United Kingdom

Operation ‘Red Meat’. Because big words can confuse little minds. Loyal(ish) Ministers (all of whom not-so-secretly see themselves as already campaigning to succeed Johnson) would go forth and bombard the Tory Party’s radicalised elements (MPs, Press, Membership) with a flurry of Hard Right wet-dream policies to get them all barking mad for two more years of this… whatever it is. Home Secretary Pritti ‘Salon Kitty’ Patel, announced she’d send the Navy into the Channel to Protect Our Borders from Browns (fap-fap), Culture Minister Nadine ‘The Goon from Mills and Boon’ Dorries announced she’d freeze the BBC’s budget and end the licence fee by 2027 (fap-fat-fap-fap), Health Secretary Sajid ‘The Squeeky Sontaran’ Javid announced plans to immediately strip away every Covid protection on the books despite hundreds still dying every day (fap-fap-fap-fap-FAP-FAP-FA-BOOOOOOOOM!).

Oh yeah, that’s some good squirrel-meat, and the ever-credulous News Media gobbled it up like the finest prairie oysters, but the maw is cavernous and its appetite endless, and these vomitus vol au vents barely touched the sides before reality closed back over the scene. The Navy let it be known that they wouldn’t be patrolling the Channel, and that if they did, they wouldn’t be launching any missiles at refugee dinghies, they’d be rescuing those poor people and bringing them back to safe harbour in the UK because that’s what actual human beings should do. The pushback against Dorries’ anti-BBC shtick was immediate, wide and deep (outside of the obedient placemen at the top of the Corporation) and boiled down to “Fuck off, dimwit. Like you’re going to be calling the shots in 2027?”. And while Javid’s cynical surrender in the face of the pandemic just to curry favour with the Brextremist Covidiot Right of the Party will have disastrous real-world effects, in the long term that’s his balls on the block for when cases and deaths skyrocket again.

And what has all this frantic dog-whistling achieved? Bugger all.

Very shortly after the launch of Operation: Let Rabid Dogs Lie, it was all in ruins again. Firstly, the whole Media-driven trial-balloon of how this signalled the first stages of a Johnsonian fight-back (cue the training-montage from Rocky IV and images of Johnson looking troubled on a toilet) was popped by a single tweet from infamous prick Dominic Cummings, the cranially malformed Russian Intelligence asset who used to be in charge of both the Vote Leave campaign and Johnson’s private office of political fuckery and who many people suspect to be the source (or maybe just frontman) for all of these insider leaks. Contrary to Johnson’s denial that he was ever aware in advance of the boozy Downing Street garden party he attended on May 20th, 2020 (the one he insists he mistakenly thought was a ‘work event’) Cummings claimed he has e-mail correspondence proving Johnson was well aware and had been warned it broke the Covid laws. Very quickly the word got around the News Media Twitterverse that there was independent corroboration of this and that Sue Grey, the shadowy civil servant currently heading up the ‘Partygate’ inquiry, would be questioning Cummings in person.

That sound you can hear still echoing around the mountaintops is Johnson’s pitiful yelp as the elastic band cutting off bloodflow between his testicles and his taint tightened another loop. The buffoon’s car-crash interview with Sky News’ Beth Rigby, where a visibly crushed Johnson blathered that “No-one told me that the Party (which wasn’t a Party, it was a work event, honest) was illegal” increasingly looks like the bubbles from a drowning man’s… uh…. mouth. He’d been banking on rollerblading across the razor thin line between Grey’s Inquiry conveniently finding that, while mistakes were undoubtedly made due to a wider culture of hard-working excess in Westminster, no clear evidence of Johnson’s deceit had passed her desk, and the ever obsequious Metropolitan Police declaring that, in the absence of evidence of clearly criminal criminality (which Grey’s inquiry isn’t actually empowered to make reference to, quelle surprise) they won’t be able to investigate the matter themselves. Cummings’s statement and his supposed evidence curbstomps that plan. We’ve already had a conga-line of Ministers trooping through the TV studios offering Johnson their total and unwavering support, but only on the understanding (wink-wink) that he hadn’t lied in Parliament (nudge-nudge), because lying there is, of course, a resignation worthy offence (say no more, say no more), thus giving the outward impression of support while simultaneously holding open the trapdoor for his inevitable plunge. Grey can either use Cummings’ evidence – in which case Johnson is proven to have committed a resignation level offence – or she ignores it – in which case Cummings just releases the e-mail, Johnson is proven to have committed a resignation level offence, and Grey loses everything she’s worked decades towards to give a moronic solipsist a few minutes of release.

Mmmmm, I wonder what’s the best route to a seat in the House of Lords?

Secondly, the noise level amongst Tory MPs in marginal seats, many of them in the northern ‘Red Wall’ constituencies (so called because the Democrats had the ‘Blue Wall’ in 2016 and our Infotainers are as lazy as yours) that went from Labour Red to Tory Blue in 2019 because they were told Corbyn would take away their precious Brexit, refused to fade away in the face of Operation: Dog’s Bollocks. Instead, and much to the amazement of court journalists with their ear horns firmly wedged up the rectums of only the most ‘important’ Government sources, the anger intensified, and rumours dribbled out of a so-called ‘Pork-Pie Coup’ (Oh, how not at all stereotypical of us Northerners. What’s next? Black MPs engaged in a Watermelon Coup?) whereby Red Wall MPs would flood the 1922 Committee (the unofficially official Trade Union for Backbench Tory MPs) with letters calling for Johnson to resign, 54 of which would trigger an automatic Vote of No Confidence. A lot of these Northern Tories are sitting on razor thin majorities and a ton of promises about a vote for the Conservative Party being not just a vote for Brexit and against Corbyn’s Commie Collective of Coloureds and Poofs, but a vote for more money from Central Government in the form of ‘Levelling Up’ funds. Sure, Tory cuts are the cause of the terrible state of many Northern towns, but that was because those people kept on stubbornly voting Labour. Vote for the Tory Party instead, they said, and you’ll get drenched by the moneyhose just like those Southern nancies.

Inevitably the combination of ‘Levelling Up’ turning out to be every bit the bullshit con-job those dirty Lefties said it was, plus the News Media turning against “that funny posh lad from off the telly”, has left these MPs sitting on powder-kegs of outraged betrayal with no halfway good message to tout in response. The decision of Johnson loyalists to tell these MPs that they owe their seats to Flobalob and so should be covering his warty behind with kisses has not gone over that well either. These MPs aren’t alone in fearing that Johnson’s unpopularity will tank their comfortable sinecures either, a lot of Tory MPs further South will be looking at the recent catastrophic collapse in the Conservative vote in the North Shropshire by-election (where a seat with a 20k + Tory majority went bye-bye) and thinking “I could lose my seat to a bloody Liberal-Democrat, how humiliating!” They’d be right, it would be, but are they going to do what they need to do about it?

Thirdly, and it’s linked to the above, one of these Red Wall MPs, a real piece of work called Christian Wakeford, just defected to Labour. Now, I’ve got plenty to say about this dollop of cold sick, but for now I’ll stick to its impact on the Johnson Premiership. In the short term it actually helped him. There’s a wide gap between the stripped-off, sweat-clad, all rolling around in front of a log fire with your old school chum internal Tory Party battles and actually jumping ship for another (not-quite as radically right-wing) Party. The shock of it, and the fear that moving against Johnson in the wake of it would be seen within their own Party and Membership as approving of Wakeford’s self-serving turncoatery, seems to have convinced quite a few angry MPs to back off from sending their letters in to the 1922 committee. But that didn’t actually solve the problem. Stymied from taking that particular course of action to release their frustrations, quite a few Tory MPs have started coming forward with accusations that they had been personally bullied and/or blackmailed by Johnson’s people and threatened by Tory whips, not just with regards to their own ambitions to become a Parliamentary Private Secretary and maybe someday rise to Ministerial-level responsibilities, but on a more cut-throat level, they either show proper loyalty to the Big Flob or they would find their constituencies starved of funds and infrastructure spending.

Now this verges on the “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here” territory, because isn’t this exactly how pork-barrel style politics has always worked? More to the point, this is exactly how Tory Governments have deliberately starved Labour-held constituencies for decades in order to force local councils to make harsh cuts that Conservative politicians then campaign against (sooooo cynical). To the legions of access journalists and court sycophants dominating our News Media this nasty misuse of public funds for partisan political advantage is just business as usual and no more surprising to them than Manchester United getting a highly dubious late penalty at Old Trafford would be to a sports journalist, but the simple fact that Tory MPs are making these accusations against a Tory Government has turned this into another major front in Großflobschland’s doomed war for survival. In response the usual suspects have been pushed in front of TV cameras to make the usual nonsense denials. No one had ever seen anything of the sort happen, they’re making it up, and an absolute peach of a statement from inside Number 10 itself that basically encapsulates the drivelling entitlement that Tories have been given to believe is their due. Essentially, there would only be an investigation into the validity of the claims if there was already evidence that they were true, which is illogical and arse-ended and entirely what you’d expect from this shower. Checkmate, rebel scum.

Except, what’s this? Rebel MPs are now saying that fuck-yeah, they’ve got evidence of bullying and blackmail in the form of secret recordings and texts. And that’s not all, former Minister Nusrat Ghani has even accused the Whips Office of arranging her sacking because other Ministers were ‘uncomfortable’ with her ‘Muslimness’, which is both utterly unsurprising and also a bit of potentially humiliating blowback for the Equality and Human Rights Commission that bluntly refused to investigate persistent charges of Islamophobia within the Tory Party on the grounds that important people get to police themselves. The usual denials were blurted out, but it was immediately apparent that this revelation had sent a cold shiver down the jellywobble spines of the Tory Inner Circle. The Chief Whip himself broke cover to insist that he was the person Ghani was talking about and her claims were totally untrue… which smacks a fair bit of protesteth too mucheth, me thinketh.

For some undecipherable reason Michael Fabricant, the seemingly fictional but actually mind bogglingly real Tory MP for Lichfield was allowed (or chose, since apparently no one is actually in charge of anything anymore) to take point on pushing back against Ghani’s claims with a series of statements accusing her of dishonourably plotting against Johnson, being ‘mediocre’ and making up the ‘lame’ reason for her sacking because ‘she doesn’t look obviously Muslim’. It’s hard to encapsulate in words just how badly Fabricant’s intervention has backfired, but try, if you will, to imagine a man who looks like Jeff Sessions’ dad fucked Andy Warhol’s biggest wig saying these things and you’re halfway there. Then it turns out Ghani told Johnson all about this last year and he just brushed her off, so that’s another wheelbarrow full of oops to add to the pile and quite possibly the trigger for a full-scale investigation of Conservative Islamophobia.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, just for once, internal Tory Party dust ups caused as much damage to all the rotten edifices of greed and corruption as they have to the country? This certainly could, and it’s all down to the breathtakingly arrogant fuckery of the walking Peter Principles running the Tory machine. Like Napoleonic generals hopped up on snuff and dreams of Imperium they’ve been force-marching their columns of conscripts from battle to battle, any grumbles drowned out by patriotic drums and threats of retaliation by cold-eyed NCOs. But when your Emperor has no clothes and every petty princeling has a secret room where they spend breathless minutes in front of a floor length mirror just staring at themselves wrapped tight in straining purple silk, the troops are pretty much bound to mutiny sooner or later. All power, all authority, rests on the degree to which “or else…” means something, and suddenly a lot of Tory MPs have decided that this new Media interest in Tory scandals has shifted the balance of power enough that “or else…” doesn’t mean shit.

It always starts with one, then three, then more, until everyone with a story to tell feels it’s safe to stand up and feel the cool wind of freedom blowing through their hair.

Another tasty little thing about all this muck getting flung about, one defence the spokespeeps from Number 10 are using is that Party Whips don’t have the authority to blackmail constituency MPs with cutting off funds, which is technically true but entirely besides the point. Whips would carry the message, and it would be sent on behalf of Prime Minister Needy McGimmeemore, but the person with his hand on the financial tap and final approval over all this would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi ‘The Guardian thinks I’m Dishy’ Sunak, the badly constructed man-mantis hybrid who has been ever so conspicuously not anywhere to be found while Cummings and Co are laying the groundwork for his (long planned) assumption of Absolute Power. It just so happens that Sunak’s Treasury has just written off nearly four and a half billion pounds in fraudulently claimed furlough payments made by the Government to their donors and chums to private companies during the pandemic. That’s a fuck ton of money, gone, poof, like dust in the wind. How many school meals would that pay for? How many extra nurses? How much of anything the Tories have gleefully flayed from the twitching meatlump that is modern Britain would that little nugget of The People’s Money have covered? Nice that this little turd of incompetence and/or corruption is bobbing around in the drinking bowl just as eyes start to turn towards the methodology and decision-making process behind the Treasury’s funding (or not) of individual constituencies, isn’t it? I wonder how much of this will be weaponised against Sunak when he inevitably makes his (failed on the grounds of melanin) bid to succeed Johnson?

To be honest, although I’m a vindictive bastard, it’s all getting a bit boring and same-y now. As much as I enjoy seeing Flobalob worked over by the masked rascals of Cobra Kai it just needs to be over so we can move on to the Rise, Ruination and Resignation of the next Tory Messiah. This one’s done and dusted, impaled on the splintery post of his own lack of restraint and the whirlwind of unaccountability that has flattened centuries of painstakingly constructed filigree tradition like Godzilla doing Riverdance in a pair of Gene Simmons’ boots.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that if it was up to them our Infotainment industry would much prefer to keep this daily percolation of misery bubbling away until the last icecap melts and the dolphins finally achieve their long-promised revenge. They love them some Flobalob, he’s a lazy journalist’s dream job and, when he’s not arranging to have them beat up, always ready to give them easy copy and a burble of words guaranteed to drive clicks. That won’t happen, of course, because they’re not making the decisions, and once the Editors send down the message from on-high they’ll all be there scrummaging around Bully Bunter’s leaking corpse and fighting to be the first to emote the line “…perhaps a certain inevitability to this most untraditional of Premierships ending with a fetish-fuelled murder/suicide pact…” into the nearest camera. Until then, though, they’re all rolling around in the shit like it’s Christmas every day, gasping over each fresh stroke of the lash and hammering their list of MP’s private phone numbers looking for the next newsworthy scoop.

In truth, what we’re seeing here is the inevitable end result of the British Establishment deciding to kick out the doors, walls and supporting beam-work of our national political superstructure in order to allow the Tory Party licence and freedom in which to assimilate the far-Right, faux-Populist, nakedly racist, kulturkampfer, anti-democratic, retrograde counter-Reformation which was formented (in this country, at least) by decades of increasingly extreme propaganda pumped into the brainfood supply by Britain’s radically Rightwing Press. The financial crisis of 2008 provided the spark that lit off a conflagration of anger amongst those who saw what little they had being at risk, and a blind panic amongst those who had taken it from them and feared being asked for it back. To deny that anger an outlet on the Left the Tories needed cover to make alliances with the social-media monsters of the rebranded National Front and their cash-rich foreign backers without being asked uncomfortable questions about it. But, as usual, tyre rims and anthrax, baby. You whittle a whistle out of frozen leper’s puss you should know that the best you’re going to get is a bad taste in your mouth. No half-measures allowed either, not with these wide-eyed paranoidicks who think the modern world is a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Kinky Boots. They wanted to see lips on tips and full eye contact or they were going to put the Tories in the same barrel as the Woke Elites of Islington Prime.

And so, there was Johnson.

What’s happening to him now is entirely due to a change in News Media coverage, itself triggered by a series of high-level leaks to the news outlets deemed least likely to bury them, itself triggered by a decision on the international donor/future employer level that Flobalob had served his purpose and should move (or be moved) aside. If it were down to our Hard Right Press alone, divided as it is between a handful of soulless billionaires all competing with each other to be this week’s least-shrivelled swinging dick, he’d be sure of his job for at least one whole term, even while being jerked hither and thither by whatever red-meat baited hook hung from today’s by-line. If it were down to the BBC alone, with its upper echelons firmly stocked with Tory loyalists, its senior journalists who have been Conservative cheerleaders since Daddy first bought them a pony, its finances always on the chopping block as hostage to tone and editorial content, he’d be safer than the punch-code to the Queen’s secret torture chambers under St Ormand’s Street Hospital. But they’re not the only game in town, and once it was plain that this remake of Humpty Dumpty was going to be a sustained barrage of escalatingly harder blows with submission the only approved endgame, they all made the strictly business decision that they had to jump on board the #pequodcruises bandwagon as a group, if with clearly differing shades of enthusiasm.

But the point needs to be made. Endlessly. This is who he was before Election 2019. This is who he was before he won the Tory Leadership race. This is who he was before he fronted the Leave campaign and made Brexit his personal oriflamme. This is who he was during two inept terms as London Mayor and afterwards as arguably the most useless Foreign Secretary Britain has ever had. The News Media could have done this to him at any time over the last two decades but they, as an incestuous body, always chose to do the exact opposite, no matter what the cost to anyone else. The Tory Party knew this, which is why they chose him as their figurehead. The UK’s problem isn’t Johnson, it’s Tories and their legions of enablers, and since those enablers installed likeminded ‘moderates’ in the cockpit of the main Opposition Party I have zero clue what to do about changing that in any major way.

But that’s probably exhaustion speaking. Every worthwhile journey begins with a single step, and it’s important to take proper pleasure in the first of those steps coming down hard and true on Flobalob’s throat.

Tomorrow might well belong to them, but for now, well, it can look after itself for a bit.

WARNING – DRY DATA DUMP AHEAD – MOSTLY

Brexit. It’s always Brexit with this lot. They ran and won an election on the simple promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ and promoted the Withdrawal Agreement they signed with the E.U. as nothing less than the immortalised bestiary of every single nocturnal dream and goosestepping desire Leave voters envisaged when they lay back in those voting booths and thought of Greater England back in 2016, but all they’ve done since their moment of glory is whine incessantly that the very same agreement is an unconscionable tether around the gonads of British sovereignty and pick fights with the E.U.’s negotiators whenever they need a bit of tabloid love to grease them out of a tight PR spot. Johnson’s point man for the monumental task of ensuring that the United Kingdom consistently chucks dead cats on the table of diplomatic battle is Baron David ‘No, not the Nixon one’ Frost, a man so formidably talentless that he could lose a staring contest with a blepharmospasmic cyclops. A man so pig-ugly he exists solely to give Brian Cox and Michael Gambon a role to fight over in the TV adaptation of his tell-all diaries. A man so self-reverentially truculent he makes Ted Cruz look like First on the Guest List material in comparison. A man so… you get the drill. Frost’s sole and defining role in this national humiliation seems to be as follows.

1) Make a speech in front of a friendly audience demanding that the E.U. completely changes the agreed terms of one or another foundational clause in the Northern Ireland Protocol or else the UK will simply stop observing it.

2) Grumble threateningly while various European diplomats go into a huddle, with one or another occasionally peeking out to see if he’s still there, then the huddle breaking up so that the tallest and thinnest can stand next to the porcine Frost, bend all the way down to the microphone and emit a breathy “Non. Ce n’est pas négociable”.

3) Stamp his little piggy feet in more interviews with friendly journalists warning the E.U. they have until he’s finished eating a 12-course tasting menu and three bottles of expensive wine at the most exclusive restaurant he hasn’t been banned from in Paris/Brussels/Kings Landing to change their tune and recognise British Exceptionalism.

4) Boast to those self-same journalists that Johnson’s last-minute decision to capitulate and agree to whatever face-saving terms the E.U. offer in order to get Frost to fuck off for a while is another Brexit victory and proof that everything is going exactly as planned.

They’ve been dancing this dance again with the latest row over the NIP — which, at the end of the day, boils down to two related things. Northern Ireland has remained within the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union rules while the rest of the UK has left them, which has meant Northern Ireland enjoying a booming economy and none of the supply chain/shop scarcity problems bedevilling the rest of the UK, which makes Brexit look like a stupid and destructive self-own and so cannot be allowed to stand. And the fact that the very Withdrawal Agreement Johnson signed to “Make Brexit Happen” specified that the European Court of Justice would remain as the ultimate arbiter of legality where issues touched on the NIP, but Brextremists HATE, HATE, HATE the European Court of Justice with the heat of a thousand auto-da-fé’s, so now it’s absolutely unacceptable.

Demanding that the ECJ should be booted from having any role in overseeing the NIP is simply a no go, won’t happen, but that’s what Frosty the Showman has been sent out to demand, with the inevitable result that the E.U. will tell him to go and shove his demands up his tunnel de vent while also having their diplomats draft some face-saving language about trade that Frost and Johnson can take to their tabloid friends as proof of a great victory over the Tyrants of Brussels. Nothing will change, the clock will still keep on ticking down to the moment when the UK either implements the full terms of the Withdrawal Agreement (and finally takes the substantial hit of being outside the E.U. right in the kisser) or openly reneges on the internationally binding promises it made… at which point hold on to your heinie because then shit gets real and no outcome is good.

Thanks again, everyone who voted for this crap. Super solid you did us there.

For issues outside of the NIP where the European Commission’s diplomats haven’t been given the job of negotiating some kind of deal that both sides can swallow, patience with Little Brexitannia has clearly run out. President Macron of France has an election looming, and would you believe his luck, but Johnson’s minions have been engaging in a bit of Frenchie-baiting over the issue of licences for French boats to fish in British waters. The Withdrawal Agreement specified that the UK and France would maintain the status quo, meaning that boats that could prove they had long fished in each other’s waters could still do so, but, and here’s the issue, suddenly the only form of proof that the UK would accept was electronic navigational data from expensive kits that smaller French boats don’t possess. Refusing to issue fishing licences to French boats led to the French arresting and impounding a large British trawler (actually Scottish, okay actually owned by a small Canadian firm called Clearwater Seafoods, yes, this is sarcasm) for a bit.

Macron has threatened to ban the entire British fishing fleet from unloading their catches in French ports, which would be almost as disastrous for the British fishing industry as Brexit itself has been, but has held off imposing sanctions until after talks with Baron Frost (remember him?) in a decision made much simpler by the hasty issuing of numerous licences by the island of Jersey, since that’s the part of UK waters where the bulk of the French boats fish anyway. As usual the Government and pro-Brexit Media have acclaimed the French decision as a climb-down in the face of British grit, but back in the real world it’s a sign that the French are in no hurry to let this issue come to a boil, not when they hold the majority of the cards, and it can be successfully parlayed into an election issue that Macron can benefit from. Either Johnson capitulates as normal and changes the licencing rules to allow the French fleet to get licences (this will happen) or Macron gets to extract a little juicy flesh from the haunches of Terre de Rosbif and display it in the Place de Concorde.

Life as a tiny little country that no one likes. It’s magical.

Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by someone for as yet unclear reasons while holding a surgery (which is what we call it when constituents can book a meeting with their MP without being a lobbyist for a major corporation) in his constituency. I don’t think I have to lay out my opinions on murder, so I’ll just say that it’s been pretty revolting to see the same people who couldn’t rustle up two shits when Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed to death by a radicalised far-Right nutjob in the run-up to the 2016 Referendum suddenly bemoaning the language people use when attacking their political opponents. And exploiting Amess’ death to bring in completely unrelated rules designed to hide their expenses, donor lists and travel itineraries from public view, on the grounds that, if people saw the amounts they were claiming, what for, who they were being funded by, and where they were being wined and dined, they might get angry and trust them less. No shit, Sherlock. Oh, and I think it’s alright to be repulsed by the rush to beatify a homophobic promoter of forced birth laws who consistently voted to take food out of children’s mouths and strip basic dignity from the poorest amongst us. You are what you do, and what Amess did with his career was be a reliable vote for the worst Tory policies of the last few decades.

And I can’t sign off without mentioning the latest dish to plop onto the all-you-can-eat crap buffet, though it’s hard to do it justice.

Basically, a Tory MP called Owen Paterson was investigated by the Commons Standards Committee for taking £100,000 in donations from two private companies and lobbying for them in Parliament, which is a big no-no. He was found incredibly guilty in a damning report which suggested he should be sanctioned with a 30-day suspension from Parliament (the horror!). So far, so normal for naughty Tories. During the course of the investigation Paterson’s wife hung herself in woods by their home, and while initially Paterson claimed he had no idea why his wife did this, once it became clear that Johnson’s Government were opposed to the concept of anyone on their side of the House of Commons being punished, however mildly, for a bit of highly profitable corruption, his story changed to her suicide being a direct result of the ‘witchhunt’ he was suffering through and we were off to the races. Yesterday the Tories called for a vote on whether or not to accept the findings of the Standards Committee, and in a partisan vote (that saw scores of Tory MPs abstain – brave Sir Robin’s that they are) they not only voted to give Paterson a free pass, but to scrap the entire system of enforcing standards on MPs and replace it with a leaner, more up-to-date system consisting of a room full of Tory MPs all standing on tables and singing Billy Joel’s “Innocent Man”.

To say this went down badly would be an understatement. If they’d drafted in the writers of The Onion they couldn’t have scripted a more pitch-perfect example of the utter contempt the modern Conservative Party has for Parliament, rules, laws, justice and/or the opinions of anyone outside of their donor class. The fact that they tried to justify their corrupt power-grab by unearthing the rotting corpse of St David the Martyr (we’re just trying to protect our honourable public servants from hostility, they cried) was just the cherry on top. It takes a lot to stir Sir Keir Starmer out of his pose of mannequin stillness, but Peter Mandelson must have forgotten to confiscate his mobile phone because he was right out there condemning the sleaziness of it all and following the Scottish Nationalists in saying Labour would not give the new and improved (no) standards format time of day.

