Readership Capture

Always good to get a missive from our British correspondent, Tony Jay. Blame me for Tony not being here to defend himself answer your questions — it hit my inbox just as the DNC was gearing up, and it’s been non-stop BREAKING NEWS ever since…

War of Wood and Plastic

Fearsome aspects clad in terror sheer
Conjured whole from nightmares children fear
Looming shapes in ghastly regiments
Implacable spawn of primal elements
Crushing blind to gorge and smash
Glacial appetite, the lightning’s lash
Bestriding world of brittle man as titans did of old
Primordial hunger, unmoored by conscience’s hold
When they fell upon the world below
The ants beneath did wail, but lo
Trembling at sight of doom impending
Now witnessing a nightmare ending
A hollow boom, an ice-thin crack
Then blinking in the brightening black
All the ants around could see
The terror and the majesty
The power inchoate, the violent glee
The eldritch foul monstrosity
Were naught but petty artifice
Mimes of might to scare the lice
Masks as worn at monarch’s feasts
Painted ‘pon stretched skins of beasts
No more eternal than winter’s snow
White crest of waves, dawn’s rosy glow
“Why did we cower?” asked the ants of the sky
“By your choice,” spake the wind, as each eye did fly
To horizon’s edge as it bulged anew
With terrors past, now in different hue
And lo, we knelt in muck once more
We ants
It’s what we’re for
Rodney Dangerfield – Reflections On My Toilet Water – A Collection

 
So, the Tories are gone. Humiliated. Downed like pants. Former Prime Miniature Rishi Sunak’s incomprehensible gamble that ‘something’ would just, like, sort of happen and obediently hasten along in the manner of a well-trained sommelier to appear at his elbow, eyebrow cocked and corkscrew primed, right on cue to save his collapsing Premiership from a historical defeat never actually came off, leading me to conclude that it was all a con, and that it was never really supposed to. Twenty months into a sentence of hard fail trying to fit his ¾-size travel-doll self into the gaping fat waster shaped hole Boris ‘Flobalob’ Johnson’s enforced absence had left at the empty heart of the Tory Party, Sunak seemed to have realised he just didn’t want or need to be there anymore. He’d simply had enough.

It kind of makes sense. No one liked him. No one respected him. Everything he did was amateurish or ill-judged or both. From his bone-stupid decision to bail on the D-Day commemorations without pre-clearing it with the Press, through the drizzle-sodden display of “EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE” dog-in-a-blazing-room meme faux-masochism that was his Downing St announcement of a snap election, right on down the line to the baffling lack of control that allowed administration insiders to place equally insidery bets on the date of the Election they were helping to set, he’d somehow succeeded in forging an image for himself that was one part Andrew Ridgeley’s nerdy little cousin (the one who was always posing in front of the mirror in his Mum and Dad’s suburban two-up/two-down in a skimpy pair of beach bulgers but never once got the call to come over and be in one of WHAM’s videos, because George had known him since he was a toddler and never could stand the snotty little snob) to two parts broad-notes slimy corporate bad-guy (a Chad, or maybe a Spencer, occasionally a Phillip, but never, ever, a Phil) with their too-long nose permanently up the pinched grunthole of the grizzled old rags-to-riches Chairman who had settled on them as the least-worst choice to marry his cute, blonde granddaughter and run the company once he retired, the one you all probably remember from any of those early-80s Michael J. Fox vehicles, a kind of subcontinental Judge Reinhold without the occasional glimmer of aw-shucks decency.

The initial modesty-screen of fiscal competence and family-man rectitude erected on his behalf in 2022 by the UK’s always very conserva-compliant corporate media following the post-Truss restoration of Politics As Usual was long gone by July ‘24, corroded by a piss-stream of headline-fodder kulturkampf ‘political events’ and the equally salty spray of angry tears emanating from a Tory electorate that never actually wanted him in charge and was riven – possibly fatally – between clumps of steadily more horrified by the results of the policies they’d enthusiastically voted for ‘normal’ Conservatives and the deeply abnormal columns of jostling proto-Völkists who took all their sociopolitical cues from Nigel ‘What if Pepe the Frog fucked Mr Toad’ Farage and the rest of the social-media revanchistorians of the modern Hard Right. Basically, he had exposed himself to the nation for what he really was – a stiff little prick better suited to spurting multi-billion-pound giveaways in the direction of people like his uber-rich father-in-law than anyone capable of performing successfully in the slick, sweaty, tactile montage of fleeting moments that is retail politics.

He’d done the first part of that relatively adequately, given his limitations and the limping state the Tory Party was in after the sugar-high of Brexit had worn off and the Establishment’s axe-murder of Corbyn’s Labour receded into the faintly embarrassing distance. If Flobalob’s reign had been all about self-gratification and grifting Covid pandemic billions into a VIP Lane superhighway for Tory Party donors, and Mad Queen Lizzie’s brief interregnum a short, sharp – but nevertheless incredibly costly – stamp on the balls of the wackier economic and financial theorists popular in Wingnutiopia, Sunak’s main aim appeared to be keeping his Party’s extreme Right distracted with hugely expensive phantom schemes to send all the forrins Back to Africa (actual point of ethnic origin being immaterial compared to the Hippy-punching spite of it all) while with his wanking hand he was signing off on huge transfers of public money into the hands of the disgustingly rich people he’s always served. Hitting the eject button on a failed political career is always an option for those who have feathered their landing spot with the grace and favour of people they’ve helped make rich(er). It’s pretty much the only raison d’être for the tribe of Conservatives who elevated Sunak to Number 10 in the first place.

Now that Rishi Rich has divested his portfolio of time-consuming distractions like ‘running the country’, I could leave it for those sombre-bearded historians to ponder the question of did he do it deliberately to punish the Tory Party for putting him through those 20 months of mild humiliation, but why on Earth would I ever do that? Calling an election when he did was – in the august opinions of commentators both expert and, well, me – a step beyond bonkers and pretty much verging on Granny buying a one-way ticket to Switzerland after signing over all of her assets to a Cayman Island trust while leaving “Goodbye, fuckers” notes on the pillows of all her unloved children and a gold-dusted cucumber of Herculean proportions on that of Pascal, the muscular topiarist who came over twice a week to trim her hedges. It was 100% a dead-man’s plunge, and he was taking the whole fucking lot of them with him.

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Guest Post – Tony Jay: <em>A Letter From Brexitania: UK Election 2024 Catch-Up</em>Post + Comments (33)