not safe on yachts

The other week, former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian gave a speech in which he said that replacing his government with the Kuomintang was like replacing a man who occasionally got drunk and pissed himself with someone who shat himself all the time, drunk or sober.

Aside from being an elegant riff on lesser evil theory, the Osborne/Deripaska affair seems to bear ex-president Chen out in terms of British politics. You’d have to be exceptionally idealistic these days not to accommodate the idea of senior figures from both major political parties schmoozing around Russian oligarchs, but part of what is emerging here is that Osborne simply has no idea how to comport himself in company, albeit plutocratic company.

The case for the prosecution – and the Guardian are going in very hard here – portrays an absolute boor, a Bullingdon bully after all these years. Crashing his old mate’s villa – the old mate who happens to be a Rothschild, no less – wheedling an invitation to the plutocrat’s yacht, endlessly nagging for a bung, getting blanked, and then milking the occasion for the purposes of malicious political gossip that could only have originated with him. It’s like some public school yahoo at a party asking every black person in the room if they’ve got any ganja.

We’re naturally talking about the kind of circles here where friends use each other as a matter of routine, where the ability of people to use each other successfully is part of the material of friendship. But this still implies a trust relationship. It puts a premium on discretion. It requires a certain amount of downtime for people to establish whether they can trust each other as a basis for proceeding further. And there’s Gideon: eating with his hands and grunting. It might as well have been Ozzy Osbourne on that yacht.

New Labour: safe on yachts. Tories: not safe on yachts. Who’d have thought it?

Comments

[Alex]

Among other things, this raises the horrid possibility that Boris Johnson is the clever one.

[Tom]

"Boris Johnson is the clever one."

We've suspected that for a while. All looking forward to 2010, are we?

[jamie]

It looks that way, doesn't it?