Let’s face it, voting in a general election is like buying a pig in a poke. How do we know that the new government won’t make a pig’s ear of its job to lead the nation?
In a way, one could say that these days the electorate is prepared to act as so many guinea pigs – and have as much of a chance to end up in clover.
Dave has now been conducting his experiment on Britain for six years, every one a vindication of the old adage that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
We are well justified in thinking that his idea of leadership is all about leading the nation like so many pigs to the slaughter. Part of the problem is that Dave has soft principles, which leaves him unable to make hard choices.
A vacillating prime minister who doesn’t have the power of his convictions because he has no convictions may initiate any number of promising measures, but he’ll never go the whole hog.
Whatever is promising runs the risk of being unpopular, and do you think Dave will ever risk his own political future for the sake of doing the right thing? Yes, and pigs will fly.
Yet trying to explain to a modern politician that he should place the nation’s interest before his own is like casting pearls before swine.
I must say I share Dave’s amazement at the ease with which he and his jolly friends took over the Tory party. He didn’t say it was like stealing acorns from a blind pig, but he might as well have done. That is a comment not so much on him as on the party, which has Conservative in its name but not at its core.
The popular tendency is to blame Dave’s ineptitude on his class. Class envy, not to say hatred, comes naturally to today’s masses, who seem to believe that living high off the hog one’s whole life from birth ought to disqualify one from high office.
True enough, being raised in an ivory tower may give a man a rather skewed view of life – but it doesn’t have to. Intelligence and sensitivity could fill the gap left by insufficient experience, preventing the man from being pig-ignorant of hard realities.
However, when a man with neither intelligence nor sensitivity looks on life from the vantage point of an ivory tower, the result can be devastating – not so much for him as for the nation he gets to lead. He will never bring home the bacon.
One look at Britain’s great PMs of the past will show that few of them were either paupers or proletarians. Churchill, for example, proves that living in hog heaven doesn’t automatically mean making a pig’s ear of leading the country at a time of troubles.
In a similar situation, could Dave be relied on to save Britain’s bacon? Somehow one doubts it. All he’s good at is telling us porkies about the country’s state and prospects, or his own intentions.
The porky he has been trying to sell the nation most persistently is that somehow he can force enough reform on the EU to make it consonant with Britain’s interests.
“Ja,” commented Frau Merkel with a wink and a sly smile. “Und schweinen will fly.”