Pay attention, entrails-pickers: this dead government has yielded up a new sign. She is Karen Bradley, actual secretary of state for actual Northern Ireland, and she has granted an interview to Parliament’s The House magazine. “I freely admit,” Karen freely admitted, “that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland. I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa.”
For me, I think that quote may be the equivalent of the death blow in Kill Bill. Do you know the one? You get hit just with fingertips, “and then he lets you walk away. But once you’ve taken five steps, your heart explodes in your body, and you fall to the floor, dead.” So with the Northern Ireland secretary’s hot take on Northern Ireland. My mechanism might be shot for good after reading it. I may well be typing my last five steps here.
Clearly, it is not simply the initial imbecility of having no clue about the central facts of Northern Irish politics and history, even though you were 28 (TWENTY EIGHT) when the Good Friday agreement was signed. It is also the second imbecility of thinking you should ever mention that in public, much less as delightedly, as Karen did. “It’s when you realise that,” burbled the secretary of state, “that you can then start to understand some of the things that the politicians say and some of the rhetoric.”
I mean ... ideally, you would start understanding these things some decades before you were the cabinet minister with operational responsibility for arguably the most highly sensitive region of the United Kingdom. Instead, Karen’s breezy “My Learning Curve” speech casts high office as a remedial scheme for the unreachable outliers of Family Fortunes survey respondents. “We asked 100 people what they imagined were the Ladybird-level facts about Northern Ireland …”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/07/karen-bradley-northern-ireland-secretary-toriesAfter a little more of this, Hyde then turns her attention to Arron Banks, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, Mervyn King and David Davis. Sample line about Rees-Mogg:
Should have gone to MonocleSavers.
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