Over the weekend, the columnist Matthew Parris described how Britain has become, if not ungovernable, at the very least a depressingly awful populace to imagine yourself governing. “A nation that has become obese, uncompetitive, underskilled, stay-at-home, health-obsessed, celebrity-obsessed, rights-obsessed, blame-obsessed, sex-obsessed, woke-obsessed, house-price-obsessed,” he wrote. There was more on the same theme. I shouldn’t really quote it in full, otherwise I would come over as Parris-obsessed, and then where would I be? Totally ungovernable.
The problem is, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like this. OK, maybe some of us could lose a few pounds. Certainly, a lot of us believe in universal human rights, but I don’t know that you’d call it “obsession”, nor that you could lump it in with a sex obsession, and while we’re here, I don’t even know what a blame obsession is.
