The sun’ll come up tomorrow
You know, nobody really complained when Status Quo churned out pretty much the same stuff year after year. Oasis pretty much got away with it as well. Sean Connery gained a massively successful movie career by being Sean Connery. All the time, every time. Similarly, in his movies, Michael Caine is Michael Caine. Like Weetabix or Lego or heroin, if you’ve got a winning product, why mess with it?
And so to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and the speech he gave in Berlin a few days ago.
It’s the usual stuff really, pitching for extended powers, putting the frighteners on again, etc. etc. And one phrase in the speech caught my eye:
The sky is dark.
Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes. From Sir Ian. It’s his favourite piece of scare-the-shit-out-of-you imagery. He used it not once but twice last year, in his Dimbleby Lecture and in a more populist piece for The Sun shortly afterwards.
I would go on, but why bother? In tribute to Sir Ian and his recycling of brooding scaremongery, I give you the post I wrote last year when he first expelled this rhetorical guff.
—
Does Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police commissioner, have any time to do any actual, y’know, policing? He seems to spend so much time putting the wind up the public these days that, if he was in any other profession, his boss would be saying, “do that on your own time, Blair, not the company’s.”
He’s been at it again tonight in his Dimbleby Lecture . (How many hearts must have sank at “During the next 40 minutes…”)
Is this his job? What he’s paid to do? I, and others, would argue that it is not.
And how about this?
The sky is dark…
Ring any bells? It’s the same gothic imagery he used in his last piece of scaremongery, published in The Sun, during his failed attempt to interfere in the parliamentary debate of the new terrorism legislation.
He’s obviously very pleased with the metaphor. Maybe it comes from a poem he wrote as a teenager (“Why do all the nice girls hate me?” or somesuch) and somebody said, “Oooh, Ian. I don’t know how you do it but you paint the picture so vividly”. That stayed with him and ever since he’s been dying to use the phrase again. And again.
It makes you wonder what’s next from Britain’s Top Cop. Maybe he could embark on a busking tour (as long as he’s got his busking licence) of the London Underground, regaling commuters with a rendition of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall“. Hours of fun to be had writing his set list. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It.
Posted on November 14th, 2006 at 3:06pm under T.W.A.T., The home front
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• 9 Comments |
Two can play at recycling.
Indeed. And Manningham-Buller popping up at the weekend fits in nicely as well. I have something brewing on the issue as a whole for later in the week…
Oh come on, we all know there’s nothing more conducive to making well-informed, rational decisions than an all-pervasive climate of eye-popping, shrieking, everyone-running-in-all-directions terror.
And speaking of scary moments, welcome back. Thought you’d been dobbed in to your hosts for giving succour to terrorists or something.
Nope, still here. They’ll never take me ali
John Le Mesurier once gave the advice – whether general or to anybody specific, I do not know – that you should play exactly the same part every time.
Leave the guy alone – you think he does know policing based on the speeches he makes? You think he gets weird little pleasure from scaring people? You think he sits in his bedroom masterbating over Asian men with bombs strapped to them?.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a giant risk of terrorism in this country and maybe you don’t know half of what Mr Blair does. Get a fu*king grip.
The police; their successes are private and their mess ups are very very public; but have enough common sense to know that, as is clearly evident here, you haven’t the first clue about the intensity of the current threat in our country nor the amount of things that need to be done to secure YOUR safety.
Does no* policing..
‘ you haven’t the first clue about the intensity of the current threat in our country nor the amount of things that need to be done to secure YOUR safety. ‘
‘The sky is dark’
Jean Charles de Menezes.
I’m still intrigued to know just what the effect all this talk of massive terrorist atrocities to come – espcially the talk of nukes – is going to do to the British economy.
By all accounts, London remains the economic powerhouse of the country – take that out, and we’re screwed. But if overseas investors start believing the likes of Sir Ian, and begin seeing the big smoke as too much of a risk, the logical thing for them to do is to pull all their investments out of our finanicial heartland, on the offchance that Abdullah gets lucky one of these days.
Hell – if half the CEOs of half the big companies in London had as clear a vision as Misery&Suffering above, the Square Mile would currently be a desolate wasteland – not thanks to any terrorist attack, but to the (evidently entirely sensible) relocation of every major institution to somewhere less likely to be a target.