Boris & Brussels in serious start to Silly Season

 As BoJo rails against punishing sin (as you’d expect) Tom Watson has landed the lead role as Nanny in the End of the Pier Show, the Met Police has a Facebook disaster on its hands, and the EU has appointed a quadrangle of three-time losers to its top jobs. The only person now standing between the eurozone economy and fisco-banking disaster is Christine LaGarde.

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The Silly Season is upon us. Judging by its early signs, we are going to have a bumper crop of Sillies this year.

PM in waiting Boris Johnson has come out strongly against ‘sin taxes’ of the sort desired by Tom “1984” Watson, the Labour deputy who wants to stop people eating puddings and having a flutter because that’s far too much like having fun.

Punitive taxes on sugar as a follow-up to cigarettes and booze are simply worlds apart when it comes to encouraging a healthier lifestyle. The main weapon for achieving that end should without question be education; but as we know, that sector is far too busy making every child a politically correct knee-jerking moron. And taxes bring munnneeee. S’no-brainer, innit?

Boris is right when he says this is all about ‘Nanny State’, but as the only alternative he’s offering is the Corporate State, it’s not what you’d call a broad range of choices for the citizenry: “Yes, you can either be thin, fit and miserable, or pauperised, overworked and miserable”. Hurrah! Let us put out more flags.

The only syntaxes I really can’t stand are US politically correct – “differently intelligent” – and US corporate – “Let me window your diary space”. There too the choice is exactly the same…in fact, to be more precise, it all kind of morphs into one directive from the 3%: “We’ll tax everything you enjoy, give you less time to enjoy it, and talk complete cock to confuse you further”.

Watson is now insisting that Matt Hancock resign from BoJo’s election team, Mathew being pro taxing the lusts of the flesh. Watson really is the sort of idiot who wouldn’t know a Gestapo if it was in his slimline mint tea. I have yet to hear him express any concerns about the rampant politicisation of the cops in recent years, but this may not be a source of anxiety to us, as the Boys in Blue riot helmets appear to be as incompetent as ever.

New research into the Live Facial Recognition Technology (LFRT, not to be confused with LGBT) used by the Met police shows it to be wrong in in four out of five cases. LFRT – in which cameras scan the faces of members of the public to compare them with faces on a list of wanted individuals, aka political suspects at demos – has been in trials for some time now, and so far has picked out perfectly innocent people as “dodgy” 80% of the time.

I think we should give the snooper-snappers a crack at scanning the House of Commons, where 90% of the inhabitants are up to no good at least 80% of the time. If the cameras pick out Kate Hoey, Steve Baker, Denis Skinner and John Redwood as known members of the Norman Stanley Fletcher Front for the Liberation of Pocket Contents, then we can be sure it is as useless as the research suggests.

On that basis, however, I do not doubt that MI6 can put the sotfware to very pernicious use indeed. Cameraderie anyone?

The official launch of our Summer of Silliness took place on Tuesday last, when the new Fab Four European Commission Bigwigs were chosen by a few people under 743 million, or more precisely, twelve Franco-German horse traders.

The result was a predictable 1-1 draw, in that Germany scored the Presidency, but France equalised by grabbing control of the Central Bank. Penalties will be involved, but they will be borne by the 742,999,988 citizens who weren’t consulted. Howjer like them apples eh, Femi?

When surveyed in more detail, the ménage à quatre is truly hilarious. Fresh from being found guilty on graft charges while working for Sarkozy, Christine LaGarde is leaving her risible track record at the IMF to become Mario Draghi’s replacement at the Central Bank, or ECB.

Veteran Sloggers will be aware of LaGarde’s stratospheric self-esteem, which is in complete contrast to the low esteem in which she is held in these columns: this starter for ten from 2011 is  good guide. Chrissie is a lawyer, not a banker. She embarrassed herself and Sarko massively with various press conference bloomers while French Minister of Finance, and last week somehow managed to be found guilty of corruption on a massive scale, but not actually punished, as such.

In that last sense, she thus represents admirable continuity with Mario Draghi, a man with a career mostly dominated by cloud cover. But whereas Draghi had a script and a gift for hidden manipulation, Ms LaGarde has only a bouffant hairdo.

Ursula von der Leyen is the spawn of senior Eurocrats. She is Merkel’s Defence Minister and her term has not been without scandal. The German electorate rated her close to zero in recent voter research.

In the style of all those walking the undeserved red carpets of the EU, she has called Brexit “a burst bubble of hollow populist promises”, looks forward to the day when her new employer becomes The United States of Europe, and is right behind her wartime ally Federica Mogherini in enthusing about the EU Army.

A mistress of Orwellian Newspeak, she stresses the vital importance of preventing “further democratic involvement” from “impeding Europe’s ability to act.”

So there you are, wooly Remainers: try reforming this harridan from the inside.

The other two nonentities are barely worth a mention apart from the ever-present need to illustrate the EU’s obsessive love of mediocrity and criminality. Charles Michel was Prime Minister of Belgium until last November, when he was ousted in a no confidence vote; while the new EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell (a Spaniard) was (a) fined €30,000 last year for a “very serious breach” of insider trading rules on the Spanish stock market and (b) was forced to resign from the European University Institute over an undeclared €300,000-a-year conflict of interest….a veritable Guy Verhofstadt in the making. Except of course that Josep resigned, whereas Guyforit still hasn’t.

The whole point about a silly season, oddly enough, is that people who take themselves too seriously – for example, the triumphant 48% – think such stuff is far too silly to be of any interest to them. They stand quietly in the conformity queue, focused on keeping their place in that queue, for it is without a scintilla of doubt the queue for everlasting free holidays in Sorosania, Antifa human rights and Love not Hate from the Left.

The rest of us left the queue years ago, somewhat put off by the notice that promised ‘Hier geht es zu den Duschen’.