Further to my recent remarks on seat-warmer conservatism, here is Boris Johnson at his apparently spectacularly successful global summit:
Johnson said that he wants the G-7 to be 'building back better, building back greener, building back fairer, and building back more equal and in a more gender-neutral and perhaps more feminine way.'
The Boris of twenty years ago would have hooted with derision at the above, and would have pelted with bread rolls and mange-tout anyone who uttered such twaddle at a Spectator lunch. I'm not sure even "long Covid" can account for a grown man committing to build back gender-neutrally. Is it all a giant leg-pull?
I see what remains of the Tory Twittersphere calls him "Fat Blair", but, to be fair to Tone, even he might jib at bollocks the size of the above. [UPDATE: "Fat Blair" is the coinage of Ronan Maher, who protests that, reasonably enough these days, he is no Tory.] And BoJo sold himself to the populace not as Fat Blair but as Thin Winston: Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, greener, more feminine men will still say, "This was their most gender-neutral hour."
~Part of what it means to be a conservative is a functioning bulls**t detector, as I believe Ernest Hemingway first formulated it. My old editor at the Speccie has evidently lost his, as has my old newspaper, the Telegraph. They've just fired Julie Burchill for tweeting that Harry and Meghan should have named their kid Georgina Floydiana. Mocking the fatuous concept of woke royalty is exactly what a conservative newspaper should be doing - but, of course, the former Torygraph is barely even residually such these days.
Instead of Georgina, the Markles, after a year of pissing all over the Queen and her family, named their baby Lilibet - appropriating a childhood nickname for Her Majesty hitherto used only by her parents and her husband (not many others get to call her anything but "Ma'am"). Like everything these hollow insincere poseurs do, it's cynically calculated - and one can imagine how the aged monarch feels about a unique closely-held soubriquet now being bandied by Colbert or Oprah or wherever the whingeing bolters are next scheduled. If it still had its bearings, the Telegraph would have been ordering its columnists to jeer at the Markles, not firing them for doing so.
~Just a few months ago, on one of his last shows, Rush complained about some Republican senator from a solidly red state "sounding like a Democrat" when talking about climate. The very least conservatives are entitled to is spokesmen who do not adopt the left's framing. The Donald Trump of 2016 could not be faulted on this - in particular, his willingness to talk about immigration from the viewpoint of the people who are already here.
On the other hand, I have no idea why he issued the following:
Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Next time I'm in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!
I suppose the above is intended to embarrass Zuckerberg by making him look like a pathetic star-struck creep calling the Oval Office and asking if he can come for dinner.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg has just announced via a lowly minion (Nick Clegg, former Deputy PM of the UK) that Trump will remain banned from Facebook for at least another two years. For a very modest sum Zuck successfully "fortified" (in Time's strikingly brazen euphemism) the election to be able to evict Trump from the White House, and I would imagine he's pretty confident that for similar chump change in 2024 he can re-fortify it sufficiently to keep the 45th president from ever getting back in.
So the dinner arrangements will be moot.
Which leaves the question: Why was Trump dining with him in the first place? Nobody voted for #OrangeManBad in order that he could schmooze the woke billionaires of social media. Why do we have to wait for a second term in order for Trump to do what he should have done in his first? And, maybe if it had been "all business" then, we wouldn't have to wait till 2025 for that return engagement.
I suppose it's not a big deal in the scheme of things, but I am puzzled as to why whoever's running Trump's post-presidency thought the above statement would make him look good, or (more important) strong.
~You'll be glad to hear, however, that the above-referenced "bulls**t detector" is not entirely defunct. In Cornwall, the Canadian delegation ceaselessly drew attention to the fact that, with the looming retirement of Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau is now the longest-serving western leader - or, as the Canucks put it, "the Dean of the G7".
I am reliably informed that everybody giggled.
~It was a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with our ongoing audio serialization of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade and my takes on John Profumo and Madame Chiang kai-Shek. Our Saturday movie date found Rick McGinnis with a dream cast, Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer, in a rather odd and category-defying picture. Our Sunday Poem continued my recent animal theme, and our Sunday song selection got to the big question at the heart of the whole business. Our marquee presentation was our latest Tale for Our Time - George Orwell's Animal Farm: click for Part Six, Part Seven and Part Eight. Part Nine airs tonight.
If you were too busy building back gender-neutrally this weekend, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poem are special productions for members of The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
