The Royal Shambolica Express has finally hit the buffers, thanks to those gorgeous voters up in North Shropshire, and there remains only the traditional offer of the ‘last rights’ to the King of Bluster who is, even now, eyeing all that gold wallpaper and packing his bags. £890 a roll for a couple of months’ eye candy? Only in Shambolica can numbers like that make any kind of sense.
But fear not. As dusk finally settles on Shambolica, the Johnson menage is putting the finishing touches to a rather longer tally of ‘Last Rights’ than is usually the case with Tory regicides.
Last Right Number One has already been exercised. Confronted on all fronts by pesky journalists curious for an explanation for this electoral earthquake, our ailing monarch could only mop his face, shake the blond thatch, and blame – yes – the media. Even the good folk of Shropshire, normally so biddable, have let their judgement be poisoned by the lefties and ur-anarchists in that nest of vipers otherwise known as the BBC.
What right did these reptiles have to find Barnard Castle on the map? What right did they have to cloud an otherwise untainted record of world-beating vaccine roll-out with pointless questions about Tory chums blagging billions of pounds for the wrong kind of surgical facemasks, wildly extortionate PCR tests, and a test and trace system that took tens of thousands to an early grave? Why should anyone lucky enough to qualify for a Shambolican passport bother to devote a scintilla of attention to wild and pernicious surmise about the party-house that is 10 Downing Street? God invented time to drape a blanket over past events, and, now that Shambolica has hit top gear, the only view that matters is the road ahead.
Which brings us to Last Right Number Two: the kingly obligation to put the best possible gloss on anything that might smack of Shambolica. So behold the prospect of lorries without drivers, of caulis unpicked and fish rotting in the queue for French customs, of empty supermarket shelves, and emptier care homes, and the abandoned old tucked up in hospital beds normally reserved for the sick. Post COP, this is an overdue return to peace and quiet, a near-bucolic state of national bliss, barely disturbed by the mass delivery of food hampers, the noisy arrival of debt-recovery agents, and the lonesome growl of Border Force armoured cars hunting the Asylum Seeker who, yesterday, busted his way out of the arctic chill of the Kent Processing Unit. The Kingdom of Shambolica is safe in our hands. You, my subjects, have my solemn word.
Last Right Number Three is a corker. In recognition of Our Leader’s services to the Three ‘B’s – blagging, bluster and bonking – Tory central office has agreed to his elevation to the peerage. The process begins with the receipt of the requisite number of letters to the Chair of the 1922 Committee to trigger a leadership challenge. Thanks to the Shropshire Seventeen Thousand, Tory Red Wall MPs – nervous as hell over their own tiny majorities – are already lashed to their laptops, trying to figure out the kindest way of telling their Leader to f**k off.
Once these letters are in, 10 Downing Street should expect a discreet visit from the Men in the Grey Suits, who will be careful to choose an hour and a day when neither The King of Shambolica nor his courtiers are pissing it up. This calculation is a great deal trickier than you might think – the rowdy arrogance of the entitled has become the bleary-eyed resignation of the doomed – but what follows will spirit a new name into the media crosshairs, and ghost our lost Shambolican monarch onto the padded benches of the Upper House.
King Boris of Never-Never Land? Lord Bluster of Blagdom? The choice, as ever, will be his.
(Meanwhile the bonfire of our rights continues to burn merrily, topped up under cover of #partygate by the RightsDestroyer General, Priti Patel …)
