Delighted to be publishing Russ again. This episode of the week in Tory is a cracker. Contains strong language.
1. Britain faces a crisis in health, education, farming, energy, housing, childcare, social care, imports, exports, manufacturing, services, debt, growth and infrastructure, so Rishi Sunak announced his grand plan to slightly alter A-Levels.
2. As Sunak finished his first and last year in office, there were rave reviews from his Tory colleagues:
3. “He’s increasingly weak”.
4. “He exists in torpor”.
5. “Clearly Rishi Sunak isn’t working as leader of our party”.
6. Even the Speaker had to bollock Sunak, who has begun a discombobulating habit of asking HIMSELF questions during PMQs, and then bouncing on the spot as he answers, looking for all the world like his puppeteer is having an argument in Italian.
7. Sunak’s famous “five promises” from 2022 have since been downgraded to “ambitions”, because not one has been delivered.
8. He is now the least popular PM ever, and only beats gawping abomination Lettuce Truss because she didn’t last long enough to take the poll.
9. This doesn’t perturb Truss, who plans an “alternative budget” on the same day Jeremy Hunt delivers his real one.
10. She will be doubling down on the renowned success of her last budget, which cost the UK £350 every 21 minutes until it was abandoned after just eight days.
11. Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt, a man who could be replaced by a spaniel with a pocket calculator, is to step down at the next election, rather than face the humiliation of a “Portillo moment”, which will condemn him to wear loud trousers on vintage trains for as long as BBC2 exists.
12. Only 3 per cent of Brits think Sunak is doing a good job.
13. To put this into context, 3 per cent of Brits think the earth is flat.
14. As evidence of Sunak’s stunning abilities, the Tories lost two incredibly safe seats in byelections.
15. These seats were formerly held by Chris Pincher, the Groper of Tamworth; and Nadine Dorries, a beef-witted, one-woman riot of idiocy who had seemingly become an MP after being plucked at random from a fight outside a kebab house.
16. Dorries was held in such affection, her local party chief said she was “about as useful as a chocolate teapot”.
17. Her wannabe replacement, Andrew Cooper, told voters to “f*ck off” before the election, and then flounced out halfway through the count.
18. Sunak said a general election is “not what the country wants”.
19. Polls show 78 per cent of Britons want an immediate general election.
20. Conservative peer Zac Goldsmith urged people not to vote Tory, saying “The PM simply could not care less”.
21. Meanwhile, self-styled “Brexit Hardman” Steve Baker, a vainglorious wazzock with the ever-so-pleased look of someone desperate to be asked if he’s finished his Rubik Cube, said the Brexit he demanded should have been called off because too few people voted for it.
22. Tory policies led to 3.8 million Brits living in destitution last year, a rise of 148 per cent since Sunak implemented his plan to make us all rich.
23. A record-shattering 1 million of the destitute are children.
24. The destitution was mainly caused by Tory benefit freezes.
25. So Sunak, an ethics chatbot with hair like a Lego Elvis, said he plans to freeze benefits for another year.
26. Then he scrapped the cap on banker’s bonuses.
27. Unrelated, I’m sure, but rumours suggest Sunak wants to go back into banking after his gap-year as PM ends.
28. He also invested £2m of the government’s Covid fund for small start-up businesses in companies linked to his wife (net worth: £730 million).
29. A parliamentary report found Sunak’s policy of scrapping Net Zero to reduce energy bills will increase energy bills.
30. Sunak’s £1bn plan to expand EV charge points created exactly zero new chargers in the 3 years it’s been running.
31. And Lee Anderthal came to the defence of the government’s amazing scheme for the £100bn railway from London to Manchester to stop short of Manchester. And London.
32. He said wasting £100bn on a useless railway to and from nowhere was fine, because a functioning HS2 would only encourage people to go to Bradford and “who wants to go to Bradford? Anyone here from Bradford? Why would you want to get there quicker?”
33. Mark Harper admitted the “absolute commitments” to invest in local transport that Rishi Sunak made 2 weeks ago aren’t commitments at all, merely “examples of the sorts of things money could be spent on”.
34. This makes it one of Sunak’s longer-lasting policies .
35. Tom Hunt insisted he’s “not xenophobic”, but revealed his evidence-free theory that in town centres across Britain “people speaking English is a rarity”.
36. Only 1.3 per cent of the population of the UK doesn’t speak English. And they mainly speak Welsh
37. Tory MP Marcus Fysh said “private rents are the key cause of core inflation”, so because he’s part of a government committed to cutting inflation, he refused to back the government’s own policy that would see those inflation-causing rents fall. One in five Tory MPs is a landlord.
38. And so, because the UK now has record demand to fix insecure housing, the Tories refused to implement their own manifesto pledge to ban no-fault evictions.
39. Then Robert Jenrick said he wouldn’t build any new towns because they’d be “filled with illegal migrants”.
40. So to house the illegal migrants they [checks notes] refuse to house, the Tories paid £15.3m for derelict land that had sold for £6m just one year earlier.
41. Harrowing antique dildo Jacob Rees-Mogg got given £17,000 for being sacked from a government job he did for only 7 weeks.
42. And weeks after it was discovered Tory education cuts had left hundreds of schools at risk of collapse, over half those at risk still haven’t been surveyed.
43. Perhaps it’s cos we’ve got no money, although James Cleverley, a stunningly successful one-man campaign to disprove nominative determinism, managed to spend £1m on private jets for two vitally important overseas visits to [checks notes again] The Solomon Islands and Jamaica.
44. Peter Bone, a child’s drawing of their vampire grandad, was recommended with suspension from parliament after he revealed his unique management technique of waving his genitals in the face of his staff. [And he got suspension – 6 weeks.]
45. Thatched Uncle Fester impersonator Thérèse Coffey said her complete failure to plan for fatal flooding was because she was looking for rain from the west, and it actually arrived from the east
46. And finally, Suella Braverman stood on a guide dog. I know this happened a couple of weeks ago, but … Suella Braverman stood on a f*cking guide dog.
I have two books, The Decade in Tory (out now) and Four Chancellors and a Funeral, released early 2024. I appreciate your support!
