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,
RupertMister 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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