The Week In Tory is a whopper, so I’ll do the promo thing first: “Four Chancellors and a Funeral” is out on 21 March; and please support “Tories: The End of an Error”, currently being written.
And now, for your pleasure, an 84-point torrent of awfulness…
I’m not saying things are getting a bit reactionary, but in one of this week’s saner moments Desmond Swayne, the reanimated corpse of Alvin Stardust, made the modest proposal that fly-tippers should be strangled with their own intestines.
2. Rishi Sunak, who made his millions by betting as part of a hedge fund, now said he wasn’t a betting man, and to prove it he placed a £1000 bet that he could waste £400m of your money on an illegal policy nobody has voted for, and which will have absolutely no effect.
3. He defended his bet as “showing commitment” to the thing he opposed as chancellor, and then two hours later he reversed out of the bet.
4. He said he’d made the a stupid choice to accept the bet cos he’d been “taken by surprise”, a leadership quality which must terrify Putin.
5. Sunak, the chef from Ratatouille after being abandoned by the rat, admitted his total failure to cut waiting lists.
6. His other four pledges were: stop small boats (he hasn’t), fix the economy (he hasn’t), reduce debt (he hasn’t) and solve the cost of living (he hasn’t).
7. The cost of living was certainly a problem for poor, dumbfungled George Freeman, who made the equal parts eye-popping and mind-numbing decision to quit his £120k job because he couldn’t afford his £24k mortgage.
7. This maths genius was science minister.
8. So perhaps to take our minds off all of that, Sunak, a man who has never met a failure he didn’t have a head on collision with, went to parliament during his self-declared “political reset week”, and noisily punched himself in the face.
9. Sunak said Brianna Ghey’s family had experienced “the very worst of humanity”, but that’s enough about Lee Anderson, cos Sunak waited until Brianna’s grieving mother was in the room, and then launched into a heavily-scripted attack on trans women’s right to exist.
10. Downing St refused to apologise 13 times.
11. Everyone said they should apologise.
12. Just as they were about to apologise, Kemi Badenoch rocked up.
14. She tweeted that the problem was actually Kier Starmer politicising transsexuals, even though it was Sunak who said it.
15. So now it’s even harder for Sunak to apologise.
16. A fan of painting himself into corners, Sunak had approved Badenoch’s tweets before they were sent.
17. The Times reported “the mood is really grim around him”.
18. He’s the best politician they’ve got. Him. That one.
19. After a study showed Tories had spaffed away £1m of public money in severance pay for the swarm of failed ministers who had been sacked in disgrace or quit in disgust, this week the government blocked a plan to scrap such payoffs.
20. This is good news for the latest one to lose their job, Andrew Bowie, the minister for building pylons, who was sacked because he’d been campaigning against building pylons.
21. It’s the satirists I feel sorry for.
22. Parliament reported that after spending £24bn (enough to form a stack of £10 notes 153 miles high) Tories still “do not understand how HS2 will function as a railway”.
23. This is cos their planned railway from London to Manchester won’t go to Manchester.
24. Or to London.
25. But Sunak did promise us that the cost of living is starting to ease.
26. And then the next morning, the govt admitted prices would rise further next month because of a fresh round of Brexit problems that they’d seemingly forgotten about.
27. Andrea Leadsom, a waxwork Thatcher that has been left leaning against a radiator overnight, said we would “adapt” to the rising costs, which were “the price of sovereignty”.
28. Funny how rich people can never be asked to “adapt” to higher taxes.
29. In 2016 she wrote “Brexit will have no effect on UK economy”.
30. This week she said higher costs were due to “increased checks at the border. That is absolutely known about since 2016”.
31. In 2016 Jacob Rees-Mogg said Brexit would cut food costs 20 per cent.
32. They’ve risen 26 per cent.
33. Anyway: in the week that Tories celebrated a new Brexit deal in Northern Ireland, it was quietly revealed that the deal will lead to even higher food prices.
34. And the new NI leadership promised a referendum on unifying Ireland, which could lead to the breakup of the UK.
35. Brexiteers had also promised £350m a week for the NHS, so this week they offered the NHS £200m to last the entire winter, which maths fans will note is a slightly less. And also: no pay rises.
36. Only 13% of people still think Brexit has been a success.
37. So David Davis, so good they named him once, said the Brexit benefits – which he once promised would be evident immediately – would now turn up “eventually”, but he couldn’t say what they’d be or when they’d arrive.
38. Off we go, then, to the launch of Popular Conservatism, aka PopCon (tagline: All Con, No Pop) which was advertised as a way to unify Tories and regain popularity.
39. It is led by Liz Truss, ITV4 incarnate, and the most unpopular Tory still alive.
40. The unity bit didn’t go well either, as two of the five advertised speakers quit the group during its actual launch event.
41. One of them, Ranil Jayawardena, said Tories should “stick to the plan” under Sunak, which surprised me, cos I hadn’t realised he even had a plan.
42. Jayawardena warned “Labour would take us back to square one”, while sat round a cabinet table with the recently returned David Cameron, PM on square one.
