Margarine Thatcher. Gilead Commander's wife who did 3 U-turns during her campaign, making Liz Truss a more effective opponent of Liz Truss than Rishi Sunak was. Is her own worst enemy, but that won't last.
Elizabeth Truss is an anagram of Haziest Bluster.
Kwazi Kwarteng
Ex-Minister for Brexit, then Business, Energy and Growth. Those things are all going swimmingly, so now he's Chancellor, despite being out of his depth on a sheet of graphene. I don't know this for sure, so don't quote me, but has "fall guy" tattooed on his balls.
James Cleverly
Foreign Secretary, fresh from being the 3rd education secretary in 3 days.
This stunningly successful one-man campaign to disprove nominative determinism is (little know fact) the original inspiration for the phrase "you couldn't be more wrong"
Suella Braverman
Aiming for "new Priti Patel", but landed on "Secret Squirrel struggling with 'International Law for Dummies'".
As Attorney General, said it's ok to break laws, so is now Home Secretary in charge of da police.
Wup wup, that's the sound of societal breakdown.
Nadhim Zahawi
The former Chancellor made such an impression that he was sacked faster than any previous holder of the role. Is now Cabinet Office Minister, which is like being given consolation role of "Third Donkey" in a nativity play for people with head injuries.
Ben Wallace
Entirely featureless sentient thumb remains Defence Secretary as a reward for his brilliant work preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine and then using oil to hold us to ransom.
Set stopwatch for him quitting when Truss tax cuts mean an end to help for Ukraine
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Rees-Mogg, who is Nosferatu attempting to blend in at a Bible study group, announced on 6th July "I shall not serve under another PM".
It is now 5th Sept, and new Business Minister Rees-Mogg's longstanding adherence to truth and honour remain unimpeachable
Therese Coffey
Cigar-chomping Uncle Fester impersonator, and all we've come to expect from a Tory health minister: backs privatising the NHS, smokes, drinks, is clinically obese, and only last week was accused of hiding 9 reports into needless deaths her last dept had caused
Simon Clarke
A mouse fart made flesh and shoved into a suit, primarily to make the wallpaper seem interesting by comparison. He is the nonentity's nonentity, and as such is the ideal man to continue the govt's flagship policy of doing nothing detectable about Levelling Up.
Nadine Dorries
Quite literally the mad woman in the attic, the betwattled, froth-weight Nadine remains Culture Secretary, despite having seemingly been plucked at random from a brawl outside a kebab shop. Trapped forever at Lambrini o'clock
Iain Duncan Smith
Whispering abomination who once posed next to a fake billboard boasting "It rains less under the Tories". So thick you can stand a spoon up in him, which in this govt qualifies him to be Leader of the House of Commons.
IDS is the reason the acronym FFS exists
Chris Philip
A shaved Afghan Hound who once - I'm genuinely not making this up - asked if he re-record a interview that was *being broadcast live* because in the middle of it he forgot what country he lives in.
Is now Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Alcohol is your friend.
Sajid Javid
New NI Secretary has recently taken to wearing a beard in the forlorn hope it will make it easier to differentiate him from a furiously glaring feral testicle.
His smiles look like he's had the concept patiently explained to him, but has never seen it in person.
Alister Jack
Is Scottish minister on the throw of a dice, since there are literally only 6 Scottish Tories.
Has the bearing of a man who weeps every time he's alone, in the knowledge his own party thinks he shouldn't exists, and his own county despises him for doing so.
Tom Tugendhat
Tom split his leadership campaign between promising a "clean break" from the fetid Johnson team, and reminding us hourly that he's a soldier with rigid ethics.
Is now in a cabinet with all of Johnson's fetid team.
How's that uniform, Tom? Medals nice and shiny?
And a quick In Memoriam of all the people you so desperately want to forget, but who - in only a few days time - you'll fondly remember as being so much more competent, ethical and packed with practical solutions than the new cabinet.
Rishi Sunak
The chef from Ratatouille having a go at being a lifestyle coach after the rat abandoned him.
Spent the entire one-thousand-year leadership campaign insisting Truss was a dangerous moron who would ruin the nation. Now supports her 100%. Kewl. Kewl.
Penny Mordaunt
A 3D printout of Captain Pugwash who (bafflingly) failed to impress Truss with her quite genuine admission that her greatest weakness is delegating jobs to her cat.
Somehow this makes her even LESS qualified than howling dipsomaniac flapdoodle Nadine Dorries.
