Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

22 November 2008

Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?

All across America, galvanised by an inspirational candidate, people stood in line for up to four hours in order to vote, many for the first time in their lives, and oh how I longed for an iota of that fervour and commitment to infect our own political scene. Instead, on our side of the pond, in our own hour of need, we were subjected to the same tired rhetoric that has long since been unfit for purpose. In this month of remembrance is there anybody at Westminster capable of inspiring us to rise out of the trenches with an Obama exhortation to ‘put your hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day’? In the unlikely event of such a wake-up call ever being made, would we be prepared to attack recession’s no-man’s land at the behest of Jack Straw, Harriet Harman, David Miliband, Geoff Hoon or indeed anybody in Gordon Brown’s rag-tag army of tired contemptibles?

The answer, sadly, has to be no. It is impossible to recall anything uplifting that Brown has uttered since the current crisis began; the only difference about him one can discern is an increase in smugness accompanied by the false smile and the fact that he has now condescended to wear a white tie at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet instead of his erstwhile lounge suit. Endlessly reciting the mantra that all our troubles are exclusively the result of global mistakes, he cannot bring himself to admit that the root cause of our new era of blood, toil, tears and sweat was his decade-long plunder of the family silver, to say nothing of the family gold. The only hope we can cling to is the thought that all politicians die at last of swallowing their own lies.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Bryan Forbes | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (7)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Austin Barry

November 20th, 2008 8:44am Report this comment

It is extraordinary that a country which can produce remarkable, inspirational figures in the arts, sciences and academia is governed at every level by second-rate, self-regarding, self-serving non-entities. Brown's gloomy landslide of a face epitomises all the venality and corruption of modern politics, and Jacqui Smith's its unattractive ignorant complacency. Our leaders are precisely described by the Irish term for preposterous dullards: gobshites.

Marc O'Polo

November 22nd, 2008 8:05am Report this comment

Brilliant article! Terrible shame that it's all so true.

Dodgy Geezer

November 24th, 2008 1:55am Report this comment

"It has become fashionable to denigrate Churchill, to pick holes in his long career, but those who now find sport in reducing him to their own size in all probability would not be here if he had not existed..."

Alas, probably not completely true. If Churchill had not existed, we would have had these hand-wringing types all over this island from the 1940s onward. Churchill, and his influence on later politicians, kept them out until the 1990s..

David Short

November 24th, 2008 3:31am Report this comment

I'm sure the Germans were as inspired by Hitler.

Churchill was a warmonger. If we had not fought the Second World War, we would be immmeasurably richer.

Ben

November 24th, 2008 1:58pm Report this comment

My thoughts exactly this cold weekend just gone.

As if the vomit-encrusted, litter-strewn pavements of South West London weren't enough to make you yearn for another time and place, I'd just been to the cinema to see the truly execrable Bond fiasco. Or Quantum of B******s as Kelvin McKenzie so rightly describes it.

When even our own fictious national icon is being trashed you know we're in trouble! Is nothing sacred?

John Thomas

November 24th, 2008 3:46pm Report this comment

What David Short clearly fails to realise is that Hitler had decided on aggression some while before Churchill cam to power, and that if, in the mid/later-30s, he had been firmly resisted (instead of being appeased, by pacifists, etc.)there would have been hardly any war. If Churchill had had power from say 1935, he would have firmly resisted Hitler (who is on record as saying that he would have backed down, if this had happened), and few would have died (no Americans) and there would have been no Holacaust. It was the appeasers who made the war what it became, not Churchill.

David Short

November 25th, 2008 6:10am Report this comment

I'm sorry but I can only reply as a retort to a John Thomas who not only presumes to know how I think ('realise' is the wrong word), but who is also illiterate or careless, or both.

Post comment