43. Kwasi Kwarteng, another of Truss’s advertised supporters, opted to quit politics entirely rather than attend PopCon.
44. Lee Anderson and Rees-Mogg turned up, for those moments when you’re so full of sh*t one arsehole isn’t enough.
45. Also present: the Tory candidate replacing pound-shop Pennywise Chris Grayling, who hated state interference with pandemics, and wants to “put nanny to bed”.
46. This was bad news for Rees-Mogg, a zombie Jarvis Cocker who seemingly can’t get his pants on without his nanny. He is 54 years old.
47. Mogg then described Davos – a gathering of the richest capitalist bastards on the planet – as a bunch of left wingers.
48. Meanwhile drive-by prime minister Liz Truss, drooling and twitching in an ideological fever-dream, cemented her reputation for being truly awful by attacking anybody guilty of “supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities”.
49. Truss then defined “left wing extremists” as – and honestly, this is the actual list – corporations, people in doing budgetary responsibility, the post office, Natural England, the media, and ACTUAL LAWS.
50. So her idea is for the Tories to move even further to the right.
51. This despite a study showing of 275 parties in 61 countries, the Tories are already the most right wing of all. Including Trump.
52. So obvs Jeremy Hunt, who could be replaced with a spaniel carrying an abacus and nobody would notice, promised tax cuts for rich people again.
53. The IMF warned Hunt his tax cuts idea would repeat the Truss disaster.
54. So Treasury minister Laura Trott nodded, and then promised more tax cuts.
55. After Simon Clarke, a mouse-fart in a suit, had called for Sunak to resign, Kemi Badenoch demanded an end to plotting.
56. It took less than two hours for news to emerge that Kemi Badenoch is a member of a Tory WhatsApp group that is literally named “Evil Plotters”.
57. And so is Michael Gove, a man with a face only a motherf*cker could love .
58. Gove was also revealed to have personally lobbied for VIP contracts for the biggest single beneficiary of PPE cash, Uniserve, an office interiors company that had zero experience of providing medical equipment.
59. They were handed £680m, and their profits jumped 500 per cent.
Uniserve just happen to share an address with Tory MP Julia Lopez.
61. Same week: it was revealed Tory trade minister Dominic Johnson had worked to provide “VIP access” to assist Infosys, the firm responsible for most of Sunak’s wife’s fortune.
62. And a Tory donor got a controversial new license to drill for oil barely a year after being fined £150k for breaking the law last time they drilled for oil.
63. Michelle Mone’s husband appeared in a Spanish court accused of a multimillion pound tax evasion scam.
64. And Huw Merriman presented evidence that BBC News being biased: the political actions of the presenter of Art Attack in the 1990s.
65. Art Attack was a children’s TV programme. And it was on ITV. There, that’s cheered you up again after all that PPE anger, hasn’t it?.
66. Gillian Keegan said, “This Conservative govt has got your back when it comes to childcare”.
67. This must be different from the other Conservative government, which under former PM and current twat David Cameron closed 1,416 Sure Start childcare centres.
68. And then, literally in the same interview where she reassured us she has got our back on childcare, Keegan said she can’t guarantee to deliver on childcare because she is “not in control of all the bits”.
69. She’s education secretary.
70. Anyway, more on Cameron, a lightly oiled thumb with a mouth slit, who is pretending to be Foreign Secretary while he waits for the paint on his ludicrous squillionaire’s potting-shed to dry.
71. This week Cameron said the UK will “hold Iran to account” for Houthi attacks.
72. Iran must be shitting itself, cos this week it was revealed the defence cuts Cameron instigated mean our Army would “exhaust its capabilities” in just two months.
73. And our Navy’s flagship had to pull out of a NATO drill because its propeller was too rusty to go to sea.
74. Migration news, and it was found the Bibby Stockholm is now storing 6 migrants in rooms designed for one person.
75. James Cleverley, who isn’t, said the 94,000 backlog of asylum seekers no longer existed.
76. He did this by renaming “backlog” to “queue”. Abracadabra!
77. Sunak’s small-boat promise failed once again, this time because his own Home Office judged his plan to be unsafe.
78. And this brings us the Tory tentpole policy to remove the rights of 67 million Britons so we can utterly fail to illegally send 100 Albanians to Rwanda
79. Cleverly said the plan – which even he has managed to realise is “batshit” – would cost £400m, and the numbers sent to Rwanda would be “quite low”, implying it’ll cost over £4m per person to send almost nobody to a place most Tories can’t find on a map.
80. The government’s latest immigration plan was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
81. So Rishi Sunak, who was fined for breaking his own pandemic laws, said “Of course our party follows all laws”, and then set about a scheme to override the Supreme Court.
82. Also, in 2017 the Supreme Court ruled it was illegal to charge fees to access employment tribunals.
83. So naturally, this week the Tories introduced fees to access employment tribunals, once again ignoring the Supreme Court. Reassuring, isn’t it?
84. And finally, because these defenders of democracy are about to lose power, they decided – for the first time in history – to introduced new rules allowing the government to define the role of the independent Electoral Commission. Sleep well.
