Thread by @RussInCheshire

Pop on the galoshes of despair, and let’s wade into #TheWeekInTory (slightly delayed from Friday, because I was busy getting drunk and shouting at ministers on the telly).

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1. Remember that time, ages ago, when Boris Johnson was found to be a liar, ditched by his party in a 354 to 7 vote, humiliated in front of the entire world, and literally barred from Westminster?

2. No reason for mentioning that: it just alleviates the doomscrolling

3. Johnson quit rather than face voters’ first preference: yeeting him into the fucking sun

4. Instead he was yeeted into the Daily Mail, where for £1m he produced what looked like an infomercial for diet pills generated by Kazakhstan's 3rd most promising challenger to ChatGPT

5. By taking the Daily Mail gig, the half-Yeti, half-tribunal-magnet was immediately found to be in “clear breach” of ministerial rules, just 24 hours after he’d been forced to quit as an MP for breaking the rules of his previous job

6. Bob Seely denied he’d ever called the Privileges Committee “a kangaroo court”

7. He was filmed calling it “a kangaroo court” 3 days earlier

8. Exuberantly gormless flapdoodle Nadine Dorries still hasn’t worked out how to do the instant resignation she promised 2 weeks ago

9. Johnson, an ethical black hole barrelling across the political universe in search of acquisitive havoc, gave a life peerage to Charlotte Owen, a 29-year-old blonde, widely rumoured to either be his secret daughter or his secret lover

10. It was discovered this week that Owen’s contribution to public life had boiled down to “providing maternity cover leave”, and acting as a “part-time executive assistant”

11. She also claimed to have worked in George Osborne’s constituency office for one whole month

12. People who actually worked in Osborne’s constituency office said this isn’t the case - she'd never been there

13. After the revelations, Charlotte Owen’s spokesman – how many 29-year-old interns get a spokesman? – her spokesman said he “no longer speaks for her”

14. A Tory source called the peerage “impossible to defend – she was just incredibly junior”

15. Another Tory MP said “diehards still think [Johnson] is the best electoral asset we have ever had” but in reality “that person was Jeremy Corbyn”

16. Meanwhile a whistleblower from No 10 said because Johnson refused to wear a mask, his staff were told there was “no point” them wearing masks either

17. As a result they were “ill all the time”, preventing No 10 from operating properly during the pandemic

18. Another PartyGate video emerged, causing resigned-in-disgrace-then-ennobled Shaun Bailey to say it made him “very upset” as he had “never seen it before”

19. Reports said Bailey had been at the party where the video was taken

20. Johnson’s emotional support turbot, Michael Gove, said the parties were “terrible” and “indefensible”, which must be why he immediately rushed out to [checks notes] abstain on the vote suspending Johnson from parliament

21. He was joined in doing nothing at all about Johnson’s constant lies to parliament by Incredible Shrinking Man Rishi Sunak

22. In total, 225 Tory MPs, including most of the Cabinet, abstained from voting on whether Johnson’s lies mattered

23. The only cabinet member to attend the Partygate debate was Penny Mordaunt, a sign-spinner outside Poundland on Battlestar Galactica, whose job meant she wasn’t allowed to stay away

24. Three days later, James Cleverley – who isn’t – said he “couldn’t remember” what had kept him away from the Privileges vote

25. He’d been keynote speaker at a drinks event, and as he was going into the party the media had asked him why he was there instead of voting

26. Off to the Covid Inquiry, where the govt refused to hand over Johnson’s notebooks, citing “security concerns”

27. But Johnson’s spokesman said the govt “is in the process of returning the notebooks to him, so they can’t be very concerned about their contents”

28. The inquiry heard at least 18 vitally important areas of pandemic planning had been stopped so the govt could plan for whatever emerged from that day’s sweaty fumble inside the Brexit Policy Tombola

29. And those plans were for a Brexit policy that was scrapped anyway

30. A top official at the Cabinet Office gave evidence that during Covid, the nation's need for PPE, the collapse of the UK economy, and financial support for businesses and citizens had “not been considered in any meaningful way”

31. And poor people, especially in the North, suffered worse during Covid due to Tory cuts to health services

32. But futile, complacent, glistening human butterbean David Cameron denied austerity had any effect on anything whatsoever, which kinda makes me wonder why he did it

33. Meanwhile a report found half a trillion of underinvestment by govt in the last decade has “left Britain’s economy trapped in a doom loop”

34. So Cameron changed the subject, and said Gay Marriage legislation was his proudest achievement

35. The same-sex marriage act was a LibDem policy, forced on Cameron by the coalition agreement

36. And although 117 Tories voted for gay marriage, 127 voted against. So it happened DESPITE the Tories, not because of them

37. Steve Barclay, a man so lacking in personality that he failed his Myers-Briggs test, was reported to have delayed the vaccine programme because he wondered if it was “good value for money” to save the lives of you and your family

38. A senior member of the vaccine programme said: “[Barclay] was a total dick, a total control freak, but also not very good at it”

39. So naturally, Sunak promoted him

40. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Windrush, the govt disbanded the unit tasked with Home Office reform after the Windrush scandal

