Ego sum valde callidus vir!

Above, The Major-General’s Song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Mike Leigh at English National Opera.
Today’s blog-post (http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=86772) by Dr. North has a witheringly and deservedly harsh critique upon the oratorical contribution offered by a certain Boris the Buffoon.
Of course, it is the case that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a very clever man, a man who could understand today’s title at first sight without the need to run it through Google Translate!
But that Dear Reader is something that goes to the core of Johnson’s success. You see, one of the things Dr. North has been railing about these past months has been the dead hand of prestige. This is because the Brexit issue has been dogged by the heightened acceptance of statements not because of their intrinsic worth, or lack thereof, because of the perception on the part of the audience that the people making the statements have status which gives authority.
When we use the word authority, we don’t mean it in the manner of a line of command but rather the deference accorded to the person because of their prestige. The phrase, “upper class with a classical education” can be substituted for the word, “prestige”.
The corrosive effects of this is admirably described by the following comment on Dr. North’s blog: “….it is [Johnson’s speech] cat nip to people with catastrophic inferiority complexes who think that because someone knows a Latin phrase or two they must now what they are talking about….”
The Brexit Shambles we are spectating upon is something that many younger members of the British Public will be able to tell their grandchildren. It is the opinion – stated before and doubtless to be stated again in the future – of the British Gazette that we could be witnesses to a historical economic and political event, outside of conflict, the measure of which equals in it’s ruinous effects to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble of August 1721.
We are living in perplexing times. Perplexing because one attempts to ascribe a rational interpretation to people’s actions and when these people appear to be behaving irrationally, one is left asking: WHY?
An example of the extraordinary times is the rise of this man:What is extraordinary about Jacob Rees-Mogg is that far from seeking to avoid becoming a caricature of a character in a PG Woodhouse novel, the man seems to revel in this!
The textbook, “Politics for Dummies” advises that such as Rees-Mogg do what his fellow Etonian, David Cameron did; play down the toff. This has been the accepted wisdom for decades, as evidenced by the change adopted by the Queen from those early marked SSRP vowels to her modern unmarked vowels. Yet Rees-Mogg will have none of it!