Send in the clowns

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

ON THE EVE of its 29th anniversary, it’s tempting to think TTsimply hasn’t ever recovered from the trauma it suffered in our bloody July 27, 1990 attempted coup. In truth, we got less than nothing whatever out of it (apart from the families of the people killed, who just got grief). Looking out at the rest of this crazy world from half-cracked Port of Spain today, though, Trinidad doesn’t necessarily seem as bad as all that.

This isn’t to minimise what happened to us. At least two dozen citizens were murdered – and, as I point out every year, our plight is such that we still don’t know for sure how many people died at the hands of the Muslimeen, we only have a figure we have tacitly agreed not to question any farther – and vast damage was done to the country’s economy; our capital city burned.

And the loss of life and property was as nothing compared with the loss of identity and opportunity we suffered as a people: had we stood up to the Muslimeen in another way, would we be plagued by Rasta Sh-tty and Unruly I-Sissy gangs today? Would we be so messed up, as a society, so helpless, as a people, if, in those urgent days and weeks of the coup and its aftermath, we had held curfew seminars instead of curfew parties?

We’ve witnessed a near-total collapse of ourselves over the last 29 years; we could not even manage to convict the 100 or so misguided crackpots (and Bilal Abdullah) who attempted a caliphate before the Taliban or the I-Sissies.

But glance at England today and you realise we really could make style on the nation that colonised us; if we, former British possessions, could in the recent past call ourselves motherless children, we could this week properly call the UK the Mother Country; with a syllable clipped off the end.

On Wednesday, to the consternation of the world and, probably, to the vast majority of Brits, Boris Johnson – a kind of asinine, blond political version of the English actor Hugh Grant, but without the charm, the self-deprecation and the pleasing roles – became the new British Prime Minister.

(What is now clearly not so) Great Britain has saddled itself with a leader who might be the only person in the world who could challenge Fat Nixon as the lowest-value person ever elected to high office. Bozo/Bojo the Clown has turned 10 Downing Street into his personal three-ring circus.

He may be the world leader with the least personal appeal but he is certainly the world leader with the least legitimacy. The process by which he was elected – no, selected – makes the daft US electoral college, which has upended the American popular vote twice in ten years to give the world the American presidency equivalent of Dumb and Dumber: in 2000, George “Dubya” Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore and, in 2016, the same dreadful year that gave us Brexit, Fat Nixon and the Russians stole the White House, despite losing the election itself by three million votes!

Bozo the Clown’s selection makes even the handing of the Electoral College White House to those two thick, loser Republican nominees look slick. Bozo and Jeremy Hunt were chosen as the final contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party by 312 Tory MPs in Westminster. The new party leader was elected by the financial members of the Conservative Party. Bozo got 92,153 of their votes – but 46,656 voted for Jeremy Hunt, ie, against Bozo.

Split the difference between them and you calculate, even via my admittedly dreadful arithmetic, that the new Prime Minister of 67.5 million people was shunted into power by 45,497 people.

In the UK, there are 650 constituencies. In England, the average constituency holds 72,200 electors, in Scotland, 67,200; in Northern Ireland, it is 68,300; in Wales, the least populated nation of the UK, the average constituency counts 52,000 voters.

So Boris Johnson became the British prime minister because fewer people than you might find in the least populated constituency in all of Great Britain voted for him.

And every single one of them represented a single political viewpoint!

Unite the nation, my a---.

For all its pomp and circumstance – and for all the grinning idiocy of its now chief clown – Boris Johnson’s assumption of the “leadership” of Great Britain makes Abu Bakr’s bid to be caliph of the Islamic Republic of Trinidad (not Tobago) look noble; at least the old Abu could claim he was acting on behalf of Allah.

Bojo/Bozo the Clown is acting on behalf of Brexit.

And 45,497 dyed-in-the-wool, soon-to-be-dead Tories.

BC Pires is looking for a ringmaster work