Thread by @RussInCheshire

This (71-point) #TheWeekInTory is the last for 2 weeks, cos I'm away doing a book tour for Four Chancellors and a Funeral (published next week)

25% off if you order this week from Waterstones



Anyway: pop on the galoshes of despair, and let’s dive in…waterstones.com/book/four-chan…

1. Let’s start with Jeremy Hunt’s budget, which had 4 requirements:

- Make us forget Liz Truss's unfunded £45bn borrowing
- Differentiate Tories from Labour
- Please voters
- And unite the party

2. So Hunt, one of the very best they've got:

- Promised £46bn of unfunded tax cuts
- Stole a major Labour policy
- Annoyed twice as many voters as he pleased
- And then Lee Anderthal defected to Reform

3. Anderson, a paranoid, witless edgelord and gravel-throated carnival-barker who Sunak had made deputy chairman, had claimed Islamists were "controlling" Sadiq Khan, perhaps with space lasers or via the use of a small wax doll

4. You may say, “Lee Anderson? Racist? Perish the thought!”, but you’d be too late, for thought has long-since perished in the bleak and inhospitable wasteland between his ears.

5. Rishi Sunak, a small man who seems smaller the more you look at him, said the obvious Islamophobia was “wrong” and “wrong” and also “wrong”, but wouldn’t admit it was Islamophobic

6. This is mainly because it was no worse than what Suella Braverman wrote the week before

7. Sunak said his party doesn’t have “Islamophobic tendencies”

8. But research shows 58% of Tory voters are Islamophobic, although there are now only about 12 Tory voters, so it's fine

9. And Byline reports that 40% of the Cabinet have previously expressed Islamophobic views

10. So our PM, Lego Elvis, couldn’t admit the truth because it would annoy all the racists he needs to vote for him, but he did suspend Anderson, a dramatic gesture that nobody noticed, least of all Anderson, who barely took a break from flapping his baloney-hole

11. Anderson, who is so heroically stupid you’d think he’d been bitten by a radioactive idiot, then hid behind a flag while he chaotically announced his non-surprise decision to lose his seat at the next election, representing his third party since 2018

12. He stopped mid-speech to say Happy Mother’s Day (it wasn't Mother’s Day), then asked who was laughing at him

13. Everybody

14. He admitted saying there was “no conceivable world” in which he’d join Reform, but this was only, as he told journalists, cos he's “untrustworthy”

15. Last year he also said, “Vote Reform and you’ll get a Labour govt”

16. He said this on GB News, where he’s paid £100,000 while being an MP

17. Before he took that job, he said “if you need an extra £100,000 a year on top then you should really be looking for another job”

18. And a year before that he backed a plan to have an automatic byelection when an MP changes party

19. But none of that matters to Lee, who is now free to speak what I’m still referring to as “his mind”. Honestly, my books just write themselves.

20. Meanwhile Lee Rigby’s widow joined survivors of UK terrorist attacks in calling for Tories to stop fuelling anti-Muslim hate

21. So patriotic Tories Marco Longhi and Jill Mortimer called for an end to a memorial for Muslims who died fighting for Britain in world wars

22. The Tories are so committed to ending Islamophobia that their anti-Islamophobia body hasn’t met for 4 years

23. After the defection, Sunak, our Sylvanian Family PM, raced to bring unity to the nest of squabbling wangs he’s attempting to govern

24. It went as well as everything else he does: he was attacked by Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates and Suella Braverman, AKA Chinchilla the Hun

25. Cates and Kruger said, “the plan isn’t working”, which is news to me, cos I didn’t realise the govt even had a plan

26. These psephological masterminds argued that 80% of voters are now to the left of the Tories, so Tories should move further right to attract more voters

27. Liz Truss update, and Margaret Thatcher from Elizabeth Duke spent £1,400 per head on catering during a single flight

28. A Tory backbencher responded by telling Truss to “shut the fuck up”, but she seemingly only heard the “fuck up” bit, so went to America to gawpingly nod along while racists called Tommy Robinson a “hero” in a half-empty room

29. Michelle Donelan made the taxpayer cough up £15,000 to cover the cost compensation after she falsely called two academics as “extremists”

30. But in swept Michael Gove, with a face only a motherfucker could love, and a plan to publish the names of extremists

31. And then he said he WOULDN’T publish names, in case naming the extremists on his list made them a target for the extremists NOT on his list

32. He’s now so mental that even Priti Patel, the Shetland Pony of the Apocalypse, asked him not to go ahead with this batshittery

33. But Gove said he’d widen the definition of extremism to include people who undermine national institutions or break laws

34. But he wouldn’t make the definition wide enough to include unlawfully proroguing parliament, which is what his party did

35. Or deliberately and knowingly breaking international law (ditto)

36. Or ignoring the Supreme Court (yep)

37. Or repeatedly and knowingly lying to parliament (them again)

38. Or calling peaceful protestors for a ceasefire “hate marchers” (you guessed it)

39. Or just plain making shit up, as flocculent walnut Paul Scully did this week when he claimed parts of London and Birmingham were “no-go areas”

