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News and Views

Bolivian marching powder...

6/10/2019

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 Offered without further comment...

No, wait, I can't quite manage it. I don't think the cocaine use is the (biggest) issue here. I think it's writing an article that condemns middle-class drug users whilst being one of the very people at whom the article aimed. Realistically, as David Cameron asserted a few years ago, politicians are entitled to a private life before entering politics. He, of course, was the subject of a particularly embarrassing story that he might have wanted to avoid becoming public. No one really seems to know whether the content of that story is true or not, but given what I saw my fellow students get up to, it would be no surprise if it were in fact true. 

So the question is: to what standards should we hold people? One can't help but feel that things like the Fiona Onasanya case and  Gove's recent revelations reveal that whatever they say in public, politicians are unlikely to ever be squeaky clean, and in some cases will be a lot worse than that. But this is a field which puts non-experts into jobs as the absolute head honcho, and expects them to do a good job of it. Michael Gove is widely pilloried by those within the teaching profession (one of my teacher friends has a book, called 'Everything I Know About Teaching', supposedly by Gove himself, which is a full book's worth of blank pages), but again it is no surprise to find someone who has no background, no professionally-gained knowledge (beyond his own education) of the system and no academic expertise (again, beyond the education he received) in any of the subjects about which he would subsequently pronounce to be at odds with members of the profession. Gove is often slightly misquoted as saying that 'we've had enough of experts'. In fact, according to Wikiquote, the exchange ran thus:
Gove: I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying--
Interviewer: They've had enough of experts? The people have had enough of experts? What do you mean by that?
Gove: People from organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.
Inteviewer: The people of this country have had enough of experts?
Gove: Because these people are the same ones who got consistently wrong what was happening.
Interviewer: This is proper Trump politics this, isn't it?
Gove: No it's actually a faith in the--
Inteviewer: It's Oxbridge Trump.
Gove: It's a faith, Faisal, in the British people to make the right decision.

Gove is also on record as saying that he could not be PM. 

So there you go. Does Gove's cocaine use mean he couldn't be a good PM? What he gets up to in private is his business, and his alone. But once he goes public with condemnation of other people's drug use, he has brought his private behaviour into the field of discussion. It will be interesting to see what the repercussions of that decision turn out to be.
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    Andy Richardson

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
    Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
    And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
    Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
    And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
    The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
    Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

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