When my daughter was 18 months old, we took her to my old family holiday home in Roses, Spain. To her delight, we had our yacht docked at the bottom of the garden. Every morning she would run out of the house, causing her mother pure terror, shouting with glee, “Boat! Boat! Boat!”
Fast forward to 2023, the holiday beyond the blooming nine year old’s memory, and the UK’s publicly owned broadcaster seems to leap out of bed and shout on the airwaves exactly the same: “Boat! Boat! Boat!”.
Where my daughter was so excited to have a yacht in the garden, the British Boat Corporation is more serious. Instead of a tot’s gleeful exclamation, this is more like a drugged up loon ranting without the swear words. So brain damaged by cocaine and other drugs of abuse in the creative industries, the ‘journalists’ seem to have forgotten how to shout “fcuk! fcuk! fcuk!” but somehow think that “boat” is the worst imaginable word in existence.
Tory boat parties?
The thing is that the British Boat Corporation isn’t the only one shouting “Boat! Boat! Boat!” every five seconds. The Conservative Party is at it too. Rishi Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants, many of whose own family will have come here on a boat, shouts the same. Indeed, the British Boat Corporation News said the other day on the lunchtime news that boats will be an important part of the election campaign. The leadership of the BBC, all of whom were appointed by Sunak, are just repeating his words.
I like boats but
I’ve had a great career writing about boats, but sadly, this compulsive ranting about them bores me a bit. I spent my youth sailing everything that floats (twice nearly killing my stepbrother, who doesn’t like boats as a result), and ended up being the busiest journalist at the 2012 Paralympic Games. I sailed for a year on a replica of a Royal Navy warship in the USA, drinking myself into a coma frequently and chasing skirt whenever I wasn’t.
Despite many Westminster politicians’ fondness for rubber and torment, apparently tormented people getting into rubber boats to come here is a step too far. It seems to cause them nightmares, make them lose sleep at night, and perhaps get them on the phone to the dominatrix to ask for a good bit of torment in a rubber suit to stop the nightmares.
On a more serious note…
The fact is that if Tory politicians were honest with themselves, they wouldn’t need to be tormented in rubber suits by dominatrixes to make them feel bad. From Bonkers Boris saying, ‘Let the bodies pile high in the streets!” during the height of the pandemic, to many tens of thousands of welfare related deaths in the last 13 years, not to mention the disaster of Brexit, there isn’t much to say that’s very good about their record of misrule.
The real reason for the obsession about boats is not the result of brain damage from too many snowed up parties, but because they want the general election to be focused on that and not their record of governance.
If you get accosted by a blustering, boated up Tory politician at the door, ask them an intelligent question about the NHS or whether you’ll ever be able to retire. That’ll as soon drive them away as saying you worship the Dorset Ooser to an evangelical Christian at your door. If a journalist starts Vox popping in the street about boats, ask them about billionaires’ tax breaks. Isn’t it time that politics started to be about the things that matter, as opposed to bluster from the British Boat Corporation and its masters?
