Leadership Quote by Boyle Roche

The line lands like a pratfall in the middle of parliamentary seriousness: a politician, presumably pressed to do the impossible, answers with a piece of logic so literal it becomes absurd. Roche frames a mundane political complaint (conflicting obligations, public expectations, the demand for omnipresence) as a question of physics. The punch is that he offers the only “reasonable” solution: flight. It’s an excuse that doubles as a sly indictment of the request itself.

Roche is remembered for “bulls,” those mangled, circular statements that sound momentarily plausible before collapsing. That tradition matters here. The humor isn’t only that the sentence is silly; it’s that it mimics the tone of responsible explanation. “Unless I were a bird” parodies the way officials justify failures with appeals to necessity, constraints, and impossibility. The subtext: you want miracles from me; I’m a human being, not a mythic creature. Yet it also gives him cover. By turning criticism into a joke, he reframes accountability as unreasonable nitpicking.

Contextually, it fits an era when public life was becoming more performative and politicians were learning that wit could be a survival tool. In a chamber, speed matters: a clever line can defuse hostility, rally allies, and redirect attention from the original charge. Roche’s flourish is comic, but it’s also tactical. He turns the demand for competence into a demand for wings, making the audience laugh at the accuser rather than the accused.