Russ Jones Profile picture
Jun 5, 2022 23 tweets 4 min read Read on X
The Horny Honey Monster is on the ropes, so I think it's time to take a quick look at the runners and riders poised to take over from Boris Johnson.

It's an inspiring list.

🧵
Liz Truss

The kind of foreign minister you'd expect to find on Gumtree. A LibDem, then a Tory. Opposed Brexit, then wanted it. Said she'd resign over it, then that she'd do anything to deliver it. Eventually decided it was too complicated and hid.

Thatcher from Elizabeth Duke.
Jeremy Hunt

A demonic pixie with persona of a polyester-blazered assistant in a soft-furnishings shop. As health minister he spent his hours auctioning your wellbeing off to – well, I’d like to say the highest bidder, but I doubt he’s competent enough to get a good price.
Penny Mordaunt

A real person, and not a minor Addams Family character. Has all the experience needed to be PM: a former magician’s assistant with a famously lavish swearing vocab, who failed to reach the last 10 a celebrity diving show. Currently 4th favourite. No, really.
Dominic Raab

Thick-necked, box-faced rugby club boor. An Etch-a-Sketch thundercunt who stands in for the PM when Johnson is too pissed or shag-happy to turn up. His career peaked when he – genuinely – managed to resign in protest at his own achievements.
Tom Tugendhat

Voice of the moderate (yet highly-militarised) centre-right. Proved himself squeaky clean when Tories decided to prove they aren't all nepotistic twats by running an independent audit of govt contracts. The contract for the audit went to Tugendhat's cousin. Obvs.
Priti Patel

The larval form of Miss Trunchbull. A trundling horcrux who oscillates between evil smirks and looking like she's about to bite you savagely about the face and neck. Described by MoD officials as "completely potty", so clearly a strong favourite.
Rishi Sunak

Rejected early draft of an Aardman sidekick who is having a go at Chancelloring during his gap year. His primary skillset: avoiding tax, pretending he drives a Kia Rio, applying to be a citizen of another country, and taking his jacket off on Instagram.
Matt Hancock

His career was ended – as so many sadly are – by a combination of love and genocide. Craves a comeback, under the demented assumption voters will be drawn to an inept and toe-curlingly sinister accountant who looks like PeeWee Herman reflected in the back of a spoon
Sajid Javid

A child's drawing of pure evil, superimposed onto a competitively evil gonad. Was *literally* in charge of collateralized debt obligations, the financial tool that caused the 2007 global crash, so clearly the ideal man to solve our massive financial problems.
Jacob Rees-Mogg

Nosferatu attempting to blend in at a bible study group. A physical manifestation of entitlement and stupidity, displayed for lols by bored TV execs, and utterly convinced his accent means it's impossible for him to be wrong. He's wrong. Constitutionally wrong.
Ben Wallace

A novelty pencil-eraser who is is only in the list of possible candidates because there's a war in Ukraine. If he succeeds in ending the war, he vanishes into obscurity again. So we have a defence minister who's career progression depends entirely on him failing.
Nadine Dorries

A beef-witted, one-woman riot of idiocy. Fiercely loyal to Johnson for as long as she remembers, which on a good day can be up to a minute. Seemingly recruited into Tory ranks directly from a fight over the outcome of a meat raffle outside a flat-roofed pub.
Steve Barclay

The nonentity’s nonentity. So devoid of personality that his official portrait is the curtains behind him. His DNA profile reads "404 error". You will have forgotten Steve Barclay exists before you reach the end of this sentence, even if you ARE Steve Barclay.
Michael Gove

Boris Johnson's emotional support turbot. Boss-eyed, conspicuously sniffing minister for partying-down and levelling up, which he's done so well that rich pupils get twice as much from the levelling up fund as poor pupils do. A shite in sheep's clothing.
Mark Francois

Thinks he's rock hard, and is, in the sense that rock hard things are also very, very dense. So thick you could stand a spoon up in him. Quite a short spoon.

Gnome or Mr Nice Guy? Gnome. Definitely gnome.
Steve Baker

Chief architect of global finance at noted success story Lehman Brothers. Has the ever-so-pleased air of a man who desperately wants you to ask if he's solved his Rubik's cube yet. Career highlight: being filmed asking a man to beat him up by the bins. Twice.
Grant Shapps

Dependable Boris loyalist with – don't doubt it – a large backstabbing knife hidden about his person. Has more false identities than Jason Bourne, somebody else who people would travel halfway around the world just to punch.
John Redwood

Ceaselessly muddled, blank-eyed error-magnet. An absolute clattering halfwit with a deranged fish and Brexit obsession, who was once called "the nastiest man in politics" by his own wife.
Nadhim Zahawi

Obscurial crammed in a suit, and forced to work in an office whilst plotting your destruction. This man of the people used tax havens while claiming MP's expenses for the stables at one of his mansions. The other 3 horsemen of the apocalypse think he's a bellend.
Thérèse Coffey

Cigar-chomping Uncle Fester impersonator who opposes gay marriage and refused to criticise phone hacking. It won't help her: the elaborate scattering of accents in her name would terrify the editor of the Daily Mail, so rule her out as a serious candidate.
These are the major competitors to be next Tory PM.

