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,
BrandonBoJo”.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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