The Play’s the Thing
Or how lying has been elevated to an art form
Posted on 07 Mar 25
by John RidgwayIn
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
Back in 2021, the lucky few thousand attendees of COP26 (aka the 26th final chance to save the world) were to be thoroughly entertained by our spiffing prime minister, the now legendary Boris ‘No Rules Were Broken’ Johnson. Just judge for yourself — read this extract from his introductory speech and tell me you are not entertained:
Good afternoon everybody, welcome to COP, welcome to Glasgow. And to Scotland, whose most globally famous fictional son is almost certainly a man called James Bond. Who generally comes to the climax of his lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation which will end human life as we know it.
Gripped? Good, in that case I’ll let Boris continue:
And we’re in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today. Except that the tragedy is this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real. And the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster, record outputs, and quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2.
https://cliscep.com/2025/03/07/the-plays-the-thing/
