I don’t usually write topical posts simply because I’m a rather slow and measured writer. Some might even call me lazy. I write a blog post then I re-write it. I add things and take away things. I leave post drafts to simmer and mature and then I fine tune them and the process usually takes quite a few weeks so writing something topical is generally out of the question. This post which I actually thought was pretty topical is therefore only reasonably topical, at least it was when I wrote it, so round about now, when you the reader finally gets to see it, it’s probably not that topical after all. Now we’ve got that clear, here we go.
I’ve always been interested in politics and the recent election in the UK was really fascinating. It was clear the public were ready for change although I personally thought that the Conservative party would win again but with a much reduced majority. That of course shows just how much I know because the Conservatives were actually crushed with the Labour party winning a huge majority putting Sir Keir Starmer into number 10 Downing Street potentially for the next five years. Rishi Sunak apologised to the nation saying that he and his party hadn’t delivered on their promises and promptly resigned as head of the party. Why leaders seem to be so quick to resign these days after an election defeat, I really don’t know but a new leader has yet to be appointed and as I write this Rish Sunak is the new leader of the opposition. Who will be the new Conservative leader, well I wonder if Liz Truss will run again? Sorry but she lost her seat in the election. Penny Mordant perhaps? Nah, she lost her seat too.
It was interesting to watch the first Prime Minister’s questions with both Mr Starmer and Mr Sunak in their new roles. At one point Starmer referred to Sunak as Prime Minister before checking himself. Old habits die hard of course. PM’s question time was very reserved and polite with MPs and Ministers congratulating each other on their appointments and so on. Eventually though, those questions and debates must invariably get tougher.
After the election there was the usual round of what went wrong from the Conservatives. Various explanations were put forward but not one, certainly to my way of thinking, were the actual reasons the Government had been kicked out. My feelings were that perhaps the public were fed up with all the various changes of Prime Minister, all of which were not voted on by the public. Of course, that’s not the way our system works, we don’t vote in the Prime Minister, just the party that takes office. Maybe also, the public were just a little cheesed off with the way the Government acted during the Covid pandemic as the Government made various rules for us; we couldn’t go out, we couldn’t meet with family and friends and had to self-isolate but that didn’t stop various Government officials flaunting the rules as well as parties going on at 10 Downing St which meant that Boris Johnson was ultimately forced to resign. Surely that was the main reason people did not vote Conservative this time round.
An election is also coming up soon in the USA. President Biden has been criticised after a debate with Donald Trump during which he was clearly stumbling over words and phrases and looked at one point as though he was going to nod off. The guy is 81 though, perhaps he was ready for his evening nap. Since then, the big news is that he has decided to withdraw as a candidate in the election and is endorsing his Vice President to stand in his place, Kamila Harris.
Other news in the US election was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The assassin’s bullet grazed his ear and Trump survived, much to the delight of his fans. Since then, the head of the Secret Service has resigned after criticism of her agency’s protection of the former President.
The very last time a sitting president decided not to run again was when Lyndon Johnson decided not to run in 1968. Johnson wanted to create a great society for the American people but his administration was completely caught up in the Vietnam war. In one of 1968’s first primaries, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy featured well against Johnson, prompting LBJ’s arch enemy Robert Kennedy to enter the contest. Johnson withdrew and Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. The democratic candidate eventually turned out to be LBJ’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. I don’t think Humphrey even entered any primaries so how he eventually won the nomination I really don’t know. Either way he ran but was ultimately soundly defeated by Richard Nixon.
If you follow the US election on television news like me, you might tend to think that there are only two candidates in this election, Harris and Trump but there are other candidates too, very few of which are ever mentioned by the TV networks. I mentioned above that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 but in 2024, his son, Robert Kennedy Junior, is also a candidate. He is running as an Independent as well as other candidates put forward by minor political parties. Do Kennedy and the other Independents have any sort of a chance in the election? For most the answer is no but for Kennedy, a member of America’s most famous political family, I reckon he must have at least an outside shot at the big prize especially for those disenchanted with the two big contenders.
One of the things that led me to writing about politics was that I’ve just finished a book by John Simpson called Strange Places, Questionable People. It’s a sort of autobiography although very little of his personal life seeps through into the pages as it’s more about his life with the BBC than about his personal life. He began working for the BBC in the 1960s at BBC radio and one of his first political encounters was with Harold Wilson. Simpson cornered the PM on a railway station, pushed his microphone forward only for Wilson to punch him in the stomach. He goes on to talk about many other encounters, happily non-violent encounters with other Prime Ministers like John Major and Margaret Thatcher.
Some of his reporting from various war-torn places like Bosnia, Kabul and Iraq are pretty hair raising. He was in South Africa to cover the election of Nelson Mandela and was in Moscow to see the coup that overpowered Gorbachev and the rise of Boris Yeltsin.
My favourite story in the book was about Boris Yeltsin during the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev. There were many in the communist party who did not like the new reforms and decided to take action. Gorbachev was at his dacha when the coup occurred. Back in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank to defend the new freedoms of Russia and Simpson interviewed Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister. Shevardnadze went in to Moscow’s White House to see Yeltsin and when he came out Simpson asked him for a comment. Shevardnadze responded by saying Yeltsin had told him he would ‘stay here to the end. Until the last drop of blood in my body.’.
Later when the Soviet Union had disintegrated and Shevardnadze had become the President of Georgia, Simpson once again interviewed him and mentioned that moment in Moscow. Shevardnadze thought for a moment and then revealed that Yeltsin was actually unconscious with an empty bottle of vodka lying beside him. But what about that stuff you said Yeltsin had told you asked Simpson?
‘What could I have done,’ said Shevardnadze, ‘what would have happened if I had said Yeltsin’s too drunk to talk?’
Interestingly, back then one of Yeltsin’s lieutenants was a young former KGB man called Putin. Wonder what happened to him?
Letters from an Unknown Author! 