Thread by @RussInCheshire

3rd #TheWeekInTory of the week. This covers events since Thursday morning

(Yes, you read that correctly)

Let's go!

1. Liz Truss, a Foreign Secretary we got off Gumtree, blew £500,000 on a private flight to Australia to sign a trade deal that probably makes us poorer

2. That’s enough to buy her 166 of her famed £3000 lunches

3. The most expensive commercial flight that day cost £7000, which is - check my maths - less than half a million quid?

4. And it would have got her there faster

5. Australia’s former PM called Truss "deranged"

6. Her flight landed the day Alok Sharma said the govt was providing "a practical demonstration of honouring our COP26 climate promises"

7. Also, Jacob Rees-Mogg launched more coal mines in what he called "our green and pleasant land"

8. He’s never seen a coal mine, has he?

9. JRM, a cross between a spindly mantis and the concept of gout, said we needed coal to support our “heritage railway” industry

10. So, sure, the planet will die, but at least there will be a fancy ancient steam-train to cart away the corpses

11. Rishi Sunak, the discarded draft of an Aardman sidekick who threw away £4.3 billion last week cos he couldn’t be arsed tackling fraud, is now privately threatening to resign if he can’t raise National Insurance, cos he's just realised he’s run out of money

12. Johnson said the National Insurance rise was vital to “fix social care”, something he’s assured parliament he has already fixed on – by my count - 27 separate occasions since he was elected. I mean, just in case anyone is looking for examples of him lying to parliament

13. The Defence secretary, discussing airlifting animals out of Kabul, said "at no stage did the prime minister ask me to make a way for those pets. Not at all"

14. An email showed the PM asking to airlift animals out of Kabul

15. The PM denied the email exists

16. It does

17. Dying palm-tree Michael Fabricant said a fellow Tory complaining of Islamophobic abuse didn’t look Muslim enough to abuse*

18. Nadhim Zahawi was revealed to have been "instrumental" in securing millions of allegedly corrupt loans to David Cameron’s billionaire pal

19. Pitch for a TV show where Tory MPs tell ludicrous stories to excuse their greed. It’ll be called I’m-All-Right-Jackanory

20. Priti Patel, Home Secretary and Mouth of Sauron, admitted (yet another) "unlawful and secret policy", this time stealing phones from migrants

21. Plague update: professional obscurity and extremely amateur Tory MP James Heappey said we were "emerging from the pandemic"

22. We have the highest death toll in Europe

23. Over 600,000 cases, 12,000 hospitalisations, and 2000 deaths this week

24. Regardless, the Tories announced everything is now *awesome*, and lifted all restrictions

25. 300 scientists called this "reckless", cos Tories were creating a hub for infection with excellent global transport links to 3 billion people who still haven’t been vaccinated

26. On to Partygate, where Tories spent the first half of the week insisting the PM had been ambushed by a cake

27. And then they spent the second half of the week insisting cakes don’t exist

28. Clearly, the quantum state of cakes is a complex issue than needs looking into

29. Sadly, the Met police said they don’t investigate crimes that have already happened

30. When we’d all finished laughing at this, police said there wasn’t enough evidence for an investigation anyway

31. Sue Gray immediately found evidence

32. So the police said there was now TOO MUCH evidence for Sue Gray to report

33. The Met immediately offered to let No 10 partygoers pay fines rather than be interviewed by police

34. Oh, and the fines will not be made public, so nobody's career will suffer

35. Not asking any questions and keeping all punishments secret makes me VERY confident they’ll get to the bottom of things

36. Incidentally, Sajid Javid’s brother is Dep Assistant Commissioner of the Met Police

37. There is, however, some good news: Dry January is over

If it isn't a shit-show, it'll do until the real shit-show arrives.

But if this kind of hellscape is your happy place, a) seek professional help, and b) consider pre-ordering my book, which does👆 this to an entire decade of this chaos

unbound.com/books/the-deca…

* The Fabricant thing at item 17 happened last week, but I couldn't fit it into the thread at the time. Twitter has a limit on how much you can write in one go, and this smorgasbord of odium and despair is so relentless I can't always fit everything