Thread by @RussInCheshire

The latest reminder of what's gone before #14YearsInTory

This thread has 84 points and covers 2018

1. Chris Grayling was made Tory Party Chairman for as long as they could trust him not to screw up

2. It turns out this was 27 seconds – his appointment was cancelled half a minute after being announced on Twitter

3. So he remained transport secretary and cancelled Levelling Up transport in The North because there was “no obvious benefit”

4. Public spending on transport per person in London: £903

5. In the North: £276. Maybe I've spotted an obvious benefit?

6. Then Grayling reorganised rail services

7. It led to months of daily delays across the country

8. Rail magazine called it “the most chaotic, fundamental and humiliating failure it has been my misfortune to witness in 40 years”

9. The head of East Coast rail said “Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine it could conceivably be anything like as bad” as Grayling left it

10. Next, without warning, Grayling turned miles of motorway in Kent into a car park overnight, causing 28 mile tailbacks

11. And then he cancelled anti-drone plans, and almost immediately drones flew over airports, causing weeks of disruption

12. Having fucked up rail, road and skies, he turned to the seas

13. He awarded a contract to a ferry company that had no ferries

14. He said he’d done “due diligence”, but the company’s T&C were for a pizza delivery service

15. And their Chief Exec had been forced into liquidation by HMRC

16. And then the govt had to pay out £33m in compensation, because Grayling had forgotten to invite others to bid

17. National Audit Office figures showed Chris Grayling’s cock-ups had cost taxpayers £2.7 billion

18. And he’s just one man! By the power of Benedict Cumberbatch, do not let him reproduce!!

19. The number of people rough sleeping had now doubled since Cameron became PM

20. So Boris Johnson proposed a solution: build a 22-mile, £120 billion bridge to France, and call it The Boris Bridge

21. This was the guy who had just led a campaign to prevent people from crossing the channel

22. Ben Bradley accused Corbyn of being a soviet spy

23. Bradley got Tory donors to pay the damages Corbyn won

24.Theresa May came up with a marvellous idea to solve the Irish Border conundrum: create a new EU with a different name, and run both of them simultaneously

25. This didn’t work, so the EU suggested leaving NI in the EU

26. May said “no UK prime minister could ever agree” to this, because it would technically split up the UK

27.And then she signed up to it

28. Defence minister and failed fireplace salesman Gavin Williamson, a supernaturally incompetent lurching tower of wrong wearing the teeth of a starved horse, told Russia to “shut up and go away”

29. Thus he brought a superpower to its knees. Laughing.

30. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said there was no evidence cutting police numbers had increased crime

31. Police numbers had fallen 15%

32. Gun, knife and serious crime had increased 15%

33. The Windrush Scandal became public, and everyone was shocked

34. They shouldn’t have been: as long ago as 2013 a dozen Caribbean countries approached Philip Hammond to warn him what was happening, and he refused to meet them

35. The govt denied claims they’d set targets to forcibly remove people from the country

36. And then at the end of the year, 23% of immigration officers were given bonuses “linked to targets to achieve enforced removals”

37. Amber Rudd was sacked

38. Her replacement, Sajid Javid, a child's drawing of perfect greed superimposed onto a competitively evil gonad, promised “major changes” to the Hostile Environment policy

39. So he renamed it the “Compliant Environment” policy, and a year later deportations began again

40. Boris Johnson shook off his protection officers so there were no witnesses at his visit to an “anything goes” weekend at the Italian palace of a KGB officer’s son

41. A cabinet colleague called Johnson a “security threat”

42. Johnson later ennobled the KGB officer’s son

43. And when he was PM the security services said Johnson “acted beyond his authority” by censoring a report into Russian influence over his govt

44. UK investment in manufacturing had dropped 50% since the referendum

45. Jeremy Hosking, a Tory donor who had given £1.7 million to Vote Leave, said “Somebody’s got to say it – it ain’t working”

46. Theresa May had lost 15 Brexit related votes in parliament, because nobody could agree what it was we’d decided to do

47. So ministers went for a weekend summit to discuss it

48. All 29 of them agreed to a new framework

49. The next day, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Steve Baker and 4 other ministers resigned

50. Andrew Griffiths quit too, but not over Brexit: he quit cost he’d sent over 2000 non-consensual sexually explicit messages to a barmaid he'd never met over a 3-week period

51. The man must have a forearm like Popeye

52. Within 10 days of agreeing her new Brexit plan, May had lost 12 ministers

53. And then she decided to vote against her own plan anyway

54. And we still had no idea how to achieve Brexit

55. Jacob Rees-Mogg said it would take 50 years to see the benefits of Brexit

56. By which time, 87% of people who voted for it would be dead

57. And then the City firm Mogg founded moved all its funds to the EU to protect it from the effects of Brexit

58. Mogg said food, wine and clothes prices would fall by 20%

59. Nearly right: farmers’ incomes fell by 20%, but food costs rose 17%

60. This is partly because we ran out of agricultural workers

61. So Michael Gove issued visas for 4% of the number we needed

62. And food prices rose even more, to 19%

63. A Brexiteer minister said “We are stuck in a ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’ bind. If we try to cancel Brexit, we destroy ourselves. If we go ahead with it, we destroy the country. People voted for a fantasy”

64. The EU proposed a deal which Boris Johnson called “a superb way forward” and Nigel Farage urged the govt to “take it and run”

65. When it came to parliament, Johnson voted against that deal, and Farage called it “tantamount to treason”

66. Seven years into the 2-year, £2bn plan to introduce Universal Credit, and it had so far cost £16 billion to implement, and running the service cost more than the thing it had replaced

67. But it would now cost more to cancel than it would to complete it

68. That was 2018. Universal Credit implementation still isn’t finished

69. Northern Ireland minister Karen Bradley had been in post for 9 months when she said she “hadn't understood” that “people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa”

70. Brexit minister Dominic Raab “hadn’t quite understood” that Britain is “reliant on the Dover–Calais crossing”

71. Raab reassured us “there are no plans to deploy the army to maintain food supplies”

72. In 2021 the army was put on notice to maintain food supplies

73. Raab negotiated a Brexit deal and recommended it to parliament, and then he resigned in protest at that deal, and satirists across the land wept in despair

74. Our 3rd Brexit minister of the year was Stephen Barclay, an explosion in a nothing factory

75. Barclay said his job was “no longer negotiating Brexit”, but was “battening down the hatches” in preparation for how bad it would be

76. Theresa May came on stage at her conference, dancing to ABBA

77. It was like Vogon Poetry in Motion

78. Andrew Bridgen said “as an English person I have the right to go to Ireland; I believe I can ask for a passport”

79. He had claimed hundreds of thousands in expenses for his European Research Group, but hadn’t “researched” the fact Ireland is different country

80. He continued “People in the Republic of Ireland can vote in the UK”

81. Honestly: hundreds of thousands of your pounds

82. In 2017, 36% of UK companies had stopped or delayed inward investment due to Brexit

83. In 2018, that number had risen to 80%

84. Brexit was back in parliament for the umpteenth time, and Theresa May lost 3 votes in 63 minutes, setting a new record for failure

85. She couldn’t get any Brexit deal, because everything desirable was impossible, and everything possible was undesirable.

86. So the Tories held a confidence vote, which she only just won: a third of Tories voted against her

87. And we still hadn’t hit rock bottom

I'm doing a #14YearsInTory thread for every year they've been in office.

Help me out by ordering my forthcoming book “Tories: The End of an Error”, which will be published ASAP after the election. Ta!

unbound.com/books/tories-e…