Pursued by a bear
I paraphrase, but bear with me.
Mike Ingham (BBC Football Correspondent): Steve, you said yesterday there would be no excuses if we didn’t qualify. Do you have any excuses?
Steve McLaren (soon-to-be former England football coach): No excuses. I apologise to the fans – we let them down; we didn’t play well enough.
MI: What went wrong tonight?
SM: It’s too early to talk about that.
MI: Why did you feel the need to change the formation and team tonight?
SM: It’s too early to say. I’m still trying to work out where it all went wrong.
MI: Will you be resigning?
SM: No. But it’s too early to talk about that. It’s too soon after the game to talk about my future.
MI: But do you take responsibility for failing to qualify:
SM: Yes, I take responsibility. But I’m not resigning. Besides, it’s too early to talk about my future.
MI: Would you like to stay in the job if you are given the opportunity to do so?
SM: Who said anything about leaving the job? Anyway, it’s too early to talk about that.
MI: Would you like a cuddle now you realise just how woefully out of your depth you’ve been for the past 18 months?
SM: It’s too early to talk about that.
Now with the honourable exception of the Paul Gray, the recently departed head of HM Revenue & Customs, how bad does something have to be in 21st century Britain before someone admits that the buck stops with them?
The Child Benefit CD Fiasco™ is so catastrophic that the Tory front bench hasn’t even called on a Minister to resign. Career politicians such as Posh Boy Dave and Posh Boy George apparently recognise that this one is so utterly fucked up beyond all recognition that, well, it could just as easily have happened to them – and if an Eton and Oxbridge education teaches you anything it’s to show your opponent a small degree of compassion.
So let’s not put on the steel toe-capped boots for this kicking. This is actually serious. This is the sort of thing that would have seen honourable men and women fall on their sword pre-Thatcherism. And honour went out of British politics circa 1979 (Lord Carrington excepted).
So let’s, in fact, genuflect before That Bloody Woman yet again, shall we?
Ignorant people sleep in their beds
Like the doped white mice in the college labs
And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all.
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before.