Thread by @RussInCheshire

#TheWeekInTory

tl:dr – AAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHH!!!

I’m sorry. This is the biggest yet.

So drink heavily, and let’s begin what seems 1000 years ago, but was actually this week

[ Cue wobbly flashback effect ]🧵

1. Parliament demanded this week’s Prime Minister, Margarine Thatcher, appoint an ethics adviser, despite Truss insisting she doesn’t need one

2. As with all Truss decisions, this was immediately tested by a thorough slap in the chops from the following bits of reality

3. Suella Braverman was formally reprimanded for mishandling sensitive documents

4. Then Kwasi Kwarteng’s celebratory champagne reception for hedge-fund managers who made billions from his shite budget “may have broken the ministerial code”, or what’s left of it after Johnson

5. While working as an MP Kwarteng was reportedly paid £20k a month as a “political advisor” to budget-profiting hedge fund manager Crispin Odey

6. And Kwarteng was found to have had “undisclosed, secret meetings” with Saudi oil firms - remember, all this in one week

7. Then Lee Anderson – clearly misunderstanding the Tory memo about "no infighting" – went outside for a fight instead, and assaulted a member of the public on camera

8. After which cocaine was found in multiple rooms following “raucous parties” at the Tory conference

9. And Jonathan Gullis, a Neanderthal’s toe pretending to be schools minister, was accused of breaching the ministerial code over a £7k donation

10. And then, perhaps worried we'd gone 3 mins without a scandal, Conor Burns rocked up to reportedly grope a man at the conference

11. Seemingly this wasn’t his only adventure at the Tory's Festival of Gobshitery: Mel (Scary Spice) B implied Burns had admitted something else to her in a conference lift

12. Burns is due to for a Knighthood from ethical mastermind Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list

13. Burns is the member for Bournemouth West, or was until he was sacked

14. It’s not going great for Tory Bournemouth: Tobias Elwood, the Tory MP for Bournemouth East, also lost the whip in July - two MPs, both had the whip withdrawn

15. Burns then tweeted his delight at record employment

16. Less than an hour later, employment fell 107,000

17. The Tory “levelling up” campaign was declared illegal, and breaking the law seems a pointless step to take for a policy you've got no intention of delivering

18. An unnamed cabinet minister – now they get bashful! – suggested tax cuts for women who have children so we can solve next month's workforce crisis in a mere 2 decades

19. This party removed freedom of movement for workers, and introduced a 2-child limit on benefits

20. Deputy PM and giant, trundling, cigar-chomping colicky baby Thérèse Coffey was found incapable of answering 18 different questions about govt policy in just 3 minutes

21. She did, however, find time to reportedly scrap anti-smoking plans. She’s the health minister

22. And then, in words that neatly explain the entire mindset of this govt, she told Radio 4 that “Poor people are richer than you think”

23. Let’s focus for a moment on Suella Braverman – who is either Heinrich Hamster or Joseph Gerbils – and who had quite a week

24. Lifelong Eurosceptic Michael Howard criticised Braverman’s latest spin of the Brexit Policy Randomizer Wheel as a “clear breach of international law”

25. Then Braverman put Liz Truss’s flagship India trade deal on “the verge of collapse” by insulting Indian nationals

26. From there it was just a short goose-step to her next move: reclassifying modern slavery as “illegal immigration”

27. Braverman's next dick-move was to say she wants to make cannabis a Class A drug

28. Liz Truss said she would not make cannabis a Class A drug

29. Braverman said she wants to “cut immigration”

30. Truss wants to increase immigration

31. A reminder that Braverman sits to the right of Truss around the same sodding cabinet table

32. And to the right of Braverman sits … nope, nobody is to the right of Braverman

33. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Microsoft Paperclip standing to attention, was tasked with coming up with growth plans

34. They were all too mad for even Liz Truss to accept, and in the words of The Times nobody could “find alternative policies that would plausibly work”

35. So the growth, growth, growth policy made the economy shrink, shrink, shrink

36. Gilt markets fell so far that it wiped out an entire decade of gains in one week

37. Rees-Mogg responded by saying the BBC describing actual events was a “breach of impartiality guidelines”

38. He then said we shouldn’t blame him for the current massive economic problems, because they began “before this govt took over” (meaning Liz Truss)

39. He was a senior member of the previous govt

40. And so was Liz Truss

41. Just after the markets closed the BoE announced it would “not extend intervention”

42. And then, just before the markets opened the next day, the BoE announced it would “prolong intervention”, meaning the policy lasted 12 hours during which nobody did anything

43. The IMF called govt policy – whatever it happened to be during any particular atomic instant – a “material risk to UK financial stability”

44. And the IMF issued – for the first time ever – a SECOND warning in a fortnight to the govt about its tax and energy policies

45. But this wasn’t even discussed at cabinet, cos they were busy squabbling about whether pot was better than coke, and making wild guesses about the quantum state of immigration and slavery policy

46. Lord Frost, after years saying we should cut ties with the EU, now says we should expand the Foreign Office so we can rebuild ties with the EU

47. He said there “has been an overzealous wish to avoid contacts with the EU”, and presumably he doesn’t own a mirror. Or a memory

48. Meanwhile the results of Frost's last idiotic idea are still playing out. The boss of Port of Dover told MPs “We do not have a solution that’s going to work” when the next load of Brexit-related border checks start next May, cos this shit NEVER ENDS

49. And in the middle of all this, Liz Truss’s spokesman took it upon himself to state that the PM “doesn’t believe Michael Gove is a sadist”. No context, he just up and said it

50. Meanwhile the National Grid said we could face 3-hour rolling power cuts this winter

51. When asked if we should use less energy to avoid this, the actual energy minister said “We are not sending that out as a message”

