The Populist-Lite Playbook for Dummies
So… BJ is still here then, like a disgraced paedophile loitering defiantly round the school gates. An inappropriate simili in virtually almost all circumstances I’ll admit, but then…
BJ is still here and with attitude, having taken lessons from those denizens of water closet politics, Vlad Poo-tin and Don Trouser Trump, though of course, being British, he’s more dither than deliver and gone for the populist-lite approach. Still, we mustn’t let the significance or seriousness of this go unnoticed and it goes like this:
Don n’ Vlad’s Pick of the Pops Playlist
If you are accused of serious wrongdoing for which there is plenty of credible evidence, then absolutely deny it. By doing so you inroduce the notion that there are such things as alternative facts, that exist independently of the weight of evidence.
Next, go on the attack, preferably via the most sensationalist, un-evidenced, over-emotive route you can think of. Crooked Hilary comes to mind. Or accusing protesters of wearing condoms on their lapels. This is now the news, so you’re pretty well off the hook for the first thing.
Final move: claim to be the victim in all this, as Trump did in the case of the Capitol insurrection and rgarding allegations of sexual assault and Putin has done on just about everything: Nato made me invade Ukraine! Gaslighting complete. Job done.
BJ populist mini-me version
Deny it. There was no party
Deny it lots more times, as a statement of fact only not quite, so that you can wriggle out of it later. Don n’ Vlad wouldn’t be doing any of that. As Lance Armstrong supposedly said to fellow doping cyclist Floyd Llandis: you need to get better at saying ‘no’.
Blame someone else. No-one told me there was a party etc. This also shows populist intent but lack of committment. If you blame others, by implication you admit that there was at least an event. This is a big populist fail.
Call your opponent a paedo. He’s back! in a masteful recovery stroke, BJ shoots straight to the top of the populist charts! What could be more populist than placing your political nemisis’ name and that of a dead paedophile’s in the same sentence? Cause and effect and the small matter of truth count for nothing here: juxtaposition is everything and sufficient for all your needs. Uproar! Defiance! Outrage! Noise! Whats’ changed? Nothing. Who’s still in power? You are. Who’s the daddy? Oh yeh!
Who cares…
None of this is anything that hasn’t been pointed out a hundred times. The more something blows up, the quicker it blows over in the end, so let’s blow it up. As the more resonable world has found to its cost, the time and effort of contesting deliberately preposterous and provocative claims made by populist leaders is simply water off a duck’s back. Lacking the sensationalist aspects of the original claim, the lack of impact of evidenced, reasoned, counter arguments only diminsishes further the resolve of anyone who actually cares.
…about a dead child sex offender?
The choice of Jimmy Saville with which to slur Kier Starmer by tenuous association was, I suspect, no accident, and this is genuinely dispiriting. The choice, I suspect, was not just about it being sensationalist and emotive enough to be a useful distraction, or even a useful vehicle with whihc to undermine the truth, but because it chimed with the copnsioracy theories of QAnon and the like: the dungeon in the pizza reastuarant, the Hollywood child sex-abuse allegations looked at by Jon Ronson. Just coincidence? Sounds like a conspiracy to me…. Whatever the case, I’d suggest it was a dangerouse button to press.
Does it work? Well, BJ’s still here. Starmer’s restriant was admirable and Munira Murza’s perfect deployment of the word ‘scurrilous’ even more so. My thought on the subject is that BJ may have misread the place of Jimmy Saville in the national psyche: lacking all the salaciousness of a Hollywood sex-ring or a secret basement, Jimmy Saville remains tethered to the 1970’s and all that was simply tawdry: cheap smoke-filled ‘entertainment’, bad clothes, bad hair, bad teeth and a blind eye to wandering hands. Jimmy Saville does not serve for the purpose BJ thought he might because what he did was straightforwardly abhorant.
This, I suspect, is what will come out in relation to the royal. I can’t even write his name.
