Conservative Party – Blood and Porridge

July 10, 2024July 31, 2024

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4^th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result. This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years. It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government. They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

But first… A message for viewers in Scotland.

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine. As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me. Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith. To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster. The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway. But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show. And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’. And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’. This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs. And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland. Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories. When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls. When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015). For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile. Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party. (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.) And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally. While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried. Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast. That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017. What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories. If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long. Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership. I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029. Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

© BBC

Oh well. You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats. I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth. Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan… Oh, how I laughed.

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk. The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it. Far from it. Truss has been blaming everyone but herself. She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership. Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump. I do hope July 4^th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five. Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage? Don’t bet your life savings on it.

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023

No fool like an old fool

© Vintage Classics

The death of Martin Amis on May 19^th this year brought forth a glut of media tributes that often included the claim he was the ‘greatest British novelist of his generation’. I have to say that’s not something I agree with. However, it did remind me that one generation before Martin Amis’s heyday, his father, Kingsley Amis, was also commonly feted as a major figure in British letters.

Neither was I greatly impressed by Amis Senior, although that’s no doubt an unfair opinion because, until recently, I’d read only one literary work by him. (I have also read a couple of Kingsley Amis novels that were classified as ‘genre’ fiction, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration by Britain’s snobby literary establishment, but I’ll talk about those later.) That book was his 1954 satire Lucky Jim, which I found awkwardly dated and, for a satire, not very funny. Yes, all literature is of its time, but good literature doesn’t feel dated the way that Lucky Jim did. And most books I’ve read by Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Graham Greene, contemporaries of Amis whom I do admire, don’t feel dated that way either.

That said, I was always keen to read Amis’s 1986 novel The Old Devils. Partly this was because its basic scenario, about a bunch of boozy, cantankerous Welshmen and Welshwomen refusing to grow old gracefully and instead doing so disgracefully, sounded like one I could identify with. Various people have accused me of being boozy and cantankerous and disgraceful in my old age too. Admittedly, I’m not Welsh, but I’m from an Irish-Scottish background, which is surely the next best thing. And in its day, The Old Devils received much praise. It prompted Anthony Burgess, for example, to say of Amis: “There is one old devil who is writing better than he ever did.” And in its year of publication, The Old Devils won the Booker Prize. So it had to be good. Right?

Well I’ve just read the book, and… Wrong.

But first, here’s the plot, such as it is. A small, tight-knit group of married couples live in the town of Dinedor in southwest Wales. There’s the frail, beleaguered literary scholar Malcolm and his wife Gwen; the greatly-overweight retired engineer and one-time lecturer Peter and his wife Muriel; the seriously alcoholic and panic-attack-prone restauranteur Charlie and his wife Sophie; plus a few associates. If I haven’t described the women in detail, there’s a reason for that, as we’ll see. The men spend their time in a snug-room of the local pub, the Bible and Crown. The room’s decorated with memorabilia from the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, which they’d been members of in their long-ago primes. The women devote themselves to a circuit of get-togethers at each other’s houses where cups of coffee rapidly give way to ‘one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Soave Superiore’ and the air soon fills with a fug of cigarette smoke.

The routineness and predictability of their existence is disrupted by the return of Alun and Rhiannon. They are members of the gang who relocated decades before to London, where Alun has done very well as a TV presenter. In particular, he’s become a ‘professional Welshman’, fronting shows about his home country that paint a mythologised and caricatured picture of it, and also establishing himself as an expert on an influential Welsh poet called Brydan. (Brydan is clearly based on Dylan Thomas, whom Amis once dismissed as “an outstandingly unpleasant man who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets.”)

Back living in Dinedor, Alun and Rhiannon soon stir the emotional pot. Firstly, Rhiannon has a history with Peter. He ‘wronged’ her while he was a young lecturer and she a student, and he’s still tormented by guilt about it. Also, the meek Malcolm has always secretly carried a torch for her and finds his old feelings bubbling up again. But Alun’s impact is more immediately dramatic. He’s a randy old goat and, before long, his insatiable carnal hunger has him cuckolding his supposed mates left, right and centre.

And that’s about it. The book mostly held my interest for the first 200 or 250 pages – it’s nearly 400 pages long – but eventually I realised how meandering and predictable the plot was. The likely climax would involve one of the male characters popping his clogs, either Malcolm with his general infirmity, Peter with his obesity, or Charlie with his alcoholism and panic attacks. Or indeed Alun, who despite his obvious, continuing virility has been subject to brief but worrying ‘funny turns’. My prediction proved correct, but I won’t say who snuffs it at the end. Meanwhile, the female characters are sketched with a perfunctory sameness – world-weary, gossipy, bitchy, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling – and even late in the book I was having problems telling them apart and remembering which marriages they were in.

The one female character Amis draws distinctly is Rhiannon, since she’s got baggage with Peter and Malcolm, the former regretful about his past treatment of her, the latter still worshipping her. The book’s most heartfelt part is where Malcolm persuades her to go for a drive with him, around some of their old hangouts during their youth, when he was close to her and hopeful of getting closer. Needless to say, and sadly for Malcolm, Rhiannon doesn’t remember them with anything like the same clarity.

It’s here that we get a jolting reminder that these characters, for all their affairs, dissolution and bad behaviour, are actually old. Rhiannon retreats into the ladies’ toilet of a restaurant, where she gets “down to work on her falsies,” i.e., picking tomato seeds from the meal she’s just had out of her dentures: “…she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression… the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing…”

Mind you, given the time, false teeth might not be a sign of elderliness. I’ve recently finished reading another Booker prize-winner, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which was published in 2020 but set like The Old Devils in the 1980s. That book’s a reminder of the astonishing fact that not so long ago, in Britain, many people believed it was desirable to get every tooth pulled out of their heads