Thoughts from London - What about that mote in your eye, Mr. Boucher

There is a good reason why I have been silent for three weeks. It is not a because of a bereft of ideas. How could one not have things to say when one sees a nation marching backwards into the future, a people who have begun to perceive change as always change for the worse because a corrupt and self-aggrandising political establishment have over the years instilled this in our collective conscience.

No, the reason this column failed to appear for the past three weeks is not that I had been chastised and cowed into silence by those who now wish to revive that failed institution called the Press Council which once resurrected will be packed with bungling bureaucrats and mass communicators who probably communicate only with the help of departed spirits.

I have not written because it requires anatomical skills to tap away at a computer lying flat on a hospital bed which of course, I do not possess and those who monitor the state of one's health would never have permitted anyway.

Still the days spent in bed provided time for reflection and to catch up on reading that one laid aside for another day.

It made one think of all the things that should have been done had procrastination not stood in the way of accomplishment.

One thought of the books that friends and others have been trying to persuade me to write bringing together experiences and impressions gathered during almost 45 years of journalism.

A former high commissioner to the UK, Mangala Moonesinghe and his wife Gnana were two who tried to convince me that I should put thoughts to paper shortly before they left London at the end of their posting some years back.

Another former high commissioner and university colleague, Faisz Musthapha is another who has tried to cajole me into it.

Since then friends back home and others here in London have been encouraging me to tell it all each time I recall some story or anecdote from the world of politics that I first glimpsed from the outside when I took to journalism way back in 1962.

It is indeed surprising what lingers in the memory when one has the time to reflect on the years gone by. Dredging the murky world of politics is not something that one wishes even on one's worst enemy. The sleaze, corruption and abuse of power that have increasingly engulfed the political world is not unknown to the public who have been the principal victims of this burgeoning tragedy.

Still they are made passive participants in this political charade that has been played over the years by successive political parties because they are made to believe they are the inheritors of the great tradition of universal franchise and democracy.

But in the name of that democracy the public are robbed blind and cheated by a political class whose sole purpose in life is to come to power by means fair or foul so they could fatten themselves and their cronies at the expense of the people and the state.

So when one is coaxed to write of one's experiences and draw the necessary conclusions a thought inevitably springs to mind. To adapt Shakespeare's words, would it not be a tale told of idiots, crooks, sycophants and those who do have deliberately abandoned the norms of civilised conduct.

Looking back one wonders when we will see honest, dedicated politicians who see political life as a public vocation and not a vacation during which they amass wealth for the gratification of several generations of kith and kin.

Will we ever see honest and committed politicians such as Dudley Senanayake, M D Banda and U B Wanninayake, to name just a few.

To judge many of today's political leaders against such benchmarks is surely to find them sadly wanting.

Is it surprising that a politically conscious public asks how a president could manage a country with a multitude of problems when he seems unable to control his own ministers.

After minister Rohitha Bogollagama who jumped ship and joined the PA got into the habit of taking his wife and children along on official business at state expense, President Mahinda Rajapaksa reportedly issued an order prohibiting ministers from taking their families along on official business.

Did that stop minister Bogollagama in his tracks? Did it make him adhere to the presidential edict?

If he did, then did Rohitha Bogollagama pay for his wife and two children who accompanied him to London for last month's "Refreshingly Sri Lanka" fest in the UK that saw several ministers here and prompted some wag to ask whether the next cabinet meeting is to be held at Park Lane.

Who paid for the Bogollagama family's stay at the Park Lane Hilton and did his son attend one or more of the business meetings with his father?

If presidential orders are flouted with such impunity and nothing is done to bring to book those who reduce such orders to a mockery, is it wrong for the public to ask how much authority the country's leader actually exercises and whether he could bring order to chaotic politics?

And what has happened to that visas- for- cash scandal that engulfed the Sports Ministry and brought minister Jeevan Kumaratunga to public attention?

How different it is here where Prime Minister Tony Blair's special envoy, a very close confidant and Labour Party fundraiser Lord Levy has been questioned by police inquiring into a peerages-for-donations scandal that could well see No 10 Downing Street itself dragged in the mire.

Could anyone ever imagine Sri Lankan police questioning leading politicians over such scandals when they could hardly inquire into the disgusting public conduct in the last decade or so of various ministerial progeny.

Today it has become the political norm to pay back friends, hangers on and sycophants by creating jobs for them at home and abroad. If political leaders wish to do so at their own expense, out of their own pockets, it might just be pardonable. But state assets and public funds are treated like some family boodelay to be distributed to old retainers while burdens are constantly heaped on the public.

The numerous advisers of dubious distinction who have found refuge in the presidential secretariat or president's house at state expense, itself stand as testimony to the quality of input on governance the public could expect.

It is worse when these advisers, some of who have emerged from the rotting woodwork of disruptive politics, are sent to foreign lands on missions that they have neither experience nor the intellectual capacity to undertake.

The result is that they have only helped muddy the waters on the crucial question that confronts the nation.

As though maintaining nondescript advisers and officials at public expense is not enough our diplomatic missions are made to carry ballast in the way of inexperienced and unnecessary baggage.

The latest move is to plant untried persons as information counsellors in some capitals. Our diplomatic mission here has acquired one such person who is a young lawyer. How he is going to deal with a vigorous and often critical British media, if he ever gets round to it, must remain one of those inscrutable workings of the chintanaya.

By the same token who is the mastermind who thought of sending an information counsellor to Cuba where our mission exists more in name than substance.

Maybe our new counsellor to Havana will give Comrade Fidel a briefing on the Mahinda Chintanaya- in Spanish naturally, if not suddha Sinhala.