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

Every two or three months British television viewers are treated to a satirical series called “Bremner, Bird and Fortune” that takes the mickey out of politics and politicians. To my mind it is in the top bracket of British tv and takes politicians such as Tony Blair, his transatlantic handler George Bush and sundry politicians and bureaucrats apart, exposing their follies and foibles, their indiscretions and horrible errors of judgment.

It is our misfortune that that we do not have a similar cutting edge team like Bremner, Bird and Fortune (BBF) to turn the searchlight of probity and exposure on our own political figures that have, over the years, turned paradise into paradise truly lost.

Sri Lanka’s political landscape provides the kind of mother lode of rich raw material that would make an enterprising and entertaining trio like Bremner, Bird and Fortune a real fortune. That is, of course, if they survive any assault, battery and even more serious violence from gun-toting goons or progeny of politicos and interested parties at the receiving end of their satirical barbs.

If such satire is to be effective and widely accepted it must be evenly spread making governments and those who prop them up whatever their political hues and ideological pigmentations, the subject of their surgical thrusts.

So Mahinda Chintanaya and the Wickremesinghe viscosity and the rest of the caboodle that form the contours of our politics should all be put under an incisive surgical knife because they all claim to be doing whatever they are doing for the good of the people (read some people).

What couldn’t a competent local BBF do with the current antics in the United National Party for instance. It is bad enough the government has it own ideosyncracies that makes even those old Sinhala cinematic characters Manappu and Josie Baba seem like serious players.

But now the UNP has joined in the general fun and there is never a dull moment as old war horses and political upstarts bash each other like bare knuckled pugilists.

Many years ago some wag determined to discredit the Grand Old Party and said the UNP was neither united, national nor a party.

Though at the time it seemed more like ridicule than the truth, one wonders in retrospect whether this condescending dismissal did not carry an element of premonition.

Not that other political parties in Sri Lanka and elsewhere have not gone through periodic convulsions and implosions that have threatened their very existence. Some have managed to paper over differences; others have broken up and gone their separate ways.

But the UNP’s current contretemps have had a public airing and that is one reason why it makes such good fodder for those with a penchant for satire.

Last Sunday I read a letter released under the name of UNP veteran M.H.Mohammed castigating Milinda Moragoda who in turn had written to party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe questioning his leadership and lots more.
Now anybody who knows M.H. Mohammed and read the letter would be hard put to acknowledge him as the real author.

But that’s as maybe, as one of my favourite thriller writers of the past, Peter Cheney, would have said.

Nobody really cares and should care whether Mohammed wrote the letter or not. What matters is that the mountain came to Mohammed and got him to release the letter in his name and on behalf of a group of MPs (UNP ones, it is safe to presume) who have been angered by Moragoda’s attempts to “subvert the leadership.”

One is not certain, of course, whether the reference to the leadership means all those who sit at the top of the party heap or just Ranil Wickremesinghe.

This M versus M battle of words appears to have been prompted by Moragoda’s private letter to Ranil that somehow has ended up in the media as these things usually do.

One does not need a Hercule Poirot or even one of our intelligence wallahs to narrow down the possibilities.

Mohammed and his followers (no mention of how many there are) have taken umbrage at Moragoda’s attempts to strike a holier- than- thou posture and his “self proclaimed moral stature.”

Now, I have hardly been a great admirer of Moragoda politics what or what I have long ago called the Moragoda mantra and his nostrums from the rostrum when he lectured and hectored anybody who wished to listen on everything from economics to international politics.

Did he not say at some seminar in Hawaii that the United States should take over the leadership of the world and bring democracy to us all or some such silly thing?

Did he not also confess publicly when he was a minister in the Wickremesinghe government that when the American ambassador summoned he did not stop to ask why, but went at once or words to that effect?

Moragoda’s constant sojourns in the United States on one pretext or another seemed like a student returning home at the end of the school term. It led many to ask legitimately where his loyalties really lay.

While much more could be said of the Moragoda tenure in office, one needs to remind Mohammed and others who hide behind his name of that principle of law- those who come for equity must come with clean hands.

Mohammed will have to search his own conscience as to how squeaky-clean he was as a minister in several UNP administrations and in Colombo municipal politics.

Listing several charges against Moragoda, Mohammed and his unnamed associates even berate Moragoda’s secretary for refusing to appear before a UNP leaders’ committee without his boss’s say so.

I am not privy to the powers and procedures of such a committee but it does raise a question. Could an employee of a member be preremptorily summoned to appear before a party committee?

The letter also castigates Moragoda for enjoying the “coveted and (unique) distinction” of being the organiser for two electorates. Does it mean that Moragoda simply grabbed two electorates without even a by your leave or he was put in charge by the party. Whatever it is did Mohammed and others protest?

What is intriguing is that despite Moragoda’s criticism of the UNP leadership and the subsequent Mohammed missive cutting the moral ground under Moragoda’s feet, he seems to have been one of the chosen ones to accompany Ranil Wickremesinghe to New Delhi.

Some media reports made much out of Wickremesinghe running to Indian High Commissioner Nirupama Rao apparently to cry on the shoulder over Mahinda Rajapakse pinching his parliamentarians.

That was surely nonsense. If Ranil wanted to run to mama he had only to jump over the wall down 5th Lane Kollupitiya.

There is no point bleating with the innocence of lambs at the political poaching going on. Wickremesinghe has surely not forgotten that the UNP has been doing this over the years.

In fact his father, the respected media guru Esmond Wickremesinghe, was one of those responsible for engineering the cross over of some SLFP MPs over prime minister Sirima Bandaranaike’s controversial press bill in 1962.

Wickremesinghe might not be exactly twinkle toes on a dance floor. But he surely knows that it takes two to tango.