For Laura Kuenssberg: A poem by Kevin Higgins

Kevin Higgins

Laura Kuenssberg is the BBC’s political editor. She was appointed in 2015 and is relentlessly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party in general. She has, “displayed a level of bias against Labour in recent months, and certainly her attacks on Corbyn's leadership have been verging on hysterical….” Writes Huff Post UK’s Political blogger Ian Middleton. She is from the middle and upper middle class and her maternal grandfather, Lord Robertson was a high court judge. Her great uncle was the last British Colonial Governor of Nigeria. It’s somewhat Ironic, a pure bred pedigree like Kuenssberg joining the BBC, a news outlet referred to in some US circles during the war in Iraq as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.

Ireland's Kevin Higgins has devoted a few lines to this daughter of the British upper crust.

Inheritor

for Laura Kuenssberg, BBC political editor

Civilisation sometimes means

rubbing hot peppers in the murderous

eyeballs of teenage internees, or

regretfully introducing their bare backs

to whips embedded with bits of iron.

A chap aiming his rifle

at unarmed Punjabees

until the ammunition runs out

is understandable in the context

of it having been a Saturday.

Those women and small ones

who drowned hiding down a well

would’ve eventually died anyway.

Sometimes a fellow,

during the course of one

excellent lunch, has to partition

India. You cannot know

what that’s like until such responsibility

has been laid out on the table in front of you.

In the opinion of many,

giving handouts to the starving

would’ve made the potato famine

worse, made them come back

asking for more.

When no alternative presents itself,

making detainees sit naked on a metal pole

is understandable in the context

of it being then and them being brown.

When thoughts such as these

take root and royally flower,

words will wing out of her mouth –

chattering parakeets disguised as exquisite owls –

she will tell you, and you will know,

why those born to rule must do

what rulers must.

KEVIN HIGGINS