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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

It’s a doggy dog world.

Let there be snark.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Second rate reporter says what?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

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You are here: Home / Archives for Foreign Affairs / Countries / United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Late Night Open Thread: Getting Done, By Brexit

by Anne Laurie|  February 3, 20232:43 am| 164 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Show Us On the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, United Kingdom

The natural endpoint of modern ‘Conservative’ thought:

with on point marketing like this who can doubt that the Tory Party can climb out of that -25 point polling hole https://t.co/551pd8oayV

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) January 31, 2023

Palmer is a British expat, and the Deputy editor at ForeignPolicy…

look I have hopes for Ukraine but the UK is simply too ridden with oligarchic corruption. https://t.co/Uyk1vReUjM

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) January 31, 2023

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Blankets, Food Banks, and Shuttered Pubs: Brexit Has Delivered a Broken Britainhttps://t.co/lgGgOvuSUd reporting from @liz_cookman

— Robbie Gramer (@RobbieGramer) February 2, 2023

Just asking: Given Russian oligarchs’ takeover of the London financial market, are we sure Brexit wasn’t another GRU operation?…

"Global Britain" was a dangerous dream. "Singapore on Thames" was a dumbass, "move fast and break things"-level pitch. But at this point it's looking like "regional Britain" will be a stretch.

— Thankful Musgrave ?? (@profmusgrave) January 31, 2023

Late Night Open Thread: Getting Done, By BrexitPost + Comments (164)

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Running & Gunning

by Anne Laurie|  October 26, 20227:38 am| 133 Comments

This post is in: 2022 Elections, Local Races, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Proud to Be A Democrat, United Kingdom, Women's Rights Are Human Rights

after successfully fooling everyone into thinking she was a human woman for six weeks and wrecking mischief, the kitsune returns to the wilds https://t.co/WVRymtlvEt

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) October 25, 2022

In Japanese folklore (and much modern anime / manga), fox deities are capable of assuming human form — not always to make mischief, but foxes are foxes.

Since non-mythical foxes are the urban British equivalent of trash pandas in America, there are much nastier quips being made!

Meanwhile, in election news…

Kerry Washington for Stacey Abrams:

My journey isn’t about politics or simply policy, it's about the people of Georgia. It's about fighting for basic rights and good living. I find solidarity in the struggles we all face and hope in knowing there is an abundance of relief that belongs to us. pic.twitter.com/Hw0SNiXA47

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) October 26, 2022


(Yes, it’s worth watching — Abrams is great at messaging!)

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Through Sunday, about 838,000 Georgians had cast early ballots, most of them in person at advance voting sites. That’s almost 60% higher than advance voting totals at this point in 2018, the last midterm election. https://t.co/rJETEUo6Zc

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) October 24, 2022

In Texas:

U-shaped line at my early voting location in Dallas right now. All these people are here to vote for Beto. pic.twitter.com/RMU6dBWFw8

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) October 24, 2022

Turning out to vote in Fort Worth to turn the page on Greg Abbott’s failures. pic.twitter.com/TOQnQxXBSK

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 25, 2022

Together, we’re going to win this election because we’re running with and for the people of Texas.

Polls are now open — go vote for change. pic.twitter.com/yuzmuZsPhO

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 24, 2022

And, [ugh] ICYMI…

Mehmet Oz says abortion should be between "a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders." #PASenateDebate

pic.twitter.com/mo5JB87U22

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 26, 2022

And then imagine that the punditocracy promptly declared her the winner of the debate. https://t.co/xhSKbTpOFy

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) October 26, 2022

Can’t wait for local governments to tax abortions & use the revenue to cut property taxes.

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 26, 2022

These dorks don’t understand what happened tonight. Oz gave Fetterman a closing ad, & it’s going to be brutal. https://t.co/uiRcNIsUIX

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 26, 2022

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Running & GunningPost + Comments (133)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Another Monday, Another Show

by Anne Laurie|  September 12, 20227:38 am| 111 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Venality, United Kingdom

.@HillaryClinton: "I wish now that people would come together behind President Biden, who is doing an amazing job trying to rebuild our manufacturing sector, trying to deal with climate change […] and all the other things […] that the vast majority of Americans approve of." pic.twitter.com/pYGnFnOXGC

— The Hill (@thehill) September 12, 2022

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Republicans for the past 20-30 years: Overturn Roe v. Wade and ban all abortions!

Republicans after seeing their poll numbers drop when SCOTUS overturned Roe: Did I say ban all abortions? What I meant to say was… https://t.co/e0EpaWz3Oe

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 10, 2022

this is awesome, push for your school districts to offer it if you can https://t.co/Y6Ii9zwbQD

— bearded guy that yells at school board meetings (@CalmSporting) September 11, 2022

News of the state funeral:

President Biden has formally accepted an invitation to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Sept. 19, the White House says. First Lady Jill Biden will also attend.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 11, 2022

Somebody’s little Republican heart is breaking:

Latest news from WH official: unlike in past similar state funerals — such as for Nelson Mandela, where the president assembled a US delegation to attend — Buckingham Palace extended WH invitations only to President and First Lady Biden. (Tho other Americans might be invited)

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 11, 2022

Next question: Will Charles send an invitation to the Obamas? (His mum certainly would have, and I assume his protocol office would consider it mandatory. We’ll see!)

