From time to time politicians like to spread the lie that modern politics is a very complicated complex subject and that is why we need clever people like them to administer capitalism.
Part of this fiction is supported by what they choose to call "think-tanks." Recently the Tory party leader David Cameron has given his support to Phillip Blond's new organisation rather grandly titled "ResPublica". The political sketch writer Ann Treneman went along to the launch of this new organisation to try and find what it stood for. She was completely baffled.
"The label that the great and the good have given to Mr. Blond is "philosopher king". Not only is he a blond who is a brunette but he is also something called a red Tory, which I am told is a blend of Catholic social thought and a critique of the effects of economic neo-liberalism. Since I have almost no idea what that means, I was looking forward to the speech, which was his vision of a "radical transformative conservatives".
"I listened closely and can report that this is radical transformative conservatism at its deepest: abstract, abstruse, and quite possibly, total gobbledygook."
Political sketch writers are notoriously flippant and renowned for taking the Mickey, but to be fair to Treneman she has certainly got a point when she directly quotes Blond on human relationships.
"These associations themselves are not post-modern verities; they are arbitrary collections of whim and sophistry arrayed against the void." (Times, 27 November)
Before you go searching for a dictionary trying to decipher that utterance lets go with Treneman's description "total gobbledygook".
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