Sunday:
Or, as the former Chancellor, actually put it:
"We realise we have got to present some substance, a bit more seriously."
All right, maybe that's not QUITE as exciting as my headline, but everyone was EXPECTING Mr Andy Marrmite to follow up his question to the Prime Monster:
"So, Mr Frown… what pills are YOU on?"
With a question to Mr Balloon of:
"So, Mr Balloon… what pills are YOU on?"
Instead it was a terribly OLD-FASHIONED interview: Mr Marrmite asked perfectly reasonable questions… and Mr Balloon refused to answer them. He really DOES thinks he's Prime Monster already!
Nevertheless, a lot of Conservatories have complained about the unfair treatment showed to Mr Balloon.
With the Irish voting "yes" to Lisbon in their referendum – and both the Poles and the Czechs saying it's quite likely that they will ratify the treaty soon – Mr Andy wanted to know if Mr Balloon would give a guarantee that we will have our own referendum on the treaty? Like he promised?
Mr Balloon's answer to that question appears to be: "I'm not going to answer that question because even though the Poles and the Czechs saying it's quite likely they will ratify, they haven't ACTUALLY ratified and that gives me a gnat's whisker of breathing room that I'm going to cling on to because I don't actually know what to do when they actually do!"
Or, as Mr Marrmite FINALLY put it: "You SAY, you know you're giving the rhetoric of a referendum - I want a referendum - but actually when you look at the detail you're NOT offering a referendum."
"I couldn't have described it more clearly," admitted Mr Balloon.
So that's Mr Balloon's final word on the subject: he SAYS he's offering something… but he's NOT really.
But blow me if Mr Marrmite didn't have to keep asking him again and again and again in order to get there!
I mean, just because he's spent the last four years sneering that the Government promised a referendum and then didn't give us one (never mind that the Government promised a referendum on a DIFFERENT treaty, the Constitution which failed) it hardly seems fair to ask Mr Balloon if he's going to keep his own promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, now does it?
I mean, if you are the sort of person to demand over and over a straight answer from the other Parties, then you really really shouldn't have to GIVE straight answers as well, should you?
I mean, boo hoo hoo, it's not FAIR!
Of course, Mr Balloon's problem is that, having convinced the slathering hordes to let him FRONT the Conservatories (mainly by jumping into bed with latter-day Nasty Parties from Eastern Europe and Royally pi…bad-word-ing off some REAL European politicians like Ms Angular Meercat and Monsieur Sarcastic, as Germany's Europe Minister spells out), most of them now WANT him to say that he will have Mrs the Queen break HER word, and go back on a Treaty that we have already signed even if it's already the law.
Unfortunately, it would be a bit DICEY for him to come out and SAY this.
That's why they've come up with this formulation of "we only have one policy at a time"… and of course we all know that at the moment their ONE policy is "tax breaks for dead millionaires"… no, that can't be right?
Seriously, though: less than a year away from possibly being the Government themselves, does it not strike anyone as a bit ALARMING that the Conservatories are essentially refusing to have a Plan B for something that is entirely foreseeable as happening before Christmas?
How exactly is this supposed to give us confidence that they are going to handle the country well through the tricky and unpredictable weather of the post-recession dark times?
Mr Balloon himself, of course, rises to the occasion by becoming petulant and whiny:
"I think people at home will also be wondering well are they going to ask me questions about anything else," he sniveled at one point.
To which Mr Andy could quite reasonably have replied: "Well, I can ask you another question when you give me an answer to this one!"
.
No comments:
Post a Comment