Cornered vipers can be very unpleasant. I met a pair 18 months ago while renovating the barn here. My only shield was a large spade, and the mass of venom dribbling down it following the encounter was astonishing.
David Cameron is a cornered viper. He botched last night’s debate, and so many registrations to vote were placed at the Government website immediately afterwards, it crashed. Crashed registration sites may simply be, of course, the new ‘banking glitch’: all one can say is that it seems highly likely the last minute voters were overwhelmingly Brexiteers. That hypothesis was quickly supported by a frantic Jeremy Corbyn calling for a deadline extension.
Cameron’s real problem is that a combination of bringing home a risible ‘deal’ from Brussels and then indulging in infantile scare tactics have finally tipped his credibility balance. Market research sources in the UK say the biggest single change in recent weeks has been the Prime Minister’s ‘character’ assessment in interviews. Lynton Crosby probably picked this up and then contributed to a Telegraph piece saying that the risks approach to condemning Brexit “is clearly working”. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
What’s more, blaming Brexit for everything from Adam’s loss of innocence onwards has less and less evidence to support it. The US jobs report was enough to scare Yellen away from a rates rise, and only yesterday we saw this.
I’ve lost track of how many cuts in the growth outlook the WB and the IMF have made, but the global markets have been stuck in an almost flat mode for seven weeks.
Oil may have seen some price recovery, but I remain convinced that this was largely manipulation (the oil business could not have lived with permanently cheap crude) helped along by Chinese stockpiling. Demand for oil continues to reflect the reality of global slump:
You could say that, without artificially high prices, the US oil business would be frack broke hahahahaha, oh how we laughed. And then – as if to deliver the final coup de grace to the Bull’s neck – Chinese data yet again fell below expectations:
So there’s Dodgy Dave the venomous viper cornered by common sense and his own breathtaking sense of superiority. Nobody believes a thing he says outside the core Tory diehard denialists, Washington and Brussels think he’s a dud, and he has reached the point he did not want to get to: how to stop the inevitable happening by other than legal means.
Mr Cameron is not worried about breaking the law: he did it in the last election, he has lied to Parliament on many occasions, and he has used both EU and taxpayers’ money to try and get his way in this referendum. He is a serial liar, cheat, justice-perverter, tax-evader and law-breaker anyway….so none of what he must do now will worry him.
The only problem is, he doesn’t know what to do without being caught at it. He knows full well that he’s been rumbled…and that from here on in, everyone will be watching him like a hawk.
He also knows that he will no longer so easily enjoy the protection of his privileged position and his Party….or the immunity that comes from his international co-conspirators.
But finally, he knows he cannot say no. The order, “You will not lose” has come down. This time, however, there is a further condition: “Don’t get caught, because if you do, we don’t know anything, we are shocked, and you’re on your own.”
Now the viper must strike. Do not be surprised by anything.
Just as, indeed, you should not have been surprised by this:
Parisian friends assured me at the time that Jérome Kerviel had done what he did with the full knowledge of his employer Société Générale. The Court’s decision seems to support that. So then, logically we should see Inspecteur Maigret of the Sureté investigating further at SocGen, right?
Don’t hold your breath.
The Slog 