Come back Monty Python

This TV show ran between 1969 and 1974. It was sometimes hilarious, sometimes dull but always nibbling at the edge of good taste, convention and conservatism. Python in its often ridiculous way captures the foolishness of authority.

In the recent cost of living crisis as the media has embarked on money saving food ideas, offal and fish heads have appeared on the menu and, of course, Spam. This square-shaped mash-up of pork, water, salt, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrate recently celebrated its 85th anniversary. One myth insists that its name is actually an acronym for "Scientifically Processed Animal Matter." Others that it stands for “Spiced Ham” or “Specially Processed American Meat.”

It has sold over 8 million cans and in over 44 countries. It’s still one of the most famous food brands. It even has its own T-Shirt “I think therefore I Spam.”

But it was Monty Python that really brought Spam back to life 50 years ago in their lyrically complex musical tribute: 

Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!
Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam

Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am
Spa-a-a-a-a-a-a-am

Lovely Spam! (Lovely Spam!)!)
Lovely Spam!

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam!

 

And it struck me that some of their most famous sketches remain relevant today:

 

The Dead Parrot sketch which brilliantly encapsulates the issues we’ve just experienced with our departing  Prime Minister and her denial of her demise.

 

The Four Yorkshireman who were affluent businessmen reminiscing about their deprived backgrounds. Their nostalgia becomes more livid and competitive reaching this absurdity:

 

“Right.. I used to get up in the morning at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill, and pay da mill owner to let us work there. And when I went home our dad used to murder us in cold blood, each night, and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah. Yah, you try an tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you...”

I’ve been like that recently telling younger people about the Three Day Week in the 1970s and, as I say, you try telling young people of today that and they won’t believe you.

 

But when it comes to bureaucracy and the offices of government what can beat the Ministry of Silly Walks? This may be the best thing John Cleese ever did.

 

 

The occasional shaft of absurdity or silliness can be highly effective satire. Monty Python could do that sometimes although – not unjustly - Morecambe and Wise criticised them saying the Python team could be annoying and unprofessional.

“…there’s five or six minutes of utter boredom. And then there’s three minutes of very funny and then another eight minutes of boredom.” 

I used to get irritated by being told by friends  from abroad that leaving Brexit had made us a laughing stock but I accept now we’re reputationally diminished after the Truss farce and the possibility of Johnson standing again when he’s highly likely to be expelled from the Commons for lying to them - no I didn’t, yes you did…

The past few months should have been enough to convince even the most right wing Tory member that we can’t go on like this, that the parrot is dead, that Boris is a bad man and own up to the fact that this government is damaging the country. I am not an especially political person and avoid ideological debates but it’s time for Monty Pythonesque ridicule to return.

In the meantime sit back and experience what might be one of the most loony weeks in our history.

BRILLIANT MARKETING IS ALL THEY NEED

In Britain we’re in the midst of a marketing battle. This is what the current Tory shoot-out is. If I were advising either candidate I’d be advising a no-holds-barred, go for the jugular approach. Winner takes all. The loser is probably finished as a politician so there’s nothing to lose.

Currently Brand Truss (the only potential PM to have the same name as a medical implement) has a significant lead in the polls offering a package of tax cuts and optimism that would even make her erstwhile boosterish boss blush (only he never does that). She wants us to be the “Aspiration Nation”. She belongs to that school of thinking like advertising agency, Saatchi’s, “nothing is impossible.” It’s obviously a seductive proposition  originating from the“I’m going to be King of the World” aspirations of a Boris Johnson. 

Brand Truss is a marketeer’s delight. Big budget confidence. A desire to break the mould. To grow. Here’s a quote she might like from Keller Williams, the American realty company coined:

“When you go from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset a new world of possibilities opens up.” 

But growth is not easy, not in the current world with war in Ukraine, global recession and a series of problems closer to home in Scotland, France and Italy. Since 1961 we’ve achieved ‘real’ growth, namely over 5% in only 5 years and we’ve had negative growth in 8 years. The Truss manifesto reminds me of Anthony Barber’s in 1972, when he was Chancellor of Exchequer in the Heath government. Barber initiated a 'dash for growth', a hugely ambitious budgetary policy aimed to deliver 10% growth over two years pushing  both the fiscal and monetary pedals to the floor in a confident and focused attempt to detonate growth. 

It failed.

Brand Sunak  is a teller of truth. The Doctor who says sympathetically but firmly “I’m afraid you haven’t got long”. 

He quietly ridicules the fairy story of growth in a world where expert voices would prefer to see us stabilise and reduce debt. But his is not a great marketing story. He sat at Boris’ right hand and his legacy from his boss has been contempt and a damning reference (“do not hire this man”.) Rishi is a marketeer’s nightmare. “Sales are down. The budget’s reduced. I don’t want anything too creative.” 

And he isn’t very visible yet. “Let my record speak itself” doesn’t play well when that record is to have been number two (however reluctantly) to a bloke called Boris who’s now stabbing him in the back of his very tight suit.

Still nearly all the smartest people think he’s clever, thoughtful, an excellent leader and a very hard worker. If I were advising him I’d say become a daily good-news story visiting farms, schools, businesses, petrol stations, hospitals, care homes creating stories about how caring and well prepared he is, never getting caught out on what the prices of a pint of milk or a loaf of Hovis are*.

And every day say “Liz is a nice person for sure but her economic plans are wrong and will make our economy worse.”

His comms advisors have to be pumping stories about Anthony Barber and Liz Truss. Non-stop simple messaging that makes the “Sunak right. Truss wrong” rubric unmissable.

At present he’s invisible. Staying like that he’ll lose badly.

