We Could Send Letters

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Whether the political stylists are channeling Kellyanne Conway (why would anyone do that?) or Margaret Thatcher (why would anyone do that?) – no-one really knows. But the chintzy photos have caused speculation that the tumbler has a large G&T (much needed after having to share air-space with Ruth Davidson in ‘the Chamber’ this week), or that the ‘unsheathed pins’ is a subtle-in-joke at the expense of the PM and her dinner guest, the Daily Mail’s legendarily foul mouthed editor Paul Dacre.

But the photo-frenzy is we think just testament to the fact that we live in the world of the Spectacle. As Guy Debord has it: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”, and “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false”. At the end of a long week understanding Boris Johnson and the Daily Mail Legs-it affair through Situationism suddenly makes everything perfectly clear from Fake News to Bad Dudes.

But there’s also that great boost to the dead-art of letter-writing, which may be now be making a vinyl-like recovery. Could the entire Brexit fiasco just be a cunning plan to resurrect the privatised Royal Mail? There needs to be some explanation.

But Nicola’s jaunty laid-back pose contrasts strongly with Theresa’s formal set-up for her letter to Donald Tusk, penfold in hand, Union Jack draped globally.

The contrast couldn’t be starker if she was in a tartan onesie tapping out a text “Yo Theresa – we’re offski!” Sturgeon’s missive now sets to be in a long tradition of Scottish letter writing, whether it’s the Lübeck Letter by William Wallace and Andrew Murray (1287) or the American Letter by Craig and Charlie (1987). This tradition was of course celebrated by Roddy Frame who predicted the whole Tusk-Sturgeon-May exchange back in 1983.

You said you’re free for me, that says it all
You’re free to push me and I’m free to fall
So if we weaken, we can call it stress
You’ve got my trust, I’ve got your home address
And now the only chance that we could take
Is the chance that someone else won’t make it all come true
We’re making tracks, they show our touch and go
And now it’s touch and come and you should know
But then four years won’t mean that much to me
When I’ve been smothered in the sympathy you bleed

Comments (2)

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  1. Alan says:

    In the pictures of May writing her letter there is a painting of Robert Walpole on the wall, above and behind her: the first British PM looks on as the last signs the letter that will bring about the end of the union.

  2. Alf Baird says:

    Maist shuirly ae delitesome (an awfu cliver) photae o Nicola. Yon’s lyke nicht an day compare’t wi Theresa May’s dour hapless pictur. Thares naebody mair couthie than a Scot in thair ain contentit naitural cultural settin. Ane pictur is wirth a thoosand wirds, richt eneuch.

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