A Responsible Adult

I was phoned up on Tuesday by one of the polling agencies, as a randomly selected individual, to be asked what my opinions were on a variety of current topics. The last time I was approached in this way was quite a while ago – in fact it was the day after John Major became Prime Minister and most of the questions then were how I thought he would do in his new job: I seem to recall that I said I didn’t think he could be any worse than the previous PM and I still regard him as an intelligent leader who has never been given credit for some of the genuinely positive things that he did achieve in spite of being surrounded by a bunch of, as he put it, S H 1 Ts.

The questions this time were general sampling questions about my age, education, employment status and how I voted at the last elections and at the Scottish Independence and EU referendums. The questions going forward were more about what I thought the countries prospects are (drowning in manure was not an actual option) and who I thought the next Prime Minister should be. There were a whole raft of names to choose from, some that I had heard of and others less familiar along with options for Other / Don’t Know. I went for “Other” and, when pressed, the only answer I could honestly give was that it was about time that we had a grown up in charge.

It may sound flippant but I believe that the main reason that the country is in such a state of limbo is that those that were left in charge were a bunch of irresponsible half-wits. Cameron comes across as the President of the sixth-form debating society, rather smug about his achievements despite being unable to piece together a rational argument. His opponents, in the form of Boris and Gove, have the demeanour of immature adolescent pranksters who have suddenly realised that their schoolboy high jinks have gone seriously awry leaving them to slope away to let others clear up their wreckage whilst Cameron has simply run away from a car crash of his own making. We need an adult to sort this out and yet there appears to be no-one with any reasoning or responsibility to take control.

Having looked at this morning’s news it looks like Theresa May is the front runner. Now, she certainly looks like a grown-up but unfortunately appears to be one whose entire world-view is informed by the pages of the Daily Mail or some other organ of right-wing bigotry. Do we really need someone in a position of power that actively hates most of the people they are meant to represent? The other alternative is Andrea Leadsom who appears to be radically opposed to any form of expert opinion and claims that Christianity is the driving force in her life. There are several hundred Conservative MPs. Is that really the best that they can come up with?

I suspect that part of the problem is that, sooner or later, someone will have to own up to the electorate exactly what leaving the EU actually entails and that it is most likely to be diametrically opposed to what many of those voting to leave were lead to believe that they were getting. To borrow from John Major, the S H 1 T will hit the fan and I suspect that many of those in power will be covered in it. One solution would be to spell out exactly what is being proposed and to give people the choice of a full withdrawal from the EU (the WTO option) with the bleak outlook for the nation’s future that it would entail; a Norwegian style option that would mean embracing all the regulations of the EU without any veto on them; or simply staying in the EU and saying “Sorry, it was all a big misunderstanding.” However, taking control of the situation in this way would require a responsible adult in charge and I don’t think that there is one available.