40. Scully apologised saying what he thought (but not for thinking what he said), and decided to stand down at the election

41. So did Theresa May, a mechanical seabird that swallowed a kazoo, and was the least terrible terrible PM since 2016

42. The most terrible was Boris Johnson, who took a private jet to Venezuela for a secret meeting with an autocrat whose legitimacy isn’t recognised by Britain

43. Fat Malfoy said David Cameron, a thumb with a mouth slit who we let play at being Foreign Secretary, had okayed the meeting

44. Cameron’s office said he only found out about it when Johnson texted him en route

45. More bad news for Sunak’s Rwanda plan, which lost every single vote in the Lords

46. To remind you, the Rwanda plan is his illegal immigration bill, which, according to the Supreme Court, is an illegal illegal immigration bill

47. His cost-saving scheme to break the law and rob 67 million people of human rights so we can send a handful of Albanians to Rwanda is now costing us £1.8 million per asylum seeker

48. And absolutely nobody voted for it, cos it’s not in any Tory manifesto

49. Ministerial discipline has now evaporated, with 2 serving ministers rebelling this week to demand more defence spending, and another, Andrew Bowie speaking out against Sunak’s windfall tax policy barely half an hour after it was announced

50. Another minister said “If [Sunak] had strength, he'd have sacked Bowie. He's no control and lost collective responsibility”. They say men can't multitask, but Sunak manages to be weak, spineless, ineffective, indecisive and feeble, all at the same time. FTW!

51. So to prove he has authority, Sunak - who in desperation brought back glistening polyp David Cameron last year - is now planning to bring back Johnson, an albino yeti with the shifty look of somebody dreading a dawn raid by a specialist branch of the Met

52. Then Sunak headed off to meet the head of the 1922 committee – who is also standing down – after reports that “30-40” Tory MPs want to get it the fuck over with and have an election in May, probably cos they’ve got a job offer from a mate in merchant banking

53. This makes at least 60 Tory MPs standing down, 40 wanting an election, and “20+” who have sent letters of no confidence

54. That’s over one third of the parliamentary party giving up on the Tories. I bet you know the feeling.

55. This despair among MPs might be because the Tories have now fallen to their lowest polling score EVER, even lower than during Liz Truss's drive-by attack on the economy

56. It’s predicted they could end up with just 25 seats after a general election, so not all bad news

57. In fact: great news for Sunak’s family, who it turns out - what are the chances? - can still benefit by £300 million due to tax-break loopholes his budget accidentally left available for exploitation by non-doms such as his own wife

58. Meanwhile, totally normal quadruple-barrelled backbench atrocity Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax called for “all wild animals” to be culled

59. Drax said “Britain is full” from his home, an inherited, 28 square-kilometre country estate that you can see from space

60. A report commissioned by Downing St to prove low-traffic neighbourhoods don’t work and are unpopular found they do work and are very popular

61. So the report was permanently shelved, cos that's accountable democratic govt for ya

62. And now the big news: a week after Sunak said extreme views wouldn’t be tolerated, he suddenly found they would be, for the measly sum of £10m a go

63. That’s cos top Tory donor Frank Hester said Diane Abbott made him hate all black women, and she should be shot

64. Ministers spent a whole day repeating their Lee Anderson tactic, and refused to admit it was racist

65. And then, 24 hours after everybody with a brain agreed that saying massively racist things is definitely racist, Kemi NotGoodEnough managed to notice it was racist too

66. This forced top spine donor Sunak to form an opinion: it wasn’t just wrong, wrong and wrong, as Lee Anderson had been. It was “racist and wrong”, a total novelty in Tory circles

67. Maria Caulfield said the comments were “not something we should be excusing in any way”

68. Mel Stride, with the moral depth of a graphene spider, took a different view, and said wanting to shoot black women wasn’t “a gender based or race based comment”, and Hester “has apologised and I think we need to move on”

69. So we turn instead to ethical mastermind Kevin Hollinrake, who held both opinions, like Schrodinger’s Twat, and said Hester’s comments were “clearly racist” but Tories wouldn’t give back their £10 million “on the basis that we don’t believe he’s a racist”

70. One Tory MP said they’re all “exhausted by the psychodrama” and “the mood in the party is terrible”

71. This fits in well with a poll that found after 14 years of Tories, the UK is now the 2nd most miserable place in the world. And that’s before they even read this thread

Next week sees the release – or is it escape? – of "Four Chancellors and a Funeral", of which I am very proud, and which has some very nice reviews.

It’s 25% off if you order now on Waterstones – see my pinned tweet.

waterstones.com/book/four-chan…

And if you’re lovely – and I know you are – you might consider backing my next book, “Tories: The End of an Error”, which I’m currently writing

Thanks very much, and I hope you're all coping OK.

unbound.com/books/tories-e…