Politics

All this fuss about whether Gordon Brown is off his head on mind-bending drugs or not. Who cares? Certainly not Andrew Marr, who fluffed the question last Sunday.

Nor me. Bill Hicks (or was it Denis Leary: I find them interchangeable) famously ranted about how drugs were a definite aid to creative thinking, to music and so on. The Beatles? So high they let Ringo sing.

Consider El Gordo's wit and wisdom long before he was alleged to be on the gear:

"Of course liberty - with roots that go back to antiquity - is not and cannot be solely a British idea. In one sense, liberty is rooted in the human spirit and does not have a nationality. But first with the Magna Carta and then through Milton and Locke to more recent writers as diverse as Orwell and Churchill, philosophers and politicians have extolled the virtues of a Britain that, in the words of the American revolutionary Patrick Henry, ‘made liberty the foundation of everything’, and ‘became a great, mighty and splendid nation…because liberty is its direct end and foundation’." *

Blah blah blah blah blah. Boring as arse.

Compare it with the deep insight of a chap that - allegedly - has done every species of rare herb and prescribed chemical on the planet, and then some. Let us take as our muse, I dunno, Mr Sean Ryder, of popular beat combo The Happy Mondays:

"Son, Im 30
I only went with your mother cause shes dirty" **

It's like a haiku, penned by Wordsworth.

In a Ryder/Brown run-off, I know who'd get the popular vote. Keep popping the pills, Gordon. Or the patches. Or suppositories, whatever. It's not gonna make a blind bit of difference come May 6th.


*Speech on liberty, 25 October 2007. There is more. Much, much more, here: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page13630
** Kinky Afro. Available in all good record stores.