Delusions of Honesty

On Thursday Night, was fortunate to enjoy hearing Theodore Dalrymple as an after dinner speaker. Dalrymple, a pen name for Anthony Daniels, was a very witty, thought provoking and entertaining speaker. Plus he has been getting Russell Brown and Chris Trotter upset which can only be positive 🙂

Anyway the absolute gem of the night came when Dalrymple talked about Tony Blair and said that Blair’s biggest problem is he suffers from “delusions of honesty”. Now you could hear the mutters go around the 60 or so people at the room as each of them independently turned to their neighbour and said a variation of “Oh my God, that is the perfect description of Helen Clark – she has delusions of honesty”.

I really do think the description nails it. Clark is, I am sure, absolutely convinced she is an honest person and that she sees no correlation between signing paintings she did not paint, illegally using taxpayer funds on her campaign, lying about Peter Doone etc and her being honest. This is why she so massively over-reacted to the “corruption” tag – she genuinely can not see that hundreds of thousands of NZers could see her or her Government that way.

So thank you to Theodore for his supplying of this wonderful term. It really is a perfect fit.