But I’d bet a whole box of store-bought cookies that the last Oval Office occupant won’t be invited — if there’s anything to the rumor that TFG was airlifted to DC last night for medical attention, it may be his handlers thought he’d had an infarction when no oversized, gold-inlaid card was personally delivered in advance of President Biden’s announcement.)

Tiger Beat on the Potomac Thames has some details:

??SCOOP: Foreign heads of state and their spouses heading to London for the state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II have been asked to arrive in the U.K. on commercial flights and banned from using helicopters to get around.https://t.co/HsalMjw24t

— Cristina Gallardo (@gallardo_ortega) September 11, 2022

This sounds very much like something Charles would ask for, and also something that he does not really expect to happen. (Australia’s leader seems to have been the first to publicly point out the difficulties.) Old habits die hard, and he’s been failing to get people to agree to his climate goals for at least forty years.

He may be able to impose a bus ride, at least for the representatives of smaller, less powerful countries…

“Can you imagine Joe Biden on the bus?” one foreign ambassador based in London complained via WhatsApp message early Sunday.

— Cristina Gallardo (@gallardo_ortega) September 11, 2022


(No doubt being as thoughtful among the leaders as he’s famously been at humbler wakes for the last several decades. And it’s not as though President ‘Amtrak Joe’ Biden is a stranger to what might be deemed public transit. But the Secret Service are unlikely to agree to such exposure, IMO.)

As Britain mourns the death of its longest-serving monarch, frantic preparations are already underway in London for what is shaping up to be one of the century’s biggest diplomatic occasions.https://t.co/SRsTWvXRtI

— Cristina Gallardo (@gallardo_ortega) September 11, 2022


(Much) more here:

… Leaders including U.S. President Joe Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have already confirmed they will attend the funeral, which Buckingham Palace announced Saturday will be held on September 19, at 11 a.m. at Westminster Abbey.

The historic church, with capacity for 2,000 people, was the setting for Queen Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip in 1947, and for all but two British coronations since 1066.

Also likely to attend the funeral are Japan’s Emperor Naruhito — who may travel alongside Empress Masako and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and French President Emmanuel Macron, among many more…

The most notable — albeit unsurprising — absence will be that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the Kremlin said his attendance is not an option. In gossipy diplomatic circles, just as important as who’s coming is simply who is receiving an invitation, with embassy officials eager to discover whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will be offered the chance to attend…

Monday Morning Open Thread: Another Monday, Another ShowPost + Comments (111)

War for Ukraine Update 36: Despite What the Kremlin Said, Putin Is Not Letting Up

by Adam L Silverman|  March 30, 202211:28 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, United Kingdom, War, War in Ukraine

We start tonight with a request from our antipodean archeologist commenter The Mighty Trowel:

I know there are all sorts of worthy fundraisers, but this one is pretty small and comes directly from my colleagues in Ukraine who are trying to keep their flagship archaeology journal alive: Arheologia is the journal published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine – they’ve already invited submissions from archaeologists outside Ukraine and now they’re trying to pull together $4500 to pay the Ukrainian copy editor/translator and to fund a new laptop for the web person who is a refugee in Germany. It’s a small bit of defiance in a war where people are dying daily, but clearly one close to my heart.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-ukrainian-journal-arheologia

I can vouch for all the people involved in this fundraiser and working with the journal.

If you’ve got a bit extra in this month’s funds, please consider sending them the way of the Ukrainian archeologists to keep their publication up and running.

As I expected after all the reporting, then clarifications, then clarifications of the clarifications regarding the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations yesterday, President Zelenskyy has now clarified things. Again…

"We will not give up anything. And we will fight for every meter of our land, for every single person," Zelensky said.

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 30, 2022

My interpretation of the ongoing negotiations is that Zelenskyy and his team know that Putin isn’t negotiating in good faith so no matter what they suggest will eventually get rejected. They also know that they need to look like they’re at least attempting to be reasonable. As a result, they’re just going through the motions with the negotiations while they continue to defend Ukraine against Putin’s reinvasion.

As I expected and mentioned last night, the British are note willing to provide bilateral, binding security guarantees to Ukraine equivalent to NATO’s Article 5:

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab says his country isn’t ready to become a guarantor of Ukraine’s independence as part of Kyiv’s proposed peace deal with Moscow. “Ukraine is not a NATO member,” he said.

The Germans were somewhat more positive, but still quite ambiguous about the idea:

Germany has ‘general willingness’ to give security guarantees to Ukraine. However, German government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit did not specify would the guarantees include military assistance.

Much more after the jump!

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Earlier today The New York Times reported that US intelligence has assessed that Putin has been willfully misinformed regarding events in Ukraine.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s struggles in Ukraine, according to declassified U.S. intelligence.

The intelligence, according to multiple U.S. officials, shows what appears to be growing tension between Mr. Putin and the Ministry of Defense, including with the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.

Speaking in Algiers, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken acknowledged Mr. Putin had been given less than truthful information from his advisers.

“With regard to President Putin, look, what I can tell you is this, and I said this before, one of the Achilles’ heels of autocracies is that you don’t have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power,” Mr. Blinken said. “And I think that is something that we’re seeing in Russia.”

In a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said that the Defense Department believed that Mr. Putin has not had access to an accurate account of his army’s failures in Ukraine.

“We would concur with the conclusion that Mr. Putin has not been fully informed by his Ministry of Defense, at every turn over the last month,” Mr. Kirby said.

“If Mr. Putin is misinformed or uninformed about what’s going on inside Ukraine, it’s his military, it’s his war, he chose it,” Mr. Kirby said. “And so the fact that he may not have all the context — that he may not fully understand the degree to which his forces are failing in Ukraine, that’s a little discomforting, to be honest with you.”

Other American officials have said that Mr. Putin’s rigid isolation during the pandemic and willingness to publicly rebuke advisers who do not share his views have created a degree of wariness, or even fear, in senior ranks of the Russian military. Officials believe that Mr. Putin has been getting incomplete or overly optimistic reports about the progress of Russian forces, creating mistrust with his military advisers.

Much, much more at the link.

I want to highlight one part of the reporting from above, which I think is exceedingly important:

“If Mr. Putin is misinformed or uninformed about what’s going on inside Ukraine, it’s his military, it’s his war, he chose it,” Mr. Kirby said. “And so the fact that he may not have all the context — that he may not fully understand the degree to which his forces are failing in Ukraine, that’s a little discomforting, to be honest with you.”

This is an excellent way to frame this assessment. Putin has agency, he has used his agency, he put these senior leaders in place, he empowered them, he decided to invade, this is, regardless of what they’ve told him, on him. Otherwise you wind up with stripping Putin of agency and removing his responsibility for the reinvasion of Ukraine, for the war crimes, for all the destruction.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former President of Estonia, has the right take on this:

Are we really going to fall the centuries-old "good Czar, bad boyars" routine?

We saw it with numerous czars, with Lenin, with Stalin, and now once again.

The subtext: "this wouldn't be happening if he only knew."

Forget about it. https://t.co/TJlvRTXjQN

— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) March 30, 2022

Who would be the target if it's an info op? To what end?

It just sounds wishful if not exculpatory

— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) March 30, 2022

Kirby’s, the Pentagon spokesperson, framing is correct. Provided that’s the framing we maintain, then this assessment and its disclosure is fine. If that framing falls away, then President Ilves concerns are more than warranted.

Mariupol:

.@ICRC confirmed the Mariupol warehouse was the org’s but said no team on the ground, no other info. “We distributed all of the supplies from the warehouse earlier in March… No ICRC staff have been at the warehouse since 15 March, and we don’t know how it’s been used since.” pic.twitter.com/Jc9S7ez8rg

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) March 31, 2022

From NPR:

Russian forces in Ukraine have forcibly deported the staff and patients of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, sending more than 70 people to Russia, the city council said. It’s at least the second hospital to undergo that fate, with more than 20,000 people now sent to Russia against their will, the officials said.

The Russians are confiscating identity documents from people who are taken out of their city, the Mariupol City Council said on its Telegram channel. It says the Ukrainians are being sent to filtration camps and then dispersed around Russia.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime for an occupying power to deport people to any other country or territory during an international conflict.

The city council’s version of events hasn’t been independently verified by NPR or other Western media. On Tuesday, Russia’s defense ministry acknowledged it has taken tens of thousands of people out of Mariupol and other parts of eastern Ukraine — but it characterized that action as an evacuation of refugees from a dangerous area.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said Russia is returning to tactics last seen during World War II. He added that the city and Donetsk Region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko are creating a database of deported Ukrainians to ensure they can return.

The Russian tactic has also caused indignation because some people would rather stay in Mariupol rather than be sent to Russia, despite the terrible conditions in the city that’s been under siege for weeks, Kyrylenko said in an interview with the independent Belarusian TV channel Belsat.

Much more at the link!

Chernihiv:

⚡️Mayor says Chernihiv under 'colossal attack' after Russia pledged to halt assault.

“They actually have increased the intensity of strikes,” Vladyslav Atroshenko told CNN. He said that a ‘colossal attack’ on central Chernihiv injured 25 civilians on March 30.

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 30, 2022

Kharkiv:

One of the journalists asked me what was the worst thing I saw in this war. Children's shoes scattered from the explosion in this kindergarten. pic.twitter.com/EmfoPaf1gk

— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) March 30, 2022

Irpin:

#Irpin after #Russia’s liberation operation. This is pure destruction. pic.twitter.com/iJM5zM8d2I

— Lesia Vasylenko (@lesiavasylenko) March 30, 2022

Here’s an update on the Russian troops I mentioned last night that were mucking about in the Chornobyl zone without adequate radiological protection or, as reported, even knowing that Chornobyl had melted down and the entire area is irradiated. Debunked by Cheryl Rofer!

The following thread is tough going and I’m sure it may be triggering for some of you. I’m posting it because I think it is important not to look away, but some of you may need to for self care reasons and that is more than okay!

Frankly I cannot tweet all the terrible news we are getting in Ukraine every day. Each day, more and more personal stories of people who were killed, raped, tortured. All normal people, looking like next-door neighbours. It makes me feel sick, fills me with so much anger and hate

— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) March 30, 2022

  • I retweet what other people tweet because these personal stories are important, they give a meaning to the numbers and statistics. Victims need to be remembered and perpetrators must be brought to justice. But it’s just too much pain and my instinct is to cowardly try to avoid it
  • The stories about rape are the most gut-wrenching. Only those confirmed today: about a woman in Kyiv region whose husband was killed and she was gang-raped by Russian soldiers. And about another one in Mariupol, raped repeatedly in front of her 6-year old son. She didn’t survive
  • And then, there are reports of teenage girls as young as 11 or 12 who have been raped. As a woman and as a mother, I feel literally sick when I read this. Russians’ cruelty has no limit. And it is surreal that mass murderers are still selling gas, oil and have their hands shaken

If you like Ritter Sport chocolate, it’s time to find an alternative. I love the dark chocolate marzipan, but it is now verboten!

Ritter Sport refuses to pull out of Russia citing possible ‘serious effects’ for the company. However, remaining in Russia brings worse effects, such as a fatal damage to reputation. Stop sponsoring war crimes, Ritter Sport. Save your brand’s name and profits. #BoycottRitterSport pic.twitter.com/cx0t3KNAHV

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) March 30, 2022

Before we finish, I want to address something that came up in a comment posted early this morning to last night’s update. The comment was regarding fascism and in one part the commenter inquired if Christianity was intertwined with fascism. The answer to that is yes. Hitler coopted both the German Catholic Church and the German Lutheran Church by appealing to its most extreme elements and emphasizing the historic anti-Semitism that both denominations had engaged with for hundreds and hundreds of years. Not every Catholic cardinal, bishop, priest, nun, or lay person fell for the NAZI message, just as not every Lutheran minister or lay person did, but Hitler and Goebbels and others leaned very hard into the worst elements of the two dominant Christian denominations in Germany, as well as other parts of Europe that the NAZIs conquered. I’ve even seen NAZIism actually referred to as “Dark Christianity”. Mussolini and his national-syndicalists, despite really not being racist fascists like the NAZIs until Hitler forced his hand, also made significant common cause with the Catholic Church. During Franco’s long dictatorship in Spain, he too cultivated the most extreme elements within the Catholic Church – both clergy and laity – for his own benefit. Franco’s actions led to the creation of Opus Dei, which have been a revanchistly dogmatic nuisance everywhere they’ve set up shop, not least of which in the US with their headquarters in DC (long led by a sexual molester of a priest close to Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, Antonin Scalia, and other notable conservative/traditional Catholics in positions of secular political power). In Chile, Pinochet also cultivated the extreme, traditional elements in the Church just as Franco had.

There is nothing intrinsic, other than perhaps centuries of anti-Semitism and in the case of Catholicism and the Orthodox denominations an emphasis on hiearchy, that makes Christianity in any of its denominations and/or sects specifically more amenable to fascism than any other religion. Judaism had Jabotinsky and Meir Kahane and is now plagued by his devotees like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. It also, of course, has the Netanyahus, who are themselves Jabotinskyites. What we tend to think of as political or politicized Islam has a number of similarities to fascism.

The polytheistic religions are not immune either. Japan leading up to and through WW II was clearly enthralled with a very Japanese equivalent of fascism that incorporated the traditional religious elements of emperor worship. The juche concept of the Kims in North Korea is, at least, fascist adjacent in its understanding of the North Koreans as the cleanest race. And I don’t think many would argue that the Hindu nationalism espoused and practiced by Modi and his followers isn’t a form of fascism as well.

I’ll leave that there.

Let’s finish with this, which TaMara sent me and asked me to include in tonight’s post:

My Dad is in a care home and his house has been empty and silent and sad. No longer! A lovely Ukrainian family from Khmelnytskyi, which is roughly mid-way between Lviv and Kyiv, have moved in. Now it's full of children laughing and some guarded hope. A tiny gleam in the darkness.

— Ashley Pharoah (@AJPharoah) March 25, 2022

Open thread!

War for Ukraine Update 36: Despite What the Kremlin Said, Putin Is Not Letting UpPost + Comments (70)

Guest Post: ANOTHER LETTER FROM BREXITANIA

by Anne Laurie|  January 27, 20224:00 pm| 83 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, United Kingdom

Ladies, gentlemen, Jackals — our own indomitable Tony Jay:

“WHEN THE SHIT GO DOWN…”

There I was, trying once again to take a bit of ‘me’ time off from ranting about the Fall of British Democracy and have an actual life doing nice things with nice people (more or less successfully, I’ve been busy) but they only go and drag me back in, don’t they? It’s just an endless calypso of “I told you so!” with these motherfudgers, and there ain’t no low where they won’t go. I’m only telling you about all this because, frankly, the current Era of Sinemanchin and the Court that Mitch Built looks pretty annoying, so you could probably do with the odd dollop of “Look at those arseholes, at least we’re not them!” to ease your fretful brows. No, no, don’t thank me, I’m here for you.

Right, where to begin?

Remember the ‘Partygate’ scandal that blew up at the arse end of last year? Flobalob Johnson’s Downing Street posse exposed via insider leaks as having held a LOT of boozy office parties during the strictest Lockdown periods, which they piously denied, only to get shown up by more leaks, repeated as necessary to inflict maximum humiliation. I know it doesn’t sound like much, not when compared to the much greater crimes they’ve committed out in the open, but something about the image of chubby-cheeked Tory totty whooping it up behind the doors of 10 Downing Street seemingly every night before necking a couple of paracetamol and fanning out each morning to solemnly warn the peons how very important it was that they obeyed the restrictions their betters were gleefully ignoring has ‘cut through’ like nothing else.

Mucho anger was seen across the land, and lo, a great plummeting there was in Tory poll ratings. Johnson himself has been lying like a scabby floor-rug all the way through the shitshow, including numerous times on the floor of the House of Commons, which is an official Resignation Level Offence, tossing whoever happened to be closest at hand under the bus and hiding behind a series of ‘independent’ inquiries, the credibility of which have crumbled like sandcastles at the slightest scrutiny. He’s cornered and desperate, leaking authority like an incontinent gerbil and with a steadily shrinking circle of Cabinet loyalists willing to sort-of defend him while also casting a gimlet eye on the bookmaker’s odds for who the next Tory Party leader will be. If it wasn’t for the horrendous damage all of this is doing to the country as a whole, it would be my absolute favourite binge-watch TV show of all time. Right up there with Mandalorian, Witcher, and Hey, Duggee.

Now, leaving aside the whole “Have you no decency, man?” fulmination about why he hasn’t resigned (because obviously, no, he hasn’t, and no, he won’t, what are you some kind of moron?) we’ve reached the bargaining stage of the process. Having invented a family member with Covid symptoms as an excuse to go into isolation for a few days, Johnson evidently spent this period shitting all over those guidelines as well, because he emerged with a pair of ‘genius’ escape strategies that were clearly cobbled together in panicky face-to-face meetings with coked-up PR consultants throwing increasingly left-field ‘mind-missiles’ around while dragging the whole thing out (a simple note saying “You’re fucked, fuck off” would cover all the bases) in order to bulk up their billable hours. Both schemes were leaked to the media ASAP, whether by Johnson’s people or by those targeting him it’s hard to say and, when you get right down to it, pretty much irrelevant. Now that the Omerta demanded of the In Group has been broken, nothing stays secret for long. They’re all terrified of being left holding the bag so as soon as anything juicy enters their eyeline it’s straight on the old jungle telegram to friendly media sources and that’s that.

What did they come up with? Well, I’m glad you asked. Brace yourselves, these schemes are so damned sharp they could bisect your imagination if you think about them too hard.

Operation ‘Big Dog’. I shit you not, that’s what they called it. The plan being to draw up lists of Tory Party staffers and civil-servants who would be instructed to zip their plump and inviting lips while Johnson, in full-on Disappointed but Stern Statesman mode, ceremoniously ladened them with all the blame for his actions and ‘accepted their resignations’ before ‘moving forward with lessons learnt”. The idea being that ‘culpability’ and ‘responsibility’ are just non-corporeal NFT type things that can be traded off to the nearest mug and forgotten about. That’s just how this business works, yeah? Well, sometimes, yes it does. When the person demanding the sacrifice has either a deep well of loyalty or an even deeper bucket of treats to dip into, sometimes people will take that bullet, confident that their savvy sacrifice will earn them brownie points and a grateful leg-up in the non-too distant future. That’s hardly the case here, though, is it? Why guzzle the tainted Kool Aid for an incompetent boob like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson when it’s pretty clear that he’s a spent force and all the future mojo rests with those dismantling his Premiership? I bet the sharp-dressed boys from Lye, Deaneye and Faykit Public Relations Inc didn’t dwell on that possibility for too long, but when you’ve got a fool for a client…

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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.

Guest Post: ANOTHER LETTER FROM BREXITANIAPost + Comments (83)

Foreign Affairs Guest Post: L’t#@t, C’est Moi (Part II)

by Anne Laurie|  November 8, 20214:00 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, United Kingdom

Continuing yesterday’s rant, the ever-amazing Tony Jay:

… The answer soon arrived in the form of a brutal report (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2530) on the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic put out by two of Parliament’s joint select committees, Health & Social Care and Science & Technology. Now, bear in mind that these Committees are chaired by Tories. In the case of the Health & Social Care committee it’s chaired by Jeremy “No Dear, they’re just calling you a runt” Hunt, who was Tory Health Secretary between 2012 and 2018 and so was the man directly responsible for many of the cuts, ‘reforms’ and supply chain reorganisations that left the National Health Service of 2019/20 already overburdened, under-resourced and ill-equipped to deal with Covid despite multiple past exercises warning in excruciating detail exactly how unprepared the NHS was for such an event. While people of normal ethical standards would be wondering “Who the hell thought that total and absolute Hunt was qualified to head up that particular Committee given his abysmal record and the degree of loathing he’s held in by everyone outside of the very top executive (Government appointed) echelons of the NHS?” you have to remember, these are Tories we’re talking about. Failure is the grease on their pole and gravity is only ever an optional constraint. He only fucked up his Health brief if you think fucking up the NHS wasn’t his job. In Tory terms he played an absolute blinder.

Many observers foolishly assumed that Hunt would pull his punches like a good little soldier and give the Government a mediocre whitewash. After all, any honest [I see what you did there – Ed] appraisal would lay a fairly damning portion of the blame on his bony shoulders and expecting a Tory to willingly assume blame for failure if they can possibly avoid it is like expecting George Armstrong Custer to refuse a medal for ever so gallantly slaughtering half-starved Native Americans while the regimental band played a cheeful garryowen.

What they apparently forgot, but the ever-paranoid Flobalob clearly didn’t, was that the Saudi-funded Hunt had come second in the 2019 Tory Leadership Election and resigned from the Cabinet rather than tarnish his middle-of-the-road brand serving under the Bullingdon Boor. He might be as slimy and malleable as any of Johnson’s ring-kissers, but Hunt sees himself as the only viable King Over the Water for the ‘establishment’ Tory Party, ready to slide into Number 10 as a safe pair of blandly corrupt hands if and when the Annos Anus finally come to a sticky end, and only too happy in the meantime to stick a knife into the weakened joints of his rival’s Body Politic where and when opportunity permits. Given this, it’s hardly surprising that Johnson got out of Dodge ASAP, he knew exactly what was coming and didn’t want to have to answer any questions about “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” where his Cabinet had viewed the oncoming pandemic through “a veil of ignorance” and where “the heroic efforts of NHS staff, are to be celebrated, but do not compensate for the mistakes”.

In any normal political milieu this report would have cut a swathe through Government faster than a mankini-clad Prince Andrew rushing to a Queen of the Teens Party on Epstein Island, dropping Ministers like sizzling bon-mots and necessitating Flobalob himself taking a short walk to the podium outside Number 10 Downing Street to read a brief note of contrite resignation before sawing off his own head with a blunt butter knife. But we’re not in a normal political milieu, not anymore, not even close. The diabolical troika of Press/Media collusion + foreign financial and social media backing + self-sabotaging Opposition means that the only threat to Flobalob’s grip on the Throne comes from within, and so far, he’s been able to keep a majority of the Tory Party’s reactionary cadres, its high-end Donors and roughly 40% of the dumbed-down electorate happy enough for his rivals to restrict their challenges to his authority to the discreet and deniable. When that changes, and it could happen very quickly indeed depending on circumstances, everyone within licking distance of the Great Brass Ring wants to be in a position where they can point to something they said or did that gives them a (barely) plausible window to represent both continuity (because a Tory Government can never, ever, be said to have done anything wrong) but also radical change (because everything that people say went wrong – even though it didn’t – was someone else’s fault, not theirs).

With that in mind, one unavoidable side-effect of Flobalob doing a runner down to ‘Marbs’ (as it’s colloquially known in Essex gangster parlance) was his leaving the feral malcontents who constitute his Cabinet without anything remotely resembling adult supervision for a while, which is never a good idea. Whenever Dumpy Drippydick goes AWOL for a few days bored political mediavores of every species start foraging about in the mouldy Westminster undergrowth for something juicy to suckle on and everyone with an ounce of ambition takes the opportunity to tout their portfolio of steadily more revealing publicity shots around the usual expensive London eateries hoping that one of the Broadsheet Big Boys will take a shine to them. Thing is, they all know that there’s a built-in expiration date on Johnson’s Premiership, that’s just how it rolls when your Party leader is (how does it go?) an egotistical mishmash of rodentine ethics and masturbatory instincts. All the pundit guff about him being so popular with Tory voters that he can feasibly challenge Thatcher’s longevity is just laughable. They said more or less the same thing about David Cameron and Theresa May, and we all know what happened to those titans of mediocrity. All Tory Prime Ministers are looming granite monoliths with political destinies measurable only in geological timescales… until they’re very suddenly not, and the Infotainers who were fluffing them so enthusiastically just a moment ago will unlatch and move on without a second glance, professionally addicted as they are to the spicy hit of the next Kwizats Hadderach’s pulpy wee worm twitching excitedly upon their nimble tongues [bleach cocktail, stat! – Ed].

The truth is, Johnson is sitting pretty right now because he’s a useful attention sponge behind which the real movers and shakers who are dismantling the UK into disposable chunks of short-term profit can operate, and because he happened to seize his moment of glory at a point in time when the pendulum of Establishment opprobrium was swinging so ferociously against the previous Labour leader (a man who wanted to raise taxes on the rich? Stop arming terrorist regimes? What a monster!) that the British News Media have found themselves, by accident or design, pancaked up against the far-Right side of the political sphere where simple inertia has resulted in them displaying a level of bias so shocking that even Injustices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett would struggle (but only briefly) to match it. Johnson could have spent the last two years vivisecting baby seals on the altar of St Paul’s Cathedral while dressed as a Nazi Nun and singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in a camp falsetto and it wouldn’t have mattered. The coverage would still have cycled unquestioningly between tonal variations on “In other news, the Prime Minister was in London today honouring the wartime experiences of religious groups on both sides of the conflict while showing off his butchery skills and, to the delight of onlookers, a surprising gift for crooning. Did he hit all the right notes? We sent Bubbly Northern Reporter Trisha Token to the nearest Conservative and Unionist Club (that will admit women) to find out”.

But that’s unsustainable. Everything new becomes old, entropy is a thing, and only a truly well-curated hatred lasts forever. Whether it’s the Brexit Bill coming due in the form of spiralling prices and collapsing businesses, Covid cancelling another Christmas because Sir Chubby of Chequers chickened out of another fight with his Party’s hemlock-guzzling Wingnuts, genuine violence returning to the cities and towns of Ulster thanks to Tory shithousery over the Northern Ireland Protocol, former-Labour voters in England’s run-down northern constituencies making up the so-called ‘Red Wall’ realising that they can’t eat anti-immigrant bellyaching or heat their homes on anti-Woke showboating and turning on their new Tory MPs, or any of another hundred entirely possible scenarios spiralling out of this amateur night at the third-best Dadaist improv club in Saffron Walden level joke of a Government’s control, the current situation will change and something will force Flobalob to take a swinging boot of reality right in the nuts. At that point His Solipsistic Majesty will deflate to the size of a popped party condom faster than you can say “Let’s Go, Brandon BoJo”.

The struggle to replace him has already started. Hell, it started back in 2019 the moment his balding pate was anointed with their crazed spittle by a radicalised Tory base of Gilet & tweed clad rural Squires and blue-haired Women’s Institute harridans. He’d very much liked to have filled his cabinet with wall-eyed loyalists who would dropkick their firstborn off the Tarpeian Rock if it would buy The Man Himself a day’s good headlines, but Johnson doesn’t seem to inspire that kind of intense devotion in anyone other than Nadine Dorries (a part time trash-novelist so vindictive towards ‘The Arts’ and wholeheartedly obnoxious to everyone working within it that she simply had to be promoted to the ‘Bully the BBC and fill it with Tory loyalists’ Ministerial post), and anyway, places around the big, shiny table had to be found for all the various externally controlled humanoid national/corporate franchises in expensive suits who populate the upper reaches of Tory Party ‘talent’. The former are pretty lightweight individuals, bound to rise or fall on the custard seas of Flobalob’s own popularity, while the latter are the ones you have to worry about, since they’re usually seen wearing the hungry grimaces of sharks let loose in a practice pool for overweight baby seals. For their time, you see, it has come.

I’m not going to bore you right now with a dramatis personae for the runners and riders in the race to succeed Bully Bunter, I can do that at great and grating length when the flag goes up for real sometime before the next Election. What I will point out is that Rishi Sunak, the heavily lacquered millionaire homunculus appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by the Banking sector is going to be sadly disappointed if he thinks Johnson’s congregation of dry white whiners are going to vote for one of ‘those people’ to reign over them. He already looks like he gets packed in salt once a week to draw every ounce of moisture from him, imagine how salty he’s going to be once he realises that all of the Media tongue-baths in the world (I’m looking at you FTF Guardian ‘journalists’) don’t count for shit when melanin outrage come into play. The same out-and-proud Islamophobia did for the then Chancellor Sajid ‘Did you know my dad was a lowly bus-driver on Sontar?’ Javid back when he filled the Bankers’ Chancellor role (House Deutsche Bank in his case, House Goldman Sachs in Sunak’s) and thought he could power-stance his way to the top job after May stepped down. He’s obviously a glutton for punishment (or maybe he simply thinks the ethnically pure pickings on the Tory front bench are so thin he can pull off an upset once the Tory membership have exhausted their racist quivers pot-shotting Sunak’s ambitions) because he’s clearly using his recent move to the Health Secretary post to burnish his anti-Union, pro-privatisation and entirely fictitious tough-guy credentials.

Priti Patel, the (White) Home(land) Secretary and Minister of State for Smirking While Dogwhistling, has clearly made a similar calculation. Her entire tenure so far has been one long audition to be the Dominatrix so many Tories not-so secretly crave to have kitten-heeling air-vents in their wrinkled nethers, with performative cruelty the one sustaining policy directive for everyone working under her. It’s possible that her lack of a menacing penis might cancel out the duskiness of her origins in the minds of Tory voters *if* she can keep them blitzed to the tits on regular injections of anti-immigrant viciousness and photoshoots of drowned brown infants. Especially if every squeeze of the plunger is accompanied by a sultry “Do you want to see some more?” smirk.

But the point, ah, the point. The point is that Johnson’s grip on power is slowly, imperceptibly, slip-slipping away from him, and a fair portion of his Cabinet see their jobs as extended auditions to replace him come that happy day. The point is also that, as I bemoaned way back up there at the start of this rant, it’s hard to write about all this headslapping lunacy because the sluice gates of outrage are always wide open and working at full capacity.

For example, since I started writing, all of this happened.

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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.

Foreign Affairs Guest Post: L’t#@t, C’est Moi (Part II)Post + Comments (43)

Foreign Affairs Guest Post: ANOTHER LETTER FROM BREXITANNIA — L’t#@t, C’est Moi

by Anne Laurie|  November 7, 20214:00 pm| 107 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, United Kingdom

Never a bad time for a despatch from Mr. Tony Jay:

The Brexception that obeys no rules

I’ve said this before and I’ll no doubt say it again at exhaustive – and exhausting – length via a voluminous geyser of made-up words verticastically velocitated from my dangerously bulging verbumlocium, but every day it gets just a little bit harder to find the requisite testicular fortitude to write about the blood-drenched bowel-movement that is the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Not because it isn’t a proto-fascist regime that merges shameless greed with the kind of brazen incompetence that fertilised British military graveyards for centuries, because it is, and not because it isn’t staffed by classless morality voids hosting the cold, dead hearts of fairground lifers, because it’s that as well, and not because it isn’t funded by people whose major qualifications are bringing to the table first-hand experience of installing repressive crime syndicates at the top of collapsing nation-states plus a gajillion roubles in need of laundering, because it’s definitely that too, and saying so frequently and loudly is both honest and good for my mental health. No, it’s because every single passing moment seems to bazooka yet another great steaming log of barefaced bastardy right into the collective face of a dazed and confused populace. There’s just so much of it, and we’re not talking small portions here. Today’s United Kingdom is the 1950’s Roadside Diner of faecal feastery, where all the plates are hubcap sized, no one leaves without polishing off a jumbo-sized ‘chocolate’ milkshake, and your place in the centre booth is reserved for every single one of the early-riser, morning, mid-morning, elevenses, mid-day, brunch, lunch, matinee, post-matinee, dinner, late dinner, Mediterranean dinner, evening meal, supper and late-night bargain bucket servings. There’s literally no time to pause for breath and give anything they do the furious dismemberment it deserves because whenever you try, oh look, here comes another facecake of cynical cruelty booming down the chute and it simply … does… not… stop.

For example.

We recently had the annual Tory Party Conference, which was held, in a fairly deliberate trolling of the city’s Labour voting majority, in sunny Manchester (that’s funny, BTW) and it was, as usual, a dreary montage of boosterish mouth-flappers sprinkling culture-war chum all over their paeans to God, Queen and Country in front of mostly empty conference rooms while the vast majority of delegates were gainfully employed elsewhere snorting lines of uncut Antiguan Boom-Boom Powder off the arses of ZHC rent-boys and betting wads of public cash on the results of pit-fights between starving dogs and handcuffed Union organisers. Just an average week on the jolly for the Natural Party of Government, nothing out of the ordinary or vaguely troubling to a complicit News Media still coming down from the addictive sugar-high of the previous week’s Labour Party Conference. In advance of that gathering the haunted ventriloquist’s puppet and short-term seat-warmer known as Sir Keir ‘Is there anybody there?’ Starmer and his backroom team of overcaffeinated twitter trolls had trailed it to the Press as a make-or-break opportunity for the charisma-sink that walks like a man to finally introduce himself and his inspiring political vision to the Great British Public, but instead had mismanaged a cringemakingly inept power-play that shone a merciless spotlight on how crap they are at basic politics, then alternated between semaphoring their pathological hatred of anyone who’d actually want to be a member of the yucky old Labour Party (look at us, Rupert Mister Murdoch, Sir, we don’t like dirty lefties either) with mind-numbingly boring speeches cribbed directly from Federation of British Industry press releases circa 1995. All that didn’t really matter, though, because even before Labour’s deputy-leader stood up at a fringe event and drunkenly – but accurately – called the Tory Party ‘scum’ (sales of fainting couches, clutchable pearl necklaces and daggers for back-specific stabbing quadrupled in an instant) and one of Britain’s oldest and traditionally Labour-supporting Unions disaffiliated itself from the Party in disgust at its uncoordinated lunge to the Right (because nothing breeds Unity like witch-hunts and factional purging, amirite?) the News Media already had their “Labour in Disarray” stories typed up and headed to the printers, leaving plenty of time for them to concentrate on their day job of parsing Tory Party statements for signs and portents that might hint at the ups and the downs at Clown Prince Flobalob’s Unseelie Court of Woe.

It’s a very different story when they write about the Tories. Their Conferences are much more like televised rallies or communal cross-burnings, scripted right down to the pauses for electronic applause and devoid of even the illusion of democratic input, which is just how the access journalists like it. No mussyfussy swellings of dissent to be navigated through here, just staged backslapping and lines of meaningless fluff the pundits back at the studio can cherry-pick from to pretend that this time the Nasty Party are genuinely serious about whatever populist nonsense they’re blathering on about today. While write-ups of Labour Conferences read like a mean Auntie Karen phoning in an anonymous complaint to the cops about ‘those people’ down the street, traditional reporting on Tory Conferences resembles nothing so much as Politico meets The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yes, they may arguably be a collection of horrific man-beast hybrids driven by unnatural lusts and a hunger for man-flesh, but can’t we just put that to one side for a moment and recognise how their impressive message discipline gives them an advantage in the War of Optics?

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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)

Foreign Affairs Guest Post: ANOTHER LETTER FROM BREXITANNIA — L’t#@t, C’est MoiPost + Comments (107)

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