Where's The Sting?

Oh, what are we to do with Pooh,

Who, to be fair, is a bear

Of little brain, but has

It can be said, 

A vaulting ambition to be

King of the World.

Thus far, our ursine PM has managed to confuse and discombobulate the core of his own party, and to a good degree his own cabinet, by hoovering up ideas left and left from pools of philosophical and economic thought that his Neo-liberal forebears - the children of Thatcher and Adam Smith - really must gag on in contemplation thereof. Oh, do shut up, Eeyore, you gloomy old sod. And Piglet - another G&T if you please, my good porker, I can feel another U-turn coming on.

The thing is, Pooh is a creature of the mob: he gravitates towards publicity - any - and the rewards that obtain from the fame and notoriety it brings - he has a skill, call it a native cunning if you will - to appeal to those whose interests he really has absolutely no concern for: red wall voters, his own party or business itself. He presents himself as the toff on the Clapham omnibus: contradictory but somehow appealing, a gestalt of confected beneficence and ability.

The problem with Pooh is that he genuinely doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself and his own ambitions: he really is just a perambulatory ego. I'll grant that he was very well advised by someone (Cummings, et al?) to surround himself with lackeys and lickspittles of even less talent than his own; guaranteeing not to either eclipse the Great Bear or to threaten the Hunny Pot to which he is so obviously addicted. The curious thing is that the movie cartoon versions of Winnie the Pooh were voiced by Americans, the country of our own Pooh's birth: kind of ironic, given the black hole that his 'oven-ready' trade deal with our cousins across the pond has turned out to be.