Whatever happened to Poetry & Polis ? Where did it get to the past weeks ?
It has been waiting on Ben Wallace. This morning he made the decisive intervention in the Conservative Leadership election that I had been expecting. He is backing Liz Truss. I thought it best to keep silence and not jabber to fill in the time. Secondly I had to have chronic Omicron-related asthma placed under proper management.
Ben Wallace is a considerable man. He is a strategic thinker of powerful, considered intellect and careful speech. He is ethically solid and sound, a important characteristic after the "Boys will be Boys" antics of the partying Boris Johnson and the naughty Mr Pincher. He has that moral force that T.E. Lawrence discerned, and was in awe of, in General Allenby. My preference would be for him to succeed Johnson, but he excluded himself from running.
Truss had a bad breaking-in as Foreign Secretary during her run-in with Sergei Lavrov. She made an elementary mistake in the geography of Russia that any student of Russian history and culture would avoid, or student of WWII. Rostov-on-Don is Rostov in Russia. However she has expressed resolute positions, similar to Wallace's, on Russia, NATO and China. If Wallace considers her the best candidate for a managerial Prime Ministership, after the distracted socialite chaos of Johnson's regal Prime Ministership, I accept that.
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