Sajid’s power play pose is a puzzle

Amber Rudd has gone, then.

In light of the reasons behind her downfall, it’s been suggested someone should show her a copy of her own resignation letter – just in case she hasn’t seen it.

Stepping into her Home Secretary’s shoes is Sajid Javid. There does seem to be a bit of a problem with that governmental footwear though – the left and right shoes seem to be unfeasibly far apart.

Perhaps that explains the rather comical photo of Mr Javid outside his new office, looking like he’s in the process of doing the splits to entertain the press pack. This feet wide apart stance isn’t anything new for the Conservative Party’s bigwigs, though.

Over the last few years, the likes of George Osborne, Theresa May and David Cameron have all been snapped looking like they have severe chafing problems. Interestingly, they have also all fallen from power spectacularly... except Theresa May, who is (at the time of writing, at least) still Prime Minister. We’ll see if she becomes another victim of the ‘power pose’.

Adopting this stance is, allegedly, a good way of boosting your confidence and making yourself look big. I find a 1Kg bar of Dairy Milk has a similar effect for me, but with a similarly high risk of splitting my trousers.

Somewhere, a PR team are high-fiving and laughing their expensive socks off, having successfully made yet another senior member of the government look like a berk by suggesting it’ll help them look more powerful.

This post first appeared as the second piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 4th of May 2018. It was re-titled as "Putting his foot in it", and ran without the image the article was about, which is unfortunate!

Seriously, though - what the chuff is this all about then? They DO know they look like idiots, right? Wow.

(CD A-Z: RCD Classic Rock Collection 9 - Classic Blues.)

Comments

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog