Thanks, once more, to commentor Tony Jay: PRE-BREXIT BLUE-ON-BLUE EDITION Rum doings on this side of the Atlantic, as the race to succeed Theresa May (the only time you’ll see those three words strung together in any sentence format) as supreme leader of the Conservative Party and (possibly, probably, maybe not, we’ll see how things …
Foreign Affairs Guest Post: “THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE SLOB IN THE NIGHTTIME”Post + Comments (106)
Now, don’t get me wrong here. People row. That’s who we are, especially when we’re in stressful situations and some entitled walrus spills red wine on the couch/finds you spaffing off to Naughty Butlers clips on your laptop. Even Tories are allowed to have private lives, though, obviously, it would be absolutely hunky-dory if more of them kept children, animals and ritual sacrificial knives out of them. I don’t like it when the Press sticks its sticky little stick of a snout in there grubbing around for scandal, but that’s not what happened here. The Police turning up in the early hours of the morning to check whether the prohibitive favourite to be our next PM was murdering (or being murdered by) his girlfriend is a legitimate news story, and more to the point, not only are concerned neighbours calling the Police to investigate when it appears such fears might be a plausible concern absolutely the right thing to do, recording audio of the incident for use in a potential court-case is smart and would very likely be instrumental in cutting through the obfuscations of your average domestic abuser’s ‘He said/She said’ defence.
What civilised person could possibly disagree with that, enquired Major Snark of the 3rd Light Sarcasm Dragoons?
The problem here, in the great tradition of the cover-up being worse than the crime, is in how the British Right chose to respond. The next day the story was all over the news, as you’d expect, but never fear, Operation ‘Don’t You Think Political Correctness Has Gone Maaaaad?’ was soon dispatching Johnson’s surrogates all over the airwaves to attack, attack, attack and smear the neighbours in a manner which will be very, very familiar to you Norteamericanos, but which we naïve Old Country types haven’t previously seen deployed in such a hyper-partisan way. They were “left-wing snoopers”, ‘Corbynista curtain-twitchers’, ‘theatrical luvies’ (i.e. pawns of the homosexy agenda), and even compared to the Stasi by one absolute charmer. The Telegraph (for whom Johnson is still a very well-paid columnist) dug up the shocking revelation that the wife of the neighbour had once swore at Johnson in the street, and that he and all of his friends were (brace yourselves) shameless Remoaners. Coverage in Murdoch’s grimy little tabloid shitrag The Sun (spit) was rapidly veering towards an outright denial that anything untoward had taken place, while the tape of the incident was obviously a Fake News construct concocted by Venezuelan secret-police as part of an anti-democratic hit-piece on Sir Boris of Brexit, but then all of Symonds’ other neighbours came forward to back up the initial reporting, which tripped up this angle of attack and caused a back-scuttle of human centipede proportions. Undaunted Johnson’s defenders circled back around to condemning all of the neighbours for ‘spying’ on their man, and no less an authority in neighbourly conduct than the until recently incorporeal shade of long-buried evil known as Jacob Rees-Mogg (nearest neighbour 12.3 miles beyond the Forbidden Wood which encircles his dark estate) went on Radio 4 to declare that the Christian thing to do in the event of hearing a woman screaming at a man to “Get off her” was to turn up the volume on ‘Songs of Praise’, mind your own bloody business, and let the man deal with his woman as God intended.
Now, you’d think that Johnson’s rival for the Tory leadership would be licking his lips and huddled over kitchen tables with his unofficial Cabinet gaming out the best way to exploit this humungous own goal by Team Boris, wouldn’t you? Sadly, you’d only be partly right. Poor old Jeremy Hunt has had his own scandal to deal with. On Thursday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip ‘Fuck Boris’ Hammond was due to give the annual Mansion House speech to the great and the good of the City of London when, as has become de rigueur, it was interrupted by a very nicely dressed contingent of Greenpeace activists out to draw attention to Britain’s crappy environmental record and the vast, existential threat of global climate change. All well and good, you’d think. Everyone was polite, short speeches were read, and there was even a smattering of applause. How very civilised.
But, uh oh, what’s this? A single Greenpeace protestor in a delightful red off the shoulder number attempted to sneak around the other side of the audience. Presumably she was planning to assault the Chancellor with the very many sharp-edged leaflets she had in her open purse, or perhaps perturb him with an organic courgette in the name of Militant Veganism, but she was stopped in her tracks by Tory MP, junior Foreign Office minister and Hunt campaign official Mark Field, who grabbed her by the neck, slammed her face first into a marble column, and frog marched her out of the door under the shocked, horrified, but ultimately completely static eye of every other fucker there. You can see the footage yourself online, it’s pretty ugly, and will be all too familiar to any woman who’s had to deal with the casual violence of the Furrier Sex. By a happy coincidence one of Field’s roles as a Hunt deputy at the Foreign Office has been to handle Britain’s response to the Chinese Government’s treatment of protestors in Hong Kong, calling for investigations into their officials’ “inappropriate use of force”. Oooh, Alanis would have loved this one.
