Beardy Branson is a twat

 "Sob, heavy world
  Sob as you spin
   Mantled in mist, remote from the happy:"

                  - W.H. Auden

The spin that Auden referred to was - at least I assume it was - the actual rotation of the earth. ["I hope," says the Rhetorical Pedant, returning after being far too long absent from this blog "I really hope, that you're going to go off on one about the length of days at the equator again."] But my gripe is with spin in the other sense of Public Relations, or lying as it used to be called when I was at school.

I'm speaking specifically of course of all this guff about Jeremy Corbyn and the train. Now, obviously I have no idea what actually happened and have spent many hours strenuously trying to avoid finding out. As Marcus Aurelius put it "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth". Harry Pearson, wargamer and author of Achtung Schweinehund!, puts it thus: "Claims there were vacant seats on a Virgin train a typical Trotskyite slur on great British entrepreneur and his sales force."

However, of one thing I am, from personal experience, absolutely certain, Virgin East Coast provide a terrible service and it is substantially worse than it was when it was run by the state-owned East Coast Mainline. People do, genuinely and often, have to sit on the floor. The power sockets regularly don't work. The train that I came up from London a couple of weeks ago had one carriage out of action because the doors had jammed and one where the heating was stuck on full blast - on a day when the temperature outside was 28˚C; the main point being that no one was in the slightest surprised. They've just put the fares up for the second time this year. Therefore, whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular train, Virgin Trains have rightly been called out for being useless at what they are supposed to do in return for our money.

And yet their slick PR machine, taking full advantage of the media's existing antipathy to Corbyn, have switched the narrative from one where they are held to account for their performance to one where they are the victims. As Mark Twain never said “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. And all the while the long-suffering passenger longs to see Branson humbling himself in the style of Japanese management as atonement, preferably followed by then ritually disembowelling himself Japanses style as well.

 Before anyone points it out, I know that the line is managed and 90% owned by Stagecoach, but if Branson wants to be the face of the firm then he must take the consequences. Unsurprisingly I would be perfectly happy for Gloag and especially the homophobic Souter to join him. And it's the Stagecoach link I think that explains the attempts to smear Corbyn. A Corbyn government (I shall return soon to discuss whether such a thing is even remotely possible) would not just renationalise the railways, but would regulate bus companies. They're just getting their retaliation in first.