{"id":1478,"date":"2007-02-02T11:24:32","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T11:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2007\/02\/02\/an-honour-and-a-privilege\/"},"modified":"2007-02-02T11:33:50","modified_gmt":"2007-02-02T11:33:50","slug":"an-honour-and-a-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2007\/02\/an-honour-and-a-privilege\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;An honour and a privilege&#8230;&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Standard language of a soon to be departing politico, you might think. No surprise Blair used is in his <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/6323149.stm\">interview<\/a> this morning.<\/p>\n<p>But surely the standard, talking about the public, is &#8220;it has been an honour and a privilege to serve them&#8221; &#8211; not, as Blair phrased it &#8211; &#8220;an honour and a privilege to <em><strong>lead<\/strong><\/em> them&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>A minor, pedantic, semantic point from a long interview, but one, I think, worth making.<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;m on the pedantry, another minor point: he refused to quit tomorrow because &#8220;that&#8217;s not a very democratic way to get a [new] Prime Minister&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike, of course, our current &#8211; <em><strong>hugely<\/strong><\/em> democratic &#8211; system of allowing individual parties to select their leader in whatever way they choose, who is then &#8211; if the party as a whole manages to gain a sufficient number of parliamentary seats to form a government (though not necessarily a majority of seats, nor even necessarily more seats than any other party) &#8211; appointed to the highest office in the land by a <em><strong>single <\/strong><\/em>little old lady (by dint of her being related to some people who were good at fighting wars several hundred years ago&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>(By the by, I&#8217;ve been asked to give this a plug, so I will &#8211; depite not necessarily endorsing the message &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.anyonebutlabour.org\/\">Anyone But Labour<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Standard language of a soon to be departing politico, you might think. No surprise Blair used is in his interview this morning. But surely the standard, talking about the public, is &#8220;it has been an honour and a privilege to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2007\/02\/an-honour-and-a-privilege\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blair","category-constitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}