Strong language warning!
You don’t like it. I don’t like it. Nobody likes it, and I wish it would stop. But dream on because here, for Christ’s sake, is The Week in Tory!
1. It is 13 years since David Cameron – a thumb with a mouth slit who played at being PM in between episodes of Midsomer Murders – first promised to reduce migration, so the Tories have now announced a stunning new policy of … reducing migration.
2. The government said only people who can afford to live here should be allowed in.
3. So they increased the salary threshold of migrants to £38,700.
4. This means 74 per cent of Britons are now officially too poor to live here.
5. The policy also applies to people already living here who need to renew their family visa.
6. This means immigrants with homes, families and children in the UK can now technically be thrown out of the country if they don’t earn £38k.
7. The Tories said the solution to this is for people to earn higher wages.
8. The Tories also insisted people should stop asking for higher wages, cos it causes inflation.
9. Which brings us on to Rwanda, the most prolonged cat death in history.
10. The Rwanda scheme was announced the day after former Primate Minister Boris Johnson was fined for attending illegal parties, and was never meant to do anything except give the Daily Mail a headline that wasn’t about Number 10 becoming the most lawbreaking address in the UK.
11. Enter Suella Braverman, a dazzling combination of over-the-top villainy and under-the-bottom competence.
12. She said the Tories faced “electoral oblivion” unless Rishi Sunak dismantled the basis of our legal system so we could illegally fly people to Rwanda.
13. Chinchilla the Hun said the government should build “Nightingale” asylum centres, cos that worked so well for Covid.
14. The Nightingale hospital in Birmingham cost £60m and didn’t treat a single patient during the entire pandemic, and I’m sure Suella’s plan will go just as well.
15. Anyway, 28,318 asylum seekers are in the queue awaiting removal to Rwanda.
16. Rwanda can take 200 of them.
17. Despite spending £140m already, the only people the Tories have managed to send to Rwanda so far are three of our own home secretaries.
18. So they’ve now decided to hand over another £150m.
19. This means the cost of not quite sending 200 people to Rwanda is now greater than the cost of handling 400,000 asylum claims in the UK.
20. There are only 160,000 people in our entire asylum backlog.
21. The government now wants to pass legislation that says Rwanda is safe, even though the supreme court said it isn’t.
22. If passing a law all it takes, I eagerly await the legislation that pronounces Ukraine and Gaza as safe. Why didn’t we think of that before?!
23. Anyway, I’m not saying Rwanda is a dictatorship, but their president is a former guerrilla leader who is linked to the murder of political rivals, changed the law to allow himself to keep ruling, banned free press, and got 98 per cent of the vote at the last election.
24. Even so, Rwanda kept the right to send any of the 200 back to the UK, so they can stick to international law.
25. The Rwanda deal also allows more than 200 Rwandans to migrate to the UK, meaning the Tory policy to reduce net migration could actually increase net migration.
26. James Cleverly is now in charge of this, so you can tell already it’ll go well.
27. Cleverly told The Times that the Rwanda bill doesn’t comply with international law, and then immediately afterwards said the bill DOES comply with international law.
28. When asked to explain this paradox, he replied “both things are true and neither one cancels out the other”.
29. And then Schrodinger’s Twat was filmed calling a Stockton a “shithole”.
30. But in a rare moment of accuracy, he did say his own Rwanda policy is “batshit crazy”.
31. Sadly, it’s not batshit crazy enough for Robert Jenrick, who has – considerably less sadly – resigned
32. This is because Jenrick wants to succeed Sunak, which is the only time the words “succeed” and “Sunak” have ever appeared in the same sentence.
33. Dauntingly awful claymation gobshite Sunak claimed the Rwanda scheme was an urgent matter of national security.
34. Same day, the Intelligence and Security Committee rebuked the Tories after it was revealed no Tory PM has attended its security briefing since 2014.
So to prove he had the competence for the job, Sunak accidentally locked himself out Number 10.
36. One Tory MP said of Sunak: “Why is he just so bad at politics?”
37. Sunak’s response was to tell a meeting of Tory MPs they must “unite or die”.
38. They chose die.
39. 18 Tory MPs have sent letters of no confidence in their latest transient stab at a competent PM.
40. The rebels have created what they call “an advent calendar of shit” to drive Sunak from office, although it’s hard to know how this makes it different from any other week.
41. It’s reported that allies of Liz Truss – no, honestly, she still has some – want to replace Sunak with Simon Clark, a mouse-fart made flesh who was Truss’s sidekick while she did her drive-by attack on the nation’s economy.
42. Rebels say their focus on Rwanda captures the popular mood.
43. Only 17 per cent of the public list Rwanda as one of their top priorities.
44. As a result of this popularity-drive, the Tories are now predicted to suffer their worst ever electoral defeat.
45. Damien Green described his fellow Tories as “mad or malicious or both”.
46. Somehow this reminds me of Resting Fish Face Michael Gove, who this week was revealed to have blown £320,000 of your money on chauffeur-driven limousines during the pandemic.
47. Back on planet earth, the Tory CEO put in a cheery call to party workers, in which he told them “We are f*cked”.
48. Meanwhile, Jonathan Gullis, a man so heroically stupid you’d think he’d been bitten by a radioactive idiot, called for Nigel Farage to be home secretary.
49. His plan is for a pact between Nigel Farage (who isn’t even an MP) and Boris Johnson (who also isn’t even an MP)
50. Which leads us to the Covid Inquiry, where Darth Bagpuss, the world’s most forgetful man, sat puzzled for two days watching competent people do their jobs.
51. Johnson, confident we’d believe him again, went with the ever-popular Rebekah Vardy defence, and claimed all the phone evidence against him had become lost, caught fire, got squiffy and gone for a lie down, or had been accidentally yeeted into the sun.
52. The sex-yeti admitted that when he’d been told Covid was about to “sweep the world”, his response was to go on holiday for 10 days.
53. He told the Inquiry that not cancelling mass gatherings in the middle of the 5th worst pandemic in history “sounded reasonable at the time”.
54. He made the not-medically-proven claim that Wales had high Covid deaths as a result of “singing and obesity”.
55. And he admitted Matt Hancock, the dad from a gravy advert, had only kept his job cos any replacement picked from Tory ranks would probably have been even worse.
57. Meanwhile, as the Tories expend all the energy of government on this pan-directional, ignominious spatter of anarchy, their failure to fix known problems at the Dept of Work and Pensions left 200,000 pensioners £1.3bn out of pocket.
58. And despite £7.2bn of Covid-related fraud, only 2 per cent of calls made to the Covid Fraud Hotline are even being investigated.
59. Speaking of witch, Michelle Mone finally admitted she’d lied about her links to a PPE firm that’s now being investigated by the National Crime Agency.
60. So she used some of the money she’s accused of stealing to pay for a “documentary” in which she put her side of the story, rather than – y’know – appearing in court.
61. In the week of COP 28, leaks show the government misled the public over its scrapping of air quality guidelines.
62. And Rishi Sunak, a one-man highlight reel of national embarrassment, is facing a Covid Inquiry that’s already learned his nickname is Doctor Death. So I’ll probably be back again in 6-8 hours, with another frontline report of delinquent political carnage.
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