As far as colossal political own goals go, it was a pretty humungous one, and true to form, the jellied substance which passes for the spine of Johnson’s Government soon started to melt into goo once the wave of revulsion felt by most of the country started to hit MP’s social media pages. The day started with Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (the Minister for Going On TV To Justify Shit When No One Else Wants To) going on TV to justify the whole shambles (he didn’t) lie about what had happened (he did) and heavily imply that the Commissioner in charge of the Commons Standards Committee should step down (she didn’t). Then the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life gave a blistering press conference in which he openly called out the Tories for partisan fuckery of the system and told them to stop that shit right the fuck now (or words to that effect). In the last few hours they’ve started the inevitable u-turn, with Government sources briefing that Paterson’s triumphalist rounds of the evening news bulletins (like they hadn’t been scripted for him ahead of time) had hit the wrong tone and now, suddenly, MPs would be allowed another vote on whether he should have to suffer the 30 day suspension after all, and the idea of a new Standards Committee was, of course, just an idle thought and not something they actually intended to run as an Old Boy’s Club, because somehow the vote they’d held the day before hadn’t been supposed to mean what they said it meant and could everyone just stop shouting at them and let them get away with this, please?

Paterson obviously had a visit from the Men in Suits because he’s just resigned as MP, still squealing his innocence and blaming everyone else for being absolutely beastly to him, but what can you expect from a Tory?

One dangling plotline that hasn’t gone away, and hopefully won’t, was the suggestion that the whole farrago was a Batman Gambit by Johnson’s circle to force the aforementioned Commissioner of the Commons Standards Committee to resign, with Johnson choosing her successor, because she is in the process of investigating the thought dead and buried story from a few months ago of who, exactly, paid for the expensive redecoration of Number 10 demanded by Johnson’s wife (ex-Tory Party Communications Chief Carrie ‘Antoinette’ Symonds-Johnson) and glossed over by the minion Johnson appointed specifically to clear him of any wrongdoing. There’s always been something very stinky about that incident, and apparently the Johnsons are shitting bricks over what an investigation might reveal. Which is nice.

See what I mean? There’s always something else to get outraged over where the Tories are concerned, and the crap rockets never stop falling. I haven’t even mentioned the laughable shitshow of COP26 where the same Prime Minister who has allowed private companies to pollute our river and beaches with raw sewage on a massive scale and made thousands of pounds rubbishing environmental issues in his newspaper columns tried to pose as a concerned Green for the second time in a month (didn’t drag the muppets into it this time, though, which is a relief) before falling asleep, maskless and probably the worse for wear after a liquid lunch, next to the 95 year old global treasure David Attenborough. It’s almost – almost – cause to jack it all in, exclusively watch episodes of ‘The Goes Wrong Show’ and just piss myself sodden with laughing, but no, that’s the vodka and absinthe appetisers talking, and if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that talking drinks should be ignored whenever possible.

Good night, and may your god go with you.

Everything about the Tories is filmed through a lubed-up lens that allows their Infotainer groupies to maintain a comfortable distance from the sharper edges of harsh reality. No context, no residual memory of things that happened a day, a week, a month or a year ago, instead everything a Tory says is treated as functionally ex nihil, a discrete bubble of words and themes floating autonomously above the mundane world it’s supposed to reference, existing safely outside of the normal channels of cause and effect and vanishing noiselessly into the ether when its mayfly utility comes to an end. Political reporting in this country is basically like a drugged up 60s cult gathering held after hours in a Soho nightclub, replete with bonged-out middle-class journalists sprawled limblessly over patchouli-scented beanbags nodding away at the Enlightened One’s stream of faux-profound absurdities, only occasionally emitting a muffled “Far out, man” as their tiny minds are blown to kaleidoscopic smithereens by the dichotomy of contradictory platitudes but somehow barely cognizant of their raised backsides being rhythmically slapped by the metronomic thrusts of kaftan-wearing men with neat moustaches and unsuspecting wives at home.

Anyway, wandering off the point there.

The Tory Conference concluded with Slobberty Flobberty himself gurning and harumpetyrumping his way through a third-rate stand-up set that had even reliably pro-Tory commentators rolling their eyes at how lazy and policy-lite it was. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic that is killing hundreds of people a week, shop shelves are randomly bare because supply chains are breaking down, the NHS is already in crisis mode, the Government’s signature ‘achievement’ is daily being exposed as a ticking time-bomb for the economy and Northern Irish peace, the world itself is about to hit a definitive cliff-edge in the ongoing climate change catastrofailure, but Johnson just shambled on stage and ignored and/or blatantly lied about all that gloomy bring-down jive in order to give his fans a hour of the sneering after-dinner baffleslop the Tory Party faithful crave almost as much as they do tax-breaks and acts of performative cruelty inflicted on people different to them.