Dominic Raab
Thick-necked, box-faced, Etch-a-Sketch thundercunt who stood in for the PM when Johnson was too pissed or shag-happy to turn up. Which was pretty much constantly.
His career peaked when he – genuinely – managed to resign in protest at his own achievements.
Michael Gove
A conspicuously sniffing shite-in-sheep's-clothing.
Gove has withdrawn to the backbenches, so now the crepuscular, backstabbing vowel-strangler can focus on his new career cosplaying as a beached mudskipper who has been dressed in boy clothes for a laugh.
Priti Patel
The trundling, razor-faced Mouth of Sauron has given up on her life's work of acting like a Netto Bond villain and being performatively awful to drowning foreigners, so is finally available for the lead role in "Young Frankenstein: What Frau Blücher Did Next"
Steve Baker
No room in cabinet for the brains of European Research Group who, in 30 years, didn't manage to research how to leave the EU without fucking up the country.
Still has the ever-so-pleased air of a man who desperately wants you to ask if he's solved his Rubik's cube.
Gavin Williamson
Supernaturally incompetent lurching tower of wrong with the teeth of an exhumed donkey. Nadine Dorries is in the cabinet, yet dumbfungled spider fetishist Williamson isn't, which tells you all you need to know about his capability.
They knighted him.
Boris Johnson
And a final farewell to the horny Honey Monster, a one-man game of Shag/Marry/Avoid who drove the country of a cliff for a laugh, brushes his hair with a toffee apple, and spent his time in office blundering around like a haunted bin-bag full of custard and viagra
If you like this kind of thing you might enjoy my book, out next month, which tears the living shit out of them all for a decade.
And as an added bonus, you can burn it for warmth, and it's thick enough to use as a barricade when it all kicks off.
She's not only wrong, but she's been proven wrong by a 12 year experiment.
Since 2010 the Tories have tried cutting tax to grow the economy, and every time they have failed to meet their growth predictions. Every single time. Osborne did it annually from 2010 to 2016
"Boundless wit and convivial exasperation... Meticulous, brilliant, unstintingly splenetic... Our great-grandchildren will place it alongside Pepys, whose diary they will, correctly, judge much, much less funny"
– Howard Goodall
"Do you have a politics junkie in your life? Then their next gift is in the bag. Russell Jones' hugely impressive first book is his or her masochistic wet dream... like flipping through a grotesque highlights album of the country's downfall"
A crisis - and boy oh boy, do we have a crisis - is the perfect time to change everything.
Obviously there's the urgent immediate issue to deal with, but unless you're very stupid (I'll come back to that) you'd take the opportunity to fix underlying problems too.
Our govt is very stupid.
Their solution is: more of the same. Tax cuts will fix it. The market will fix it. Deregulation will fix it. And centrally-directed plans are "interfering with the market" and cause chaos.
We've had 40 years of that. Look where we are.
George Osborne promised his corporate tax cuts and shrinking the state would revitalise the nation, create growth and raise wages. He did it every year from 2010 to 2016.
And every year from 2010 to 2016 he cut his growth forecasts, wages fell, and the nation slid into despond.
It's perhaps hard for those who don't remember the 80s to understand the constant nuclear dread. It often felt like total annihilation was days away.
#Gorbachev was a beacon of hope and light. Imperfect? Certainly. But he took the world away from the brink.
My childhood (70s and 80s) was wall-to-wall existential dread. Cartoons telling you how to survive a nuclear blast (ha!). Leaflets explaining what to do with your family's corpses. Lessons in how to construct a fallout shelter from your school desk. Terrifying news and TV drama.
All of that evaporated when Gorbachev arrived. He wasn't like the previous Soviet leaders - he seemed warm, cuddly, human (and humane). And he had the courage to stare down his own generals, and reach out to the West. The terror subsided, and proliferation ended.
I call this: "My great big thread of all the times in Lord of the Rings that somebody falls off something, and is absolutely fine".
Do I need to say "spoilers"?
Spoilers.
(sometimes they're not absolutely fine)
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
We are but seconds into the movie, and seemingly just as a warm-up exercise about 100 orcs fall unnecessarily off a cliff.
Are they fine? Who knows? But given what's coming, it wouldn't shock me.
Moving on: Gandalf (who is around 2,000 years old, but seemingly has the bone density of a granite elephant) is pinned to a wall, dropped 60 feet, forced to do some impromptu breakdancing, and then hurled into an anti-gravity un-fall 1000 feet up into the air.