Now, in comparison to the ‘Johnson Row’ response, Field himself was suspended the following morning and his pitiful whining about “feeling threatened” didn’t last very long, presumably because Hunt got on the phone and told him to apologise and then shut the fucking hell up ASAP. But the media misdirection campaign, ah, that was a different matter and suspiciously similar in tone and theme. Tory MPs and professional mouthpieces for the Second Counter-Reformation (Motto – “It’s a Straight White Conservative Christian Man’s World, Let’s Keep It That Way”) vomited out of the gates with salvos of pre-scripted bullshit. She could have been a terrorist! It was a citizen’s arrest! What about protestors evicted from television studios, eh? Was that assault too, Comrade Journalist? The response of the British Media was also the same. Baffled confusion, stuttering repetition of “With the greatest of respect…” when trying to counter crimson-faced projection and openly disrespectful accusations of media bias. Like red-shirted movie characters confronted with their beloved household pet turned into a rabid flesh-eating zombie, they just couldn’t process the change in the dynamic and huddled up in foetal balls of denial, waiting for the violence to pass and looking forward to the inevitable letter of private apology, handwritten on expensive stationary and without a shadow of a doubt expressing genuine contrition. After all, these people went to the right school and ate at the right restaurants, they couldn’t really mean what they were saying… could they?
All in all, an absolutely terrific week for the Conservative Party and Britain in general, I’m sure you’ll agree. So terrific that it’s overshadowed even the timed-like-clockwork ‘revelations’ of division on the Labour benches over how to handle the last few spasms of Brexit. The sheer scale of the misogyny and the vehemence of its defenders has been so loud everything else has been drowned out. It’s still Boris Johnson’s race to lose, of course. His policy of keeping his head down and leaving the Tory membership to justify his bullshit to themselves without his input has served him well. A double-digit majority of crazy right-wing bellends – still – consider him to be the more trustworthy and capable candidate, but outside the Base Bubble the hits just keep on coming. His former employer (and impeccably connected former Editor of the Telegraph and London Evening Standard) Max Hastings has described him as “unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification”. Jeremy Hunt has emerged from behind his couch and decided that lambasting his rival for “cowardice” in ducking 99% of Press interviews and televised debates while accusing him of attempting to “slink in by the back door” is the way to go. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Bank of England, and even bought-and-paid-for pro-American billionaire lobbyist and cork-brained shill for naked capitalism Liam Fox, who is also our International Development Secretary, have all criticised his lies about GAT-24 (transparent bullshit about tariff agreements making the Northern Irish border a non-issue that only the Brextremists even pretend to believe) and labelled his entire Brexit plan “pie in the sky”. The EU have (once again) helpfully reminded the British Government and Media that, regardless of what promises anyone makes, there’s not going to be a renegotiation or even an extension to the October 31st deadline for agreeing a withdrawal deal without a General Election or a new Referendum. Tory Remainers are floating great, big neon signs advertising their willingness to vote against any prospective Johnson-led Government in a No Confidence vote, and even big money Tory donors are starting to mumble that maybe Boris isn’t all dat and shit.
What a wonderful time to be alive. (eyeroll)
Will any of this spike Johnson’s long climb to Absolute Power? Nah, probably not. He’s got the bulk of the Tory membership wrapped around his pudgy little finger and Jeremy Hunt is too much of a bloodless technocrat in the mould of Theresa May to inspire any kind of energised counter-offensive. The man got where he is today by fucking up his ministerial briefs in ways that profit the right people, not by building a constituency amongst the hoi polloi of local Conservative clubs, most of whom have bought hook, line and sinker into the Deep Myth of a ‘clean Brexit’ leading to a White Free State bestriding the Atlantic like a tweet-suited, tea-drinking colossus. It would take something very special indeed for them to lose their faith in Boris’ essential qualities of bumbling failure and self-serving deceit greasing the way to their Brexiteerian promised land.
OTOH, all of this can’t be doing much for Johnson’s other claim to relevance, namely his public personae as ‘Boris’ being a draw for middle of the road floating voters who only go by what the headlines say and can be expected to plump for “that funny blond toff from the telly” over Comrade Corbyn and the New Holocaust Party in any future General Election. What sells to the Church of the Blue Moonies (half of whom are quite open about never wanting a Muslim PM) won’t necessarily go over quite as well to Joe and June Bloggs of Dagenham, however much ‘economic anxiety’ they might have about brown boys in hoodies and women in burkhas. When ‘character’ stops being a selling point in politics all you have left is enthusiasm and policy, and the Tories have to be shitting bricks of jagged obsidian at the prospect of waging an electoral war on that kind of battlefield.
That’s it. Back to your regularly scheduled programme of Trumpian volk-stroking and international willy-waving. We’ll be over here feeing comparable levels of shame and ignominy.