Whereas you guys had Trump rallies where he’d channel the bile of a million resentful vacuum cleaner salesmen standing naked in motel parking lots at three in the morning ranting drunkenly about their bitch ex-wives and how they don’t get no respect from their kids while, back in the room they paid for with unpaid alimony, a bored hooker empties out their wallet and pockets their tubs of prescription painkillers, Flobalob is more like an elderly comedian doing a winter season at the Margate Lyceum armed with a set of Mother-in-Law jokes and cracks about the stupid NiCLANGS. He knows his audience, and he knows what they like. Some perfunctory waffle about enterprise and bringing well paid jobs to all areas of the country to pad out the routine, sure, but the bulk of it was just the time-worn litany of digs at popular Tory hate-figures dressed up in a bit of fake-Latin to put his ‘Borisworld’ spin on it. Corduroy Clad Communists, Snooty Shifty Eurocrats, Corrupt Union Bosses, Smelly Eco-Hippies, Woke Black Lesbians, on and on and on in a flobbadobbing treacle of Three Word Phrases that somehow managed to avoid saying anything very much about anything at all but left his audience satisfyingly wet about the gusset and willing to forgive him once again for the occasional act of gross corruption and ongoing national humiliation.

It must have been a very draining hour for everyone’s least favourite half-melted Pilsbury Dough-Man, because as soon as he’d dropped the mike and signed “Best Wishes, Love Boris” across a few sagging breasts he was out of there and on a plane and heading south for yet another freebee holiday at the sprawling Marbella estate of former 90’s ‘It Boi’ and celebrity/politician fraud Zac Goldsmith, failed London Mayoral candidate, recently booted Tory MP, and even more recently ennobled (by, go on, guess who, rhymes with Doris Bonson) Baron Goldsmith of Richmond, the Minister of State for Pacific and the Environment [is that even grammatical? – Ed]. Son of the execrable asset-stripping proto-Brextremist James Goldsmith and brother of Jemima ‘Poundshop Lady Di’ Goldsmith-Khan, Zac has the kind of effortlessly privileged heritage that fellow Old Etonian Johnson would turn a hedgehog inside out and wear it like a codpiece to possess, although he does have the edge in the “Rode TV Celebrity to electoral success and the Top Job” Challenge Stakes to keep him warm at night. Having realised that the febrile late-Weimar atmosphere of Tory Britain is a difficult one for a socially liberal libertarian environmentalist millionaire to prosper in, even one with a record of Islamophobic dog-whistling that must go down great guns with his occasionally Pro-Palestinian sister, Zac has settled down with his share of the family fortune to make even more lovely, lovely money alongside his unelected role as UK Minister for Lemuria and Wherever.

A stay at this Marbella estate goes for something like £25,000 a week, which is a nice little earner for a holiday pad on which he very likely doesn’t pay any Spanish tax because of the convoluted holding company/offshore investment mechanism by which Zaccy Boy owns the property, but it should raise some interesting questions in the wake of the release of the Pandora Papers. I say should, because of course, it really won’t. The British Press mostly ignored the revelations, and even the ones that didn’t have shown little to no interest in pursuing the question of who, exactly, paid for Flobalob’s week-long jolly? It certainly wasn’t him, Bully Bunter doesn’t pay for a damned thing, which would mean he either got it as a freebee from a man he recently made a lifetime Peer of the Realm so he could stay in his Government, which is very bad, or some other incredibly flush ally of Tory interests stumped up the cash, which is even worse and probably illegal. But these are Tories, so no one is going to risk their necks asking difficult questions of people who sign their cheques in Arabic or Cyrillic. Suffice it to say that a lot of Oligarchs, including Big Daddy Vladdy, have similar sized estates in this part of southern Spain, so I’m sure Flobalob didn’t lack for company around the courtyard dining table of an evening, even if he did wake every morning wishing he’d said no to the third bottle of iced vodka and wondering why he wearing make-up and a dog-collar.

One question that was raised about all this in the Media, but only in a sort of desultory “I see the Chumley-Warners are favouring red roses for their borders this season” fashion, rather than the more virile “There’s a story here and we need to break it!” manner you’d expect if these were actual journalists covering a proven liar and coward. Just why was Flobalob so eager to get out of the country after the Tory Conference? We all know he likes to get away from the hard graft of, well, anything more taxing than drinking someone else’s wine and groping somebody else’s wife, but this jaunt required an extension in the Parliamentary break that in itself drew attention to his Lord Lucan style flight from Blighty. What was going on? Was it an outraged husband with a shotgun? A window opening up in the schedule of Marbella’s top liposuction practitioner? Had he killed again? …

TO BE CONTINUED (Tomorrow, same time, same place)