From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk
The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson. That was a mere four months ago. What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity. To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity. As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
But oh well. Here goes.
So, Prime Minister Liz Truss. What could go wrong? Everything, basically, at top speed. On September 23rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing. This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19th century Carpathian peasants. The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.
Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?” On October 20th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won. It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity. Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).
Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man. Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her. AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24th. HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15th. LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment. The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS. The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.
It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks. After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits. But probably they won’t.
From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office
By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present). There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10th Doctor, David Tennant. Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic. Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament. Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen. Great work if you can get it. Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM. And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations. However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25th. This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin. Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness. He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19th century rather than the 21st. He’s minted. He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds. And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”
Really, Rishi? Working class?
“Well, not working class.”
From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury
In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn. He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning. Soon after – screech! Sunak announced he would attend it after all. (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.) Mandatory housing targets? Screech! No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens. A ban on onshore windfarms? Screech! “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.” Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment? Screech, screech, screech!
However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91). Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill). At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.” Her dream? She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.
To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.
From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason
Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch. After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.
To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.” To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work. What else do you think it involves?” To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.” To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”
Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account. When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case. Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.
Honestly, who cares? Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit. But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.
Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands… Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?
The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”
From unsplash.com / © Peter Leong