Meanwhile Boris uncta porcus+ is lying in wait. He’d probably beat either contestant now if he could stand and MPs are already beginning to ask  “what have we done?”

 

*80p and £1.15

+ Boris the greased pig                                                                              

WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

Have you noticed that bookies have invaded virtually everywhere we live. There are hundreds of them. Baylor University Professor Earl Grinols estimates that addicted gamblers cost the U.S. alone between $32.4 billion and $53.8 billion a year. Gambling is going to be a much greater problem in the future … I bet you.

But risk, although fundamental to gambling, is a much larger issue the understanding of which will shape all our lives. Government policy hinges on risk analysis. Personally, we daily make decisions based on our judgement of the likelihood of them turning out well.

The person we marry, the job we take, the house we buy, the holiday we take and more. Covid has sharpened all our views on risk. We have two extremes: the people who are so cautious they double mask, avoid all human contact, leave 30 feet between themselves and another in the street, wash their hands every 20 minutes and put their letters into the oven and cook them until they are charred and germ free. 

Whilst Rishi Sunak is now imploring us to go out and have fun and save the economy just like we saved the NHS,  the ultra-cautious are quaking in anticipation of the fourth wave with a mutant virus that will kill us. 

And in the blue corner (the dark blue Tory corner) we have the handshaking, hugging, rugby-scrumming, beer-swigging proponents of largesse , bonhomie and a casual attitude to life – “for tomorrow we die”. Rebels against caution and safety first:  skydivers, mountaineers, black run skiers. They believe in the right of everyone to make their own choices in life regardless of the probable consequences to themselves or others.

It seems to me both get it wrong, Mr Reckless and Ms Lifeless. The reality is we have to manage risk. We cannot eliminate it and if we tried we wouldn’t drive, fly, go on trains, cycle, go to restaurants, cinemas or meet people (or ‘germ-carriers’ as some see them.)

Robert Benchley, the American writer, satirised the cautious lifeless:

“Sometimes I’m so worried that I stay in bed. There I worry about falling out and breaking something.”  

The 21st century is not a place for tidy minds. It’s messy and it’s full of hazards. The better things get, the more risks emerge. Disease travels. Sophisticated communication systems fail. We are living on the edge of apocalyptic events (recently a storm cloud in the Western Pacific reached a temperature of -100C;  a record, but one that will soon be broken) and we need to plan for what we’ll do if, no when, these destructive events happen.

One thing we have to be more realistic about is death. I recently said I would die in the relatively near future…realistic not morbid. This provoked an emotional “don’t say that”. But I must. In 1950 the annual death rate was 1% of population. By 2019 it  had fallen to around O.7%. In 2020 thanks  to Covid there were 70,000 more deaths than forecast. Yet in reality whilst tragic that’s not cataclysmic. Despite the headlines we are living longer and better.

So let’s cheer up. 2020 has been a year of massive epidemiological advance and of understanding how to manage extreme risks. We have learnt about the fragility of the experts’ opinions and the penalties of caution. Everything that went wrong has been due to caution and indecision. The next decades will be full of “Black Swan” events. We just need to be prepared for them, learn from mistakes and enjoy life. 

!f we don’t enjoy it, what is life for?

1 + 1 = BANANA

I read a teasing piece about poor Diane Abbott this week. I find now as Labour party regimes change that I miss her good heartedness and her arithmetical loopiness. She once missed out some noughts in describing how much a proposed recruitment of police officers would cost annually allowing her interviewer to splutter:

“So you’re going to pay them just £300 a year each?!”

The piece I refer to said:

“Diane Abbott says she has symptoms of Covid eleventy eight.”

We are living in arithmetically lunatic times. Imperial College who’ve been in the forefront of mathematical modelling for Coronavirus, overruling the government experts and winning the  battle for data salience have come out with a variety of numbers.

Their estimates that really hit the headlines with a bang were 500,000 would die unless the strategy changed; then  20,000 would die if it did change and now that  2,000 might die adding that was because the strategy they’d urged was working.

Let’s put this into perspective. Annual deaths in the UK are some 550,000 of which some 17,000 on average are from ‘normal’ flu.

If the current catastrophe is less devastating than ‘normal’ flu by that margin why am I incarcerated, forced by fear to drink my wine supply as rapidly as I can. What a ghastly epitaph this would be: “He left most of the wine he had untouched. His last words ‘bring me a very large bottle of claret’ were unheeded as he was judged delirious.”

Delirious?  I was furious.

But arithmetical insanity reaches new depths when it comes to money. Our new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak (a winner if ever saw one) pulled off an astonishing coup in delivering a budget, an update a few days later and then a further two updates with numbers as I recall of borrowings from £12 billion to £200 billion to £500 billion to “Infinity billion”.

He was trumped by the American President a few days later with a two trillion dollar bail-out for America and a demand that the country got back to work by Easter.

Biden is still ahead in the polls but the results are volatile and Trump keeps on slipping closer or, more likely old Jo will slip behind. If he wins he’ll be 78 – I’m younger than that and regarded as “at risk” and if the truth be known probably gaga – “fetch me my claret nurse”.

Not to be outdone China will doubtless come up with a quadrillion bail-out next.

A quadrillion looks like this; 1,000,000,000,000,000

Yes guys it’s roll-over Saturday.

In the UK, for laudable reasons,  we are taking on unbelievable debt. But do we realise what follow?
Well someone soon  has to pay for all this, and that someone is you and me. On my shaky calculations (I’m in the Diane Abbott league arithmetically) we’ll need to find just over £23,000 per working person in the UK to pay that off.

Arithmetic? We are heading for capital ‘A’ austerity again. Capisci?