A Crooked Man in a Crooked House

As His Imperial Majesty Tony Blair tries desperately to hang on for his ten years in office, it would seem he's following the trend set by that other great socialist multi-millionaire hypocrite and crook, Bill Clinton, to start off a reign with the blessing of the nation, and to end it with his collar felt by his own minions. My current betting is that Blair will stagger over the line of May the 7th, this year, and then utterly collapse into ignominy.

To have started a premiership with so much goodwill and to then end it with your hand so flagrantly in the till, and so obviously thinking of nothing but yourself and your own personal short-term interests in what you can sweat from the serfs, is of course fully in line with the predictions of Hoppe's 'Democracy: The God That Failed', the favourite book on our survey below. If you haven't read this mighty work, a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster of a tome, then now really is the time.

The central character it describes, the flashy demagogue thief, is an almost too-real sketch of Tony Blair. However, the silver lining of Blair's waste of ten years' worth of the fruits of British industry, all of it spent on the rents of his friends and cronies, is that never again in my lifetime will the British people believe in the sanctity and goodness of any politician, no matter what emotional tricks he plays to make us love him. I think all the scales have fallen from all of our eyes, and now we know that whatever any of them says about anything, we know that they are in it entirely for themselves and their own psychic profit, whether financial, sexual, or in the exercise of power for its own sake. Our current prime minister really was a last drink at the last chance saloon of deluding yourself into believing in the goodness of politicians. So well done, Tony.

Let's just hope that in your Clintonian decline your Queen of Narnia of a wife doesn't do a Hillary, and press herself into our bosoms as Tony Blair Mark II. Ye Gods! Yes, it would be good from a long-term point of view to further wreck the survival of democracy, but would any of us make it through the short-term? It is a horror that even fails to make it beyond the confines of my twisted imagination. Let us hope that it never comes to pass.