the brilliantly leaping gazelle

One of the problems I have with putting Boris Johnson on trial for misconduct in public office, is not that it sets a dangerous precedent, one that allows those with the means to seek legal redress of some perceived political grievance. Nor is it because it – and the legal challenge by Gina Miller again about Brexit– is a frankly undemocratic way to settle these disputes.

No for me the problem is more fundamental, much simpler. We all know politicians lie, and even when they don’t, we think they do. We know they play around the notion of truth as if it were a political ‘Stretch Armstrong”. Ever since we’ve attained some healthy – and well deserved – skepticism for whatever politicians say, we’ve treated what they claim at election time with a dose of salt large enough to cause one serious health problems. That’s why I have more than serious doubts that anyone who read the claim on that bus actually believed £350 million a week going to be spent on the N.H.S if we left Europe. As soon as it was revealed, the doubts as to its veracity were aired. In fact as I recall, the main reason the claim received the publicity it did was precisely so it could be thoroughly discredited.

Which it was so many times and so comprehensively proven to be untrue in such a short space of time, I find it hard to credit anyone with the stupidity to still believe it to be true. One has to question the motives of whoever thought that this was in any way a matter for a court to rule on, and allowed it to proceed this far. The person who bought this mockery to trial, crowd-funded it.

Of course he has. Apparently he’s well on the way to raise the £500,000 needed to pay for it. Being a private prosecution it could of course be stopped by the C.P.S at any time, but for now, at any rate, it is in the public interest to proceed. But how a claim that will kill no-one be allowed on such arbitrary grounds, when a claim that helped cause an illegal war, that led to countless deaths, helped create ISIS and des-stablised the region, and was proven by a government inquiry to be false, how is the perpetrator of that fraud not on trial?

Try crowd funding a trial for Tony Blair for war crimes.