Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

In a wonderful farmhouse retreat in Cumbria,  I have little inclination to keep up with the news. So today just some quick observations.

The Kermit the Frog moment was a speechwriter’s blunder and a PR disaster. Boris’s message to the UN, whatever it was, on the critical issues of climate change and global warming, was lost in a zillion replays of an idiotic line  and a torrent of twitter derision.

On the growing fix now list are now mounting crises for which  the government has no obvious answers, or if it has,  they are too late or too little. A pattern under the regime of K the F to which we have become accustomed, since the oven ready Brexit election and the onset of the ‘mild illness’ pandemic.

There is the shortage of lorry drivers and key workers causing failures in supplies of almost everything, with food and petrol topping the potential panic agenda. There is the recurring crisis at airports with Border Force inadequacies snarling up terminals. We have an astonishing collapse of the the distribution arm of the byzantine electricity and gas markets. And there are signs of serious inflation coming down the line.

So the government has a lot to do. Almost everything is of the Tories’ own making during a decade of poor national leadership. Fix it all and Boris could emerge invincible in the face of a rather divided and piecemeal Labour reboot attempt.

But to do that he will have to offer a lot more than silly jokes about Kermit the Frog.