldn’t conceive of. To the point where even lifelong Labour voters contemplate voting for a leader they loathe, simply to “get it done.”
Not that anything will be “done” on leaving day, whether we have a political deal or not. It will be only the beginning of the actual process of negotiating the actual trade terms. But a Johnson-Cummings combo—let’s call it/him the Fatuous Control Freak—will be so busy dishing out Cummings’ delirious dream of disaster capitalism in Britain that the EU will probably have to send over chauffeurs if it wants any UK negotiators to come to Brussels for trade talks.
Crash out or Remain aren’t the only options. We could still leave with a political agreement and a transition period, and sort out our trading relationship with the EU over the course of the next parliament. But delivering Brexit wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for Johnson’s backers. They want unfettered control over Britain.
Putting the Fatuous Control Freak in power would be the most idiotic thing a voting public has done since Signor Everyman, of 23 The Irons, Frolì, Emilio Romagna, wrote to Benito Mussolini in 1922:
“I’ve always voted against militaristic, nationalist political parties but by Jove someone needed to sort out the fucking mess on the railways. You are just the ruthless fucker to do it. I look forward to many years of peace and democracy in our bel Paese Eia alala!”
QuadRanting 