completely honest

There’s a poster on a bus shelter between here and the tram station. It’s the DSS bullying its clients:

If you’re not completely honest, we’ll be on to you

…or words to that effect. “Completely honest” is right. That’s the phrase I remember specifically.

What struck me about it is the contrast between the government’s attitude towards people who lose their jobs and apply for the dole they contributed to when paying taxes and the sentimental consensus congealing around David Cameron and his cocaine adventures (come on, does anyone now think he never had a close up view of a glass topped coffee table?). How tragic that a pleasant young man should be prevented from getting what he wants now because he had some of what he wanted before.

The line taken on the DSS poster was: prove you’re not a crook, which is obviously not the only thing the government has to say to the public. The other thing is: prove you’re not a terrorist. Obviously, David Cameron isn’t part of the government. But he is part of a general political and economic consensus within which the government operates. There’s a conviction up there that there’s no such thing as a “job for life” and that the public have to be managed and disciplined to meet the requirements of the market and the occupational vanity of the political classes.

I don’t think it matters that David Cameron liked the odd toot way back when. I don’t think it matters if he likes it now. But I don’t like horizontal lenience and vertical severity. If we have to be completely honest with them, they should have to be completely honest with us. After all, David Cameron is a jobseeker.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that if I was a newspaper editor and had in my possession a photo of DC hoovering up a line or two, then at this current point in time I'd be asking myself the following question. Is knocking off a candidate for leader of the opposition a good enough story, or is it better to wait until we can knock off an actual leader of the opposition?

Naturally, that approach runs the risk of Cameron losing, which would effectively kill the story - though you might get a bit of mileage out of "how close the party of Churchill came to electing a dope fiend as it's leader shock horror".

The best way to minimize that risk - to set skittish Tory hearts at rest - would be to bait the trap. Let it be known how relaxed you were about it, that it was a youthful peccadillo, something of the dim and distant past etc, etc...and then after he's elected, you clear the front page.

Comments

[mr k]

What ARE the conservative parties opinions on drug use? I assume David will be all for allowing users to avoid any kind of jail sentence, as he can by chuckling about it. What is it about politicans that they can get away with crimes that the lesser mortals can't?

Oh yeah, they rule the country... still...

[Justin]

"...we can knock off an actual leader of the opposition?"

Why not sit on it for another four years and scalp a prime minister-to-be during the election campaign?

[Phil Hunt]

What ARE the conservative parties opinions on drug use?

Drug users are all evil depraved individuals who deserve to be locked up. Unless they are Tory MPs, of course. Or sons of Jack Straw. Then they are decent honourable people showing a regrettable but understandable human weakness.

[Reinder]

Dude, the party of Churchill already had Churchill for a leader!

[Paddy Carter]

I know this question is naive, bordering on the cretinously so, but:

1. everybody knows evasions amount to an admission, so ...
2. everybody know that David Cameron has taken cocaine, and ...
3. nobody seems to care

so for the love of God why can't he just admit it?

[jamie]

Confucious believed that the performance of ritual was the cornerstone of the state, and this is a sort of neo-Confucian ritual. If someone just said "yeah, I took a bunch of drugs so what" the world as we know it would end.

Which maybe it would. Once people start getting the idea that what politicians do doesn't matter, they might also start getting funny notions about their relationships as individuals with the state.