The Bollocks log of a Bourgeois Dissident

Thursday 29th October 2009

Out on the skillhunt. It's a good word 'skillhunt' isn't it? I just made it up. It'd make a great title for ITV's nex treality show. It's reassuringly reminiscent of words you can't use in polite company any more - and just made for anagrams: kill shunt, still hunk (see above), H. Slut-link, skint Hull and so on. But there's nothing mysterious about its meaning: viz, to hunt out skills wherever one may find them...they being a very seriously threatened species in 2009.

Consider: last Monday, Lord Mandelsnide hailed the new Post Office talks. He's a bit of a loudhailer altogether is his Lordship, although the farewell thing would be more appropriate on the whole. So far he's hailed Gordon Brown, the Rover deal, his own come-back and other similarly unpleasant by-products of abject failure. Now he's hailed the Post Office negotiations - but by yesterday, hopes were fading for these discussions. He got it wrong, and he got it wrong for the same reason all his other hailstorms were misplaced: he's a very silly old Queen devoid of any real understanding of what's going on, or indeed any skill at anything beyond how to make a crock of shit look like a shiny apple.

Or take Labrador Darling: he got it wrong about the approaching recession, the rate of descent into the recession, the wisdom or otherwise of reducing interest rates, and how to put lots of banks on a safe footing. He decided to put two huge banks together in order to ensure that result, but got it wrong in terms of how much it would cost. Now he wants to break them up again. Last month, he declared that the worst was behind us. This month, he was shocked to see a 4% fall in output. He got it wrong, and he got all this stuff wrong because he lacks any creativity about solving our problem, or indeed any skill at all beyond clipping his eyebrows.

At the start of the month, David Cameron was against QE, and dubious about low interest rates. Now he says let's have more QE. He got it wrong because he's not very bright and lacks the skills to engage with post-Crash economics, or indeed any skill at all beyond riding to the office on his bike with a chauffeur-driven car behind carrying his suits and spin doctors.

David Miliband has, in his vastly over-promoted role as Foreign Secretary, got it wrong in South Ossetia, India, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and just about anywhere else he has rattled his plastic sabre.

Last year at Kingsnorth power station, the police stormed in and wasted millions of pounds of public money in search of the Next Big Thing, domestic extremists - an as yet unspecified group with no legal basis at all as a target for police action...any more than homophobia is. The police get almost everything wrong. It's the skills, you see: you can't get the skills these days, and you couldn't get them in those days. Especially if your boss was Jacqui Smith.

Had either Miliband or Smith required the assistance of the Defence Ministry during their tenure, it too would probably have been skill-free. One can observe this with a high degree of certainty, because (if the Nimrod Inquiry is to be believed) the MoD got it wrong in spades: the Ministry, its technical suppliers and several RAF officers were adrift in the areas of leadership, culture and priorities. There's not much left to be wrong about after that trio, apart from perhaps the right way to peel spuds and how many wings to have on the plane.

However, Jimmy Jones (initially a designer of Nimrod) opined that the barrister in charge of the Inquiry didn't know his exhaust flame from his tailplane. How the new Minister of Defence PC Bob Ainsworth will make a judgement about this is hard to discern: he is of course a former Rover cars shop steward. Bobby might have the odd skill in relation to servicing tanks; beyond that, he doesn't give off an air of encyclopaedic knowledge when it comes to real wars with real bullets.

Should Gordon Brown decide before the election to hand his empty chalice to another, it'll probably be Alan Johnson. Al suggested while Health Secretary that old people should be treated at home, an idea that any five year-old with a Nurse's kit for Christmas could've told him was impractical and unaffordable. Now he's Home Secretary, an area of Government about which he knows nothing - and very little about how to hide this paucity of skills. Should he become PM, even Al himself has said he thinks the skills required for the job might be beyond him. In fact, he would have one obvious skill as Ten Downing Street Man: doing a better-than-average impression of Jim Hacker.

Now I read (with a boredom level that increases hour by hour) that the legacy-seeking, warmongering and largely absent peacemaker-missile Tony Blair is to be put forward - in an entirely unelected manner, naturally - as President of Europe. Modest as ever, Moral Tone doesn't want to be upfront about this: he's worried about being turned down, and the humiliation that might follow. My concern is a bigger one, as in this case too I'm struggling to work out what skill qualifications TB has for the job.

To date, the only evidence I've seen in the media is that he's very good at stopping all the traffic wherever he goes. This seems to me more the skill required to be the Chairman of Greenpeace than President of Europe, but one mustn't judge before the event: I prefer to have an open mind about it. I think he'll almost certainly do no good at all, rarely turn up, and enact the exact opposite of what a skilled person would prioritise - but if he tears the whole thing down and then shoots himself, obviously I'll change my mind.

Sarkozy (and his left-hand man Bernard Kouchner, a man until now I've always admired) think Tony's the Man. Merkel doesn't, and her remark that a person who "stayed out of the Eurozone and caused an EU rift in 2003" doesn't have The Right Stuff is perfectly fair. Come to think of it, on that basis I think he may well be the very man for the job after all.

The strange case of the squeaky kitchen. Every parent dreads the childless Aunt who buys their kid a drum for Christmas. My first wife and I were incredibly lucky in that this never happened, but last weekend two chums gave our youngest dog Tiggy a squeaky toy. By halfway through the following afternoon, the sound of a trombone with hiccups in the kitchen had become hard to bear.

Things got worse when Foxie (who recently had two two teeth removed, and is thus up for chewing stuff again) began to steal the toy. Following a major spat about ownership of the uuurrk-emitting bone, Foxie too now has her very own staccato clarinet.

On the whole I think I'd have preferred a drum, but the cacophony seems to have cheered our eldest (special needs) dog Harry up no end. He sits in his little bed smiling contentedly, as if he has at last found a way of soothing his troubled mind.

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