And because we're a modern, functional democracy, the winner will be chosen by the 1 in 250 voters who have paid money to become members of the Tory party.

The loser, obviously, will be you.
Also, you can pre-order my book if you like this sort of thing. I don't. It's fucking horrible.

unbound.com/books/the-deca…

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More from @RussInCheshire

May 5
Here's what's gone wrong for the Conservative party.

They didn't adopt austerity in 2010 because the economy needed it. They adopted it because it allowed them to do an ideological shrinkage of the state, while blaming Labour. Austerity wasn't economics, it was pure politics.
Austerity fucked the country for the simple reason that if you starve the economy of money and hope, you end up with a hopeless economy and no money. Investors knew this, so abandoned us. OECD average investment is a third higher than it is in the UK. We starve ourselves.
Cameron was (as Obama observed) a lightweight. Osborne, a sadist. Between them they caused huge economic and social harm, and were happy to nod along when their racist moron wing blamed everything on the EU. For temporary political benefit, they let liars tell lies.
Read 14 tweets
May 3
It's a perfectly designed torture for Tories.

Sunak won't call a GE cos the results predict a disaster. Any Tory winners had distanced themselves from the party, so nothing to boast about. He did *just* well enough to kill any rebellion and *just* badly enough to pause a GE...
So Sunak will remain in office, but not in power, his right wingers making his life a misery, his left giving up and resigning.

His Brexit voters flee to Reform. Moderate voters flee to LD or Labour. New voters repelled by the bigotry. His five pledges unmet.
Mordaunt, Badenoch and Braverman will make continuous manoeuvres. Rwanda, intended to save him, will turn into a biblical curse. Brexit consequences will deepen. The public will blame him. Every day will make the GE worse, but he's too weak to euthanise his terminal premiership
Read 6 tweets
Apr 29
Here's why I think there should always be a by-election when an MP defects, like Dan Poulter did.

1. MPs (except independents) stand on a party manifesto. Those are the policies the constituency electorate voted for. Now, without a vote, the MP's policies have changed.
2. Research shows 75% of people can't name their local MP. Tragic, but true. So quite clearly they are voting for a party, not a person. It doesn't matter what the official version of events is: voting for a party is self evidently the reality.
3. "The people voted for a party, not a person" was the excuse for not holding a general election when PM changed between elections (see the last 4 PMs). Can't have it both ways! So: by-election for Poulter, or give us the GE we should have had when you changed to Sunak
Read 6 tweets
Apr 27
Things that Dan Poulter was ok with:

Brexit
Partygate
Illegally proroguing parliament
Lying to the Quern
Unlawful PPE contracts
Austerity
Dominic Raab
Chris Williamson
Dominic Cummings
Mark Menzies
William Wragg
Owen Paterson
Chris Pincher
Scott Benton
1/2
Windrush
Tripling tuition fees
Tripling national debt
Trillions of gallons of raw sewage in our rivers
Banning onshore wind
Hundreds of scandals involving party donations
Lee Anderson
Frank Hester
Priti Patel's secret meetings with Israeli security services
2/4
Suella Braverman hate marches
Andrew Bridgen holocaust claims
Matt Hancock in the jungle
David Warburton's coke habit
Liz Truss ... everything
Michelle Mone
Robert Jenrick cash for favours
Sunak's tax arrangements
Zahawi's tax arrangements
Priti Patel bullying
3/4
Read 4 tweets
Apr 18
In my book The Decade In Tory I recount reports of Mark Menzies hiring a Brazilian sex worker, showing him around the palace of Westminster, and asking him to buy them amphetamines.

And then another time, the police being called cos Menzies had ...
thetimes.co.uk/article/28f948…
... been accused of getting a dog drunk, then engaging in a massive street brawl. He wasn't charged cos he persuaded police he hadn't fed the dog alcohol - he'd just stood by and taken photos. So that's ok then.

My point is: this guy's behaviour is not new. He's been a ...
... human hand grenade for a decade, and the press knew it, the police, his constituency party and Tory HQ. And they've known about this latest seedy little episode for 3 months too.

And yet throughout all this, he kept being selected to stand. Constantly. For a decade...
Read 4 tweets
Mar 13
A step-by-step guide to why saying "I want my country back" is inherently racist, sexist and homophobic.

1. Logically, "back" means there was an earlier time when the country was "ours"

2. The same people wanted it "back" from the EU in 2016 too, and won. Well done you! Image
3. So logically, the latest demand for "our" country "back" cannot mean "back from the EU". We've already left. So it must, logically, mean back from a time BEFORE we joined the EU. And that means going back to some time before 1973. So ... when?
3. Before 1973, 80% of white Britons regularly used racist terms. Now it is below 20%. So going "back" there means an increase in racism.

4. Before 1973, the gender pay gap was 27% higher than it is now. So going "back" there means worse conditions for women.
Read 6 tweets

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