Oh, no, he didn't!

[shewhomust]

The front page of yesterday's Guardian -

Yes, I know, things have moved on since then. I don't know whether to apologise for this sudden outburst of posting about politics, or for not posting more, more promptly. Suddenly, people are behaving uncharacteristically: friends who aren't normally interested in political minutiae are glued to the Parliament channel, learned antiquarians are sending me links to YouTube - and I, it seems, have things to say that I don't, for once, hear other people saying better. So, yesterday's Guardian -

- had a big front page headline, above a photograph of the Prime Minister: "He misled the Queen, the people and parliament". I wouldn't call that 'humbug' exactly, but I don't know anyone who actually heard of the prorogation of parliament and thought "Well, now that you come to mention it, it's about time we had a Queen's speech. I've been wondering how Parliament was going to spend its time this autumn..." I don't know whether Boris was trying to prevent Parliament interfering with his plans for Brexit, or whether he was just trying to avoid being put on the spot and asked questions he didn't want to answer. But I wasn't misled into thinking that this was just a normal piece of procedure, business as usual, and nor were you, and nor were any of the people who immediately challenged it in the courts.

What about the Queen, was she misled? If you believe all the reports of her intelligence, her sound grasp of the issues, it seems unlikely.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the only person Boris Johnson managed to mislead about the grounds for proroguing Parliament was Boris Johnson.

Comments

[shewhomust]

Except that so much of what we see is not the man but the performance. I don't much like a man who would opt for such a persona, but I have no sense of who he is, as a man.