‘Public Service’: the First Refuge of the Scoundrel

Urgent shortages of sick bags are reported nationally in public response to Dave’s latest effusion of hypocrisy. Addressing the patently absurd hypothesis that he might fail to sweep to victory at the general election, Dave asserted his determination to remain a Member of Parliament.

“If they hoof me out and go for the other guy,” said the best prime minister since Gordon Brown, “I’ll have to think of something else, but I hope I’ll still be a Member of Parliament. I love serving my constituents. I love politics. I love public service. It’s what I care about. It’s a vocation.” Yuk! Suddenly it seems a dauntingly long hike to the vomitorium.

There is so much to provoke nausea in that self-regarding, reality-denying drivel, it is difficult to know where to start in disparaging it. If he loses the election and is excluded from government Dave still wants to hang around the House of Commons like a nasty smell, presumably regarding Westminster as a useful networking base. But he also intends to “think of something else”.

I wonder what that might be, Dave? Could it be a sheaf of well remunerated directorships? Or a job in America? Or a post in the EU? Or a combination of all those and more? Will there be a ridiculous, vanity-inflating Cameron Foundation, to rival the empire of his hero Tony Blair? All of these hypotheses are possible, even likely. Yet, simultaneously, Dave wants to continue as an MP, despite his record showing his complete incapacity for any job remotely connected with politics.

Dave is a loser. He lost the 2010 general election to Gordon Brown, whose popularity rating with the British electorate was lower than that of George III in America in 1776. It took a very special talent for political incompetence to fail to secure a Tory majority against Brown, but Dave rose to the challenge and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Apparently that experience has convinced him his political career is “a vocation”.

But the most rebarbative aspect of Dave’s egotistical ramblings is the statement: “I love public service.” No other term has been more bastardized than “public service”. When Tories who have never had a real job in their lives are shooed into safe seats via A-lists and other devices to circumvent grassroots opinion, they declare they want to “serve” the public. So, in similar circumstances, do brain-dead trade-union hacks selected as candidates by Labour.

When Sir Bufton Tufton has just claimed a packet in expenses for cleaning his moat, renovating his duck house or powdering his footmen’s wigs, he will orate pompously at constituency dinners about a long tradition of “public service”, of which he is the current embodiment. The entire consensual establishment in British public life recites the mantra “public service” like a protective juju.

Politicians do not enter parliament to serve the public: their aim is to serve themselves. The less harmful majority aims simply at lining its pockets and building a career by lying, betraying the true public interest and behaving sycophantically towards those with powers of patronage.

Yet these cur dogs do less harm than those politicians who, in the current argot, want to “make a difference”. To them we owe the erosion of freedom and the PC Terror. Apart from such ideological prejudices, however, they are as venal as the undiluted time servers and, rather than being indifferent to the national interest, actively hostile towards it.

What does it say about the contempt the political class feels for the electorate that Cameron can insult the intelligence of the British public by dishing up such tripe about “public service” and a “vocation”, in the apparent hope of garnering votes? In fairness, does an electorate that voted on three successive occasions for the Great Charlatan Blair merit any higher esteem?

If the public wants to recover intellectual credibility it needs to greet such effusions of Daveguff with the derision they deserve. The same applies to the entire political class and its media running dogs. The BBC likes to defend its outrageous licensing fee monopoly by prating unctuously about “public service broadcasting”. That would be EastEnders, then?

We should lose no time in throwing back into the faces of the political class the grotesque hypocrisy that is categorized by the weasel term “public service”. Was altering the whole demography of Britain by unrestricted immigration “serving” the public? Was handing the sovereignty of this ancient nation to the gangsters in Brussels “serving” our interests? Were MPs’ bogus expenses claims a testimony to public service?

The general election this May will not, overnight, topple the consensual political class; but it is likely to be the beginning of that process. An important contribution by those active citizens who desire the liberation of our country from the tyranny of the legacy parties would be to trash their pompous vocabulary of self-justification to the point they would no longer dare to employ it. Public service? Shove it, Dave.