The Twilight Of Incompetence

 For the last couple of weeks I have been lucky enough to be viable. Creating a virtual conference for a major global brand which will eventually go live this Thursday. It’s been a long, but engaging process with many ups and downs, but I’m very grateful for its part in my life. Otherwise, like so many of my peers, I would have no contact whatsoever with the world in which I work.

I’ve been out and about filming and spending days in the studio, and if one tends to ignore the sight of people’s face-masks, and the Covid Marshall vigilantly keeping an eye on our distancing, it would seem to have been work as usual.

Yet every day there has been a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I should be at home. I am 63 years of age and the government would term me to be mildly obese. Lockdown hasn’t helped and a hitherto subdued passion for chocolate digestives has risen to the fore. Having the time to cook decent meals hasn’t helped either, and both lunch and dinner have often featured a dessert. Add to that mild COPD and I worry about the virus.

 When we finish this job on Thursday, the major achievement will be having survived to the end of it. The constant threat of ever-changing government regulations from the Mad Hatter’s tea party that seems to be running the country at the moment has not made things easy. Contingency planning has had to change on a day-to-day basis. I haven’t seen the film “Contagion” but I’m pretty sure that the gripping climax of beating the virus isn’t achieved by closing pubs at 10 PM. It’s hard to find an example of a cinematic fictional Prime Minister or President who has stood in front of his country and forgotten the regulations he has just imposed.

Johnson and his yes boys (it’s hard to think of Priti Patel as a woman given her constant absence of humanity) have plunged this country into a twilight of incompetence. You can hear a collective sigh ease out of the doors and windows of village and town alike as yet another measure “backed by The Science” is launched upon us.

Students imprisoned, a workforce now being told to work from home having just mastered the inadequacies of public transport. Trains and buses packed to capacity bearing revellers thrown onto the streets simultaneously each evening.

If you scripted it, you couldn’t make what Johnson’s government has done more unbelievable. To watch the blustering cockhole on Andrew Marr this morning was to see someone whose dream job has proved way beyond him.

Often when my agent rings to tell me I've got a job, that’s the moment of joy. Turning up every day at 6:30 AM in the middle of a field to film and the joy wears thin. Putting on the dinner jacket for a gala screening and it’s back. So it seems to be with Johnson’s attitude to the role of Prime Minister. He always wanted to be Prime Minister. He wants to have been Prime Minister. He has, however, discovered that he doesn’t like being Prime Minister, and we’ve all discovered that he’s pretty useless as it.

Whatever alien influence is governing him from behind-the-scenes — the deeply uncharismatic Darth Cummings or the ball-sack cheeked Gove (see the new Spitting Image for quite frankly one of their best puppets) — they are making a first class absolutely top hole hash of it.

Perhaps we do need another national lockdown. Perhaps we are all safer indoors. Not to shield us from the virus, but to protect us from the sheer bungling ineptitude of our government. I suppose the one good thing to take from this is that laughter is immensely powerful. Across the globe, no matter how Covid is playing out for them, the world can turn their eyes towards the UK and split their sides with mirth at Bungling Boris and his forty thieves.