If only Truss was Roman

As a spectator sport the disintegration of the Conservative Parliamentary Party over recent months has been pure popcorn entertainment.

As the Ringmasters of this circus its maybe been less of an entertainment to Boris & Liz

What fun we have enjoyed.....

Firstly we have stood witness to the parricide of the father of their success – Boris Johnstone for sins that were well known to all and long ignored. This is a subject previously visited that requires no further examination here save to observe that it led to our second dose of entertainment - the event I, and I feel sure most bystanders, considered unnecessary, the truculent election process between the champions of the status quo (Sunak) and revisionary (Truss). for the leadership of this disfunctional tribe.

Who was right in this debate between visions is not a question for now. I simply observe that few CFOs make good and inspirational CEOs and that I do not consider Sunak a particular good Chancellor. Regardless of the reasons giving away money created by fiscal slight of hand rather than productivity, whilst at the same time holding down interest rates and chasing the political dream of net zero in defiance of economic gravity, has become an international acceptable approach over the last decade that ignored the simple fact is sooner or later reality would impose its self and the bill arrive – a fact that seems lost on most of our current crop of MPs, social commentators and those under the age of 30 who have only lived in this age of low interest and government fiscal largess and now face the reality of over extension in chasing inflated asset wealth driven by separation of their borrowing power from incomes.

Again I have already had my rant on this so no more; save to observe that the outcome of the Sunak v Truss tourney simply gave affirmation of the rift between the parliamentary party, who in majority voted for Sunak and the membership – whose vote for Truss carried the day.

As with Boris the new leaders mandate came from the party at large not its Westminster cabal and so the internal discord within that happy band continued and amplified.

Resulting our third entertainment - the Conservative Party Conference and a media feeding frenzy, a predictable explosion within the Twitter sphere and social media, sanctimony without content from the Labour Party and, the televised and 24/7 reported debacle of the conference with its open dissent and attempts at a second political assassination by the disciples of easy money and a big state’s ability to provide jam for all to a client population without a Scandic mentality or the will to adopt the Scandic taxation and spending model.

How Truss must wish (and as a classical scholar Boris have wished) for a simple solution to such malevolence – if only they had been Roman and held the Roman option that fitted the crime:-

Poena Cullei.

How both must wish they could take the likes of Gove and Shapps, dress them in wolf skin and sandals and then place them in a sack with a dog, monkey, snake, and rooster (or others from amongst their detractors with these characteristics) and then fling them from the terrace of the Houses of Parliament into the passing flow of the Thames.

A fitting punishment?

Cicero thought so. Writing with minimum paraphrasing;

“Their crime judged as serial actual and attempted parricide the offender should be sewn up in a sack while still alive and thrown into a river. What remarkable wisdom showed, gentlemen! Do they not seem to have cut the parricide off and separated him from the whole realm of nature, depriving him at a stroke of sky, sun, water and earth – and thus ensuring that he who had killed the human [and caused damage to the Party] who gave him life should himself be denied the elements from which, it is said, all life derives?

They did not want his body to be exposed to wild animals, in case the animals should turn more savage after coming into contact with such a monstrosity. Nor did they want to throw him naked into a river, for fear that his body, carried down to the sea, might pollute that very element by which all other defilements are thought to be purified. In short, there is nothing so cheap, or so commonly available that they allowed parricides to share in it. For what is so free as air to the living, earth to the dead, the sea to those tossed by the waves, or the land to those cast to the shores?

Yet these men live, while they can, without being able to draw breath from the open air; they die without earth touching their bones; they are tossed by the waves without ever being cleansed; and in the end they are cast ashore without being granted, even on the rocks, a resting-place in death.”

Overkill?

Ask Boris and Liz….