Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 47,543
Thanks: 27,621
Thanked 14,456 Times in 10,262 Posts
|
re: BORIS Sleeze: Barristers STRIKE & Doctors Demand Pay Rise
The Only Way Is Ethics: Who Will Advise Boris Johnson Now?'
We're at T Point Where There are Literally NO Ethics Left in Downing Street, Says Fleet Street Fox
Boris Johnson's brazen acts that led ANOTHER ethics chief to quit - and why it's dangerous for PM
Daily Mirror 18 JUN 2022
It is a truth universally acknowledged that 1.3million unemployed people must be in want of a job.
And those who enjoy saying what the government ought to do will be interested to learn of a role, freshly-delivered to the jobs market, that comes with the chance to walk the corridors of power, command ministers of the Crown, and generally swan about acting like the big-I-am.
The salary is unknown, but is large enough for its existence to be noted in the House of Lords register of interests. Holidays are likely to be interrupted, and there isn't really any sick leave because if you are sickened, you just have to leave. You're also going to have to spend a lot of time telling the Prime Minister that the only way is ethics
.
Boris Johnson Geidt ethics adviser Good luck with that
After Lord Geidt became the second ethics adviser to flounce out of Downing Street - the first one went in a huff over Priti Patel, this one has departed in a huff about steel tariffs, if you believe that's possible - the job of Independent Adviser on Ministerial Ethics is vacant at a time when the jobs market is awash with opportunities.
Of course, they're opportunities to pick seasonal fruit for 6 weeks and lose rights to Universal Credit for months afterwards, to do back-breaking labour for little pay, wait tables, or drive a lorry into a six-week traffic jam at the ports, so the prospect of a nice office job in an actual palace when all that is asked of you is an opinion may seem proper cushty by comparison.
This was a job first instituted by Tony Blair, soon after he was accused of misleading Parliament over the Iraq War and his majority shrank to 66, which is so piteously small that Theresa May would have chewed stinging nettles for such a swingeing mandate to rule.
It continued under Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and the aforesaid Mrs May, and all may have had their moments of moral wobble - bigoted women, pig's heads, hooliganism in wheat fields - but none of them ever caused the incumbent ethics adviser to down tools in protest.
Boris Johnson Geidt ethics adviser
"Yes, but I'm world-beating"
'I'm a 72-year-old councillor and I've had to take on THREE jobs to make ends meet'
If there's one thing you can say about Boris Johnson, though, it's that he does always like to go one better. And now the job of advising him on the principles of public life is available for the second time in as many years, it would be completely in character for the Prime Minister to decide the next one shouldn't be some stuffy old lord with olde worlde ideas on what's right and, er, the other thing.
Who has the pizzazz to dazzle the media, the zing to adorn the right hand of the Prime Minister, the zap to tell him, yes old boy, you can absolutely do that with no qualms whatsoever? And who, more importantly, is desperate enough to do the job?
Step forward Prince Andrew, Duke of Dork, who just so happens to be looking for a way back into public life and may enjoy being seen as a moral crusader, for once.
"Cripes! Old Bozza's in the poop again, Your Royal Ethics Advisoriness! What do I do about this one?"
"I've got the perfect excuse. Tell them you were in Woking Pizza Express and it's not your hands in the pictures."
Boris Johnson Geidt ethics adviser > "You're so fired"
Bombshell resignation letter of Boris Johnson's ethics chief blasting PM's rule breach plan
Boris Johnson could scrap ethics chief entirely after second one quits in a row
Perhaps that wouldn't work. What about Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of a thief, ex-girlfriend of a sex abuser, and long-time associate of unpleasant prats in gilded walks of life?
---"Bugger me backwards, Giz, those fiends at the Church of England are calling me morally bankrupt for enabling
Priti Patel! Gizza some backup! Geddit? Gizza! Crumbs, Geidt would've got it."
---"Have you considered hiding, or claiming to be a victim of precisely the thing you're accused of?"
"Hid in a fridge once, didn't go well. And I'm not going to deport myself to Rwanda! They think albinos are the result of witchcraft, they might put Old Bozza in a wicker man! Get thee back to maximum security."
Boris Johnson nails his own coffin shut
Perhaps Loki would like to have a crack at it, or that MP who had a bit of a thing for tractors. Failing that, Vladimir Putin might be looking for an exit strategy from his current predicament, and Sarah Ferguson always seem up for making a bit of money and talking tripe.
The real issue is that ethics and this government seem to be in a state of instable equilibrium, like mutually-repellent magnets. Johnson needs rules in order to be seen as a rule-breaker, and the rules need a bad guy to be seen as necessary.
Neither can exist without the other, yet they pull in opposite directions: it's like having a tug-o'-war with your backs turned.
If the thought of commuting to London every day through simmering union discontent is not enough to put you off this job, the idea that you'd be daily bedevilled by the sort of ethical concerns which would make King Solomon weep hot tears of frustration probably would.
Throw in the fact that the person you'd be guiding through the moral maze is as likely to heed your advice as a cheese-crazed puppy humping Granny's slipper, and frankly we'd all be volunteering to die in a urine-stained sweatbox parked on the A2 outside Dover instead.
Because, as the employment figures show, just because there are 1.3m jobs available and 1.3m unemployed, it does not mean that those without work are in any position to fulfil the roles available.
'A wheelchair-bound accountant isn't going to pick sprouts, and if the combined forces of Eton, Oxford, Her Majesty the Queen, and the Conservative Party can't make Boris Johnson behave, it's probably beyond the power of most mortals.
Which is why he'll either appoint Jacob Rees-Mogg, who no doubt applauds wildly if the PM does a ripping fart, or scrap the role entirely so there are literally no ethics left in Downing Street and he can, therefore, no longer be accused of ignoring them. The only question is whether Boris Johnson sticks around long enough to ask for moral feedback from the ballot box.
|