52. Then the govt dropped plans to tell people how to use less energy, the reason being: Liz Truss is “ideologically opposed” to helping people

51. Then Truss’s ideology changed again, and she said the govt WOULD run a campaign to cut energy use

52. Three weeks after a leaked Treasury report showed UK energy producers have £170bn in excess profits, the Treasury now claims the report doesn’t exist

53. They used this quantum fluctuating report as an excuse not to do a windfall tax, and force you to pay higher bills instead

54. And then 2 days later they said they WOULD do a windfall tax, but only on renewable sources, cos climate change is for wimps

55. From here it was just a short hop-skip-and-jump to batshit climate minister Graham Stewart insisting fracking and drilling for oil in the North Sea “is good for the environment”

56. His govt’s policy also opposes the expansion solar farms

57. Spare a thought for Greg Hands, cos it sounds like he could use the donation

58. Hands said “The best way to prevent energy blackouts is to vote Conservative”

59. He also had “absolute confidence” in Kwarteng

60. And he said reversing the budget would be “Labour chaos”

61. Which brings us, inevitably, onto finance news. Deep breath, everyone

62. Truss’s growth plan has proven so successful that the UK is the only member of the OECD predicted to have zero growth in the next year

63. When she became PM (4 epic weeks ago) Truss railed against “Treasury orthodoxy” and sacked the dept’s top expert

64. The markets panicked, so Truss did her 11th U-turn since becoming PM, and appointed an orthodox Treasury veteran again, then ignored him

65. In her conference speech Truss said there was "no alternative" to the 45p tax cut

66. She then scrapped the 45p tax cut

67. The IFS said spending plans would cost 200,000 public sector jobs

68. So Truss said there would be no job cuts

69. The IFS said there would be £60bn in spending cuts

70. Truss said there would be no spending cuts

71. The IFS said in that case, the govt has to scrap its tax cuts or the market would tank

72. Truss said she would keep her tax cuts

73. Unsurprisingly, the market tanked

74. Truss raced out to do a “charm offensive” for backbenchers, and got the latter part right

75. Her uplifting speech to the 1922 committee was described Tory MPs in the following terms:

76. “The worst I’ve witnessed from any PM”

77. “Funereal”

78. “I feel embarrassed to have sold [the PM] as a safe pair of hands. I sold them a pup”

79. “The PM took zero responsibility for driving the economy into a wall”

80. “Catastrophic misjudgement”

81. “It was horrific. She’s not going anywhere but she can’t survive”

82. “We are being offered the choice of a shit sandwich… Or a shit sandwich with extra shit”

83. After that stunning success, Truss headed straight off for her weekly meeting with The King, who greeted her with the words “Back again? Dear oh dear”.

84. Nadhim Zahawi, a child’s drawing of pure greed superimposed onto a competitively evil gonad, said the govt was still committed overcoming the Anti-Growth Coalition it had just invented

85. Truss then reversed her tax cuts, and joined the Anti-Growth Coalition

86. Kwasi Kwarteng said "I'm not going anywhere", and then got on a plane home to be sacked

87. His time in office was shorter than Liz Truss’s leadership campaign

88. Seemingly the airlines have a rich line in irony, since Kwarteng’s flight performed a U-turn before it landed

89. Truss fired her chancellor for delivering the specific central policy of Truss’s own leadership bid

90. This chaos wiped £300 billion of the value of UK assets

91. That’s £3,600 per hour, every single hour for 9512 years, and we have 3 million using foodbanks

92. And the OBR forecast said the budget has a £70bn hole in it

93. That’s £3,600 per hour for another 2219 years

94. And that’s just what they’ve wasted THIS WEEK

95. Gilts – govt bonds – kept on climbing, sending pension funds and mortgages back into crisis

96. Bankers told the FT the UK is now “uninvestable”

97. To settle the markets Truss appointed Jeremy Hunt, who’s face expresses the uncomprehending optimism of a spaniel chasing a ball into the Large Hadron Collider

98. Our 4th chancellor in 4 months is so brilliant with money and numbers that he once “forgot” about 7 homes he owns

99. Let's not judge: who amongst us can honestly say we haven’t occasionally forgotten about 7 homes we own?

100. Its rumoured Grant Shapps is offering to become “caretaker PM”, making him the 4th Tory PM in 3 years

101. Also the 5th, 6th, and 7th

102. He has more identities than Jason Bourne, somebody else that people will travel halfway around the world just to punch

103. Shaved Afghan hound Chris Philp has also been sacked from the Treasury, which is equivalent to bleaching the murder scene

104. After this, Truss held a press conference to announce she now answers to the name Rishi Sunak, and is confident about the way forward

105. So confident that when she was asked if she’d resign, she cut the press conference short and ran away

106. The pound immediately fell yet further, borrowing costs rose yet more, and a Tory backbencher said “even by her standards that was really bad”

107. In other news: accounts showed in her last month as Foreign Secretary Truss blew almost £2 million on personal travel. In a month.

108. In context: her predecessor spent just £67,000 in six months

109. Truss then called for “efficiency savings” from all govt depts

110. A study of 275 parties in 61 countries found the Tories are the most right-wing of all – including Italy’s new “fascist” party

111. The public spending watchdog began investigating the “irresponsible waste of public money” that was the £120m “Festival of Brexit”

112. Even Truss advisors the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs say she should resign cos there’s “no point” to her being there

113. And the 1922 committee says it’s “ready to change the rules” to allow the “a pile of no confidence letters” waiting to be sent

I'm contractually obliged to mention my book about a decade of Tory chaos, scandal and mismanagement.

It's out on 27th Oct, and contains more jokes and less screaming than this thread. Feels shorter too.

Thanks!

unbound.com/books/the-deca…