41. Immediately following that scandal, the Tories promised 30 key reforms

42. Only 8 of them have been implemented

43. Only 1 in every 4 Windrush claimants have yet received a penny in compensation

44. It is 7 years since the Windrush scandal

45. So this week Suella Braverman – aka Joseph Gerbils – scrapped a post-Windrush commitment for more independent scrutiny of immigration policies

46. Despite record asylum claim backlogs, Braverman – aka Heinrich Hamster – told her staff to stop making asylum decisions so they could retrain to implement a new policy wheeze she's dreamed up, which isn’t even legal yet, and experts say may never be legal

47. Meanwhile we discovered her previous wheeze – the Rwanda policy – will cost £169,000 per person, but she says it will be “worth it to deter illegal migration”

48. Except the govt admitted the Rwanda policy probably won’t deter illegal migration

49. And an independent, cross-party House of Commons report said the govt’s “stop small boats” policy is “harmful, impractical and costly”

50. So obviously, the Home Office also admitted the policy might not stop small boats. Hey, at least they're consistent.

51. The govt awarded – without competition - £1.6bn to a firm providing 3 barges to store 500 immigrants each

52. That’s just for 2 years

53. So to cut the cost of keeping asylum applicants in hotels, we are spending £533,000 per person, simply to make migrants more miserable

54. And the govt's deliberate policy means we still can’t process their applications

55. Even hardcore anti-immigration Brexiteer backbench dementor Richard Drax (full name: Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax) called the costs “alarmingly high”

56. I’m not sure who this performative cruelty is meant to impress: despite years of toxic, divisive, life-threatening rhetoric, a poll found UK was still the country with the most positive attitude to refugees. Give yourselves a high-five. No, not you Nigel.

57. Economics news: and 13 years into their plan to cut state debt, our state debt has risen from 64% of GDP in Labour's last year in office, to 100% of GDP today

58. As wages shrink, Helen Whately promised the govt would abide by the findings of pay review bodies

59. Same day: a cabinet minister told The Times the govt probably wouldn’t abide by the findings of pay review bodies

60. The OECD reported the UK now has the worst pensions in the developed world – 29% of average earnings, compared with 100.6% in Netherlands

61. Due to the ongoing Conservative Economic Miracle™, we also have the worst inflation in Europe

62. And the highest interest rates in Europe

63. And the highest Covid mortalities in Europe

64. And the lowest number of doctors per capita in Europe

65. So Tory MPs briefed that the inflation crisis was all the fault of the Bank of England, and not the govt

66. Two weeks ago, Sunak had said on live TV that if inflation didn’t reduce by half, “It’s on me personally. I’m the PM”

67. So Jeremy C/Hunt rushed into inaction, forcing the banks to agree a “grace period” for people unable to pay their mortgages, which is something the banks already do, and have done for years

68. The Mortgage Broker’s Association called it “water pistol to put out a fire”

69. As vast leaps in inflation and interest rates took a 25% bite out of anybody paying a mortgage, Sunak, who is worth around £650 million, told us to “tough it out”

70. The ex head of the BoE said Brexit – which Sunak backed – is to blame for our #worldbeating inflation

71. And in Sept, yet more Brexit import checks will be added, which will push food prices higher still

72. So the Tories began charging reporters £125 each to merely attend the Conservative Party conference, seemingly in the hope nobody would turn up with a mic and questions

73. Obviously “reporters” – and I'm using that word very much in air quotes – from GB News, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph are exempt from the charge.

74. John Redwood, a congenitally wrong Vulcan dolt (and “the nastiest man in politics” according to the woman who married him), told Question Time he’d never suggested we’d get a free trade deal with the USA

75. Oh really, Redwood? “The US/UK Agreement could become a template for other deals worldwide” – John Redwood, 29 April, 2020

76. Kemi Badenoch launched an Ofsted investigation into a school because she fell for a widely-debunked story about a child pretending to be a cat

77. Bob Stewart, already facing criminal charges over an alleged “racially aggravated incident”, was found to have hidden his directorship of an Azerbaijani defence company, while he was a sitting member of the HoC defence committee

78. HS2 was “paused” to save money, even though a report said the pause would increase costs by £366m

79. A Tory mayor went to a LGBTQ+ event, then wrote that he had “repented” for his attendance, and then resigned because he’d apologised for accidentally doing a decent thing

80. And Daniel Korski, the Tory candidate for London mayor, was accused of sexually assaulting a TV producer

81. Sunak said NHS waiting lists are coming down, and then 83 seconds later in the same interview, Sunak said NHS waiting lists are not coming down

82. And finally, slack-brained, quasi-sentient teaspoon Matt Hancock was found to have used taxpayer’s money to pay a parking fine given to the removal company that was shifting him out of the family home

On Thursday my 5⭐️ first book, The Decade In Tory, is released on audiobook (see Amazon etc)

And the sequel is currently being prepped by lawyers, but you can order it here, if you’re looking for something heavy and flammable to hurl from the barricades
unbound.com/books/four-cha…