"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

and perhaps now m possession of sufficient confidence,
Scotland was beginning to acknowledge what it didn't
like about itself as well as re-evaluating the often suspect
worth of what it did. whether this led to any of it actually
getting sorted out was, of course, another matter, but it was
undeniably, like a hundred dead spin-doctors, a start.
The whole thing was a start. It was the kind of opportunity
history seldom afforded: to begin again and do it differently
next time. To create something new, and inso doing, purge
whatever had corrupted version 1.1. Hence the widespread
anxiety that whatever we had created should work, and
that it should not repeat the mistakes that necessitated its
creation in the first place.
This led to disproportionate public censure of early outbreaks of
confrontational, point-scoring exchanges (thereafter referred to with
gleeful scorn as Westminster-style'
politics). Equally disproportionate were the appalled reactions of
seasoned commentators to the rather rough-and-
ready contributions of certain MSPs not schooled in the
starchier formalities of public speaking. But all of this
was perfectly natural: the creation was in infancy, and to
the concerned parent, every minor blemish can look like
a potential deformity; every anomaly the onset of fatal
disease. In time, though, the wee bugger usually thrives.
The definition of 'thriving' was, of course, entirely subjective. It was
said that if you had low expectations, you
couldn't be disappointed, but in Parlabane's experience
of politicians, no matter how low you set the threshold,
they could still contrive to come up short. That they hadn't
might still say as much about his standards as about
their achievements, but nonetheless his impression of post-
devolution Scotland had been that it was no better than he'd
hoped for and no worse than he'd feared.
There had even been the odd glimpse of something that
might, in a certain light, be taken for maturity. The Peter
Logan thing, for example. Some regarded the fact that
he hung on to his post after that as the ultimate dubious testimony to
Labour Lite's spin capabilities. However,
Parlabane knew they'd never have managed it - never
attempted it - if they didn't think people's priorities and
perspectives had changed. Cabinet careers, it seemed, were
no longer going to be in the gift of the tabloids, and if
the Churches wanted to talk about morality, they would
maybe have to start looking beyond the crotch for a fucking
change.
It was a pity the cause celebre had to be that self-satisfied
knob-end, but it would have been churlish not to see the
bigger picture. Joe Punter certainly had, and that, Parlabane
thought, constituted serious grounds for optimism.
But that was months ago. September. Before the meteor-