No.45 - When cardboard, papier-maché and stone meet architect designed brick and steel?

Dear James, 

How many times is it now? How many hollow messages have recently been delivered from No.10 with the borrowed authority of that icon’s illustrious setting? “Inside or outside? Let’s do it inside this evening. Outside is for the really big stuff. Anyway it’s too cold tonight”. So the press is alerted, the lights go on and the nation sits and waits for the cardboard apparition to appear. While we wait, my eyes focus on the two union jacks that will stand behind the lady when she speaks. One of my good friends, an ex-military person, recently brought to my attention the fact that these were not flags at all but merely cardboard cut outs. The irony could not be clearer. Cardboard instead of the real thing. Ersatz trappings for an Ersatz politician.

At least this time she did not dance onto the rostrum. Well, not quite. It was more a darting ‘let’s get this over with’ dash. She had just come out of a seven hour cabinet session. The poor lady’s face is slightly puffy, her eyes swollen beneath the make-up artist’s brushwork. She alludes to the fact that everyone is tired of all the goings-on. Tired? We’re all exhausted but she starts anyway. She tells us that she can no longer rely on her own party to get her Agreement through parliament. She needs help. She is therefore offering an olive branch to the leader of the opposition, one Jeremy Corbyn. Surely he can see her predicament? Consultation and collaboration are clearly the way forwards. After almost three years of denying the obvious, she grabs for the life boat coxwained by Mr Corbyn!  Having made her statement, she turns quickly and makes her dash to safety. 

But her problems remain. There are three of them. Firstly Mr Corbyn. Mr Corbyn is not a cardboard cut-out. He is cardboard’s precursor or its ‘post-cursor’. He is papier maché. Mr Corbyn’s thoughts are soggy to the point of watery shapelessness. Talks with Mrs May are therefore likely to be unshapeable. That’s what happens when you confront cardboard with water. It all collapses in a heap of wet stuff. Not much hope there. 

Secondly Mrs May has to deal with her own Brexiteers, the ERG and the DUP. They are made of stone. Cold, implacable stone deposited over millions of years. You cannot bend or dissolve stone yet it can occasionally do a very good imitation of an avalanche which may crush those who stand and stare at it. 

The final problem that faces Mrs May is probably the most difficult of all. The EU is neither cardboard nor amorphous nor is it made of stone.  It is – from our present view point – an architect designed, brick and steel structure. The EU is the real thing at least in terms of negotiating with the UK. It is they who now control the agenda and, should our cardboard lady ask for a further extension, will put their own conditions upon it. The most likely outcome is a longer extension with a People’s Vote at the end of it. But before that we’ve got to go through the dying contortions of the current Westminster psychodrama. 

So James, your leader has merely won another day or two. The cardboard flags will continue to ‘unflap’ like the lady herself. Stiff, rigid and unbendable. When you do try to bend them, they crack and break. 

So today we watch in despair as the cracked and broken remains of a cardboard government talk to a papier-maché wannabe. 

I am sorry to go on about this James, but there is another way to break this crisis. It is to let the people speak. 

Kind regards,  

BH - Your Concerned Constituent