Could Rishi Sunak take a leaf out of Francis Urquhart’s book?
I CAN barely look at newspapers or news programmes these days – full of politicians, their pals and unelected peers sneering as they trouser vast sums of money while the rest of the country counts the pennies and wait for gigantic energy bills to thud through their letter boxes.
Westminster is a never-ending carousel of corruption, and it seems to be getting worse.
The ineffectual Rishi Sunak, bolstered by his chums, treats SNP politicians with barely concealed contempt.
These are the MPs that we in Scotland returned with several mandates which – unfortunately – they have ignored until it is now too late.
Nicola Sturgeon’s ill-thought-out attempt to look as if she was doing something positive about independence is in tatters, and all this nonsense about using a general election as a de facto indyref is a complete non-starter.
I don’t know where we go from here when our democratic processes are being dismantled by a government we did not elect, but it’s bound to get worse before it gets any better.
To get away from it all the other night, I binge-watched the first series in the House of Cards Trilogy, where the ruthless Tory chief whip Francis Urquhart, played by the late, great Ian Richardson, sets his ducks in a row as he prepares for a run at No 10 – all the while denying that he’s interested in becoming PM.
To a constant refrain of, “I’m simply a back-room boy,” FU schemes, plots, manipulates and manoeuvres everyone around him, including young journalist Mattie Storin (who was nominated for a BAFTA TV Award for her role), until he is the only real
choice for the top job.
Former Tory MP Michael Dobbs, who now sits in the Lords, wrote the trilogy in 1989 during the last days of the Thatcher reign and the book spawned the TV dramatisation, as well as a US version made by Netflix.
Although it is fiction, much of the story is more than believable and illustrates the truth of the ties between power-broking media moguls and top politicians.
I’m now waiting for the opportunity to re-watch the rest of the trilogy, only too aware that the real House of Cards is probably slightly more feral than Dobbs’s writings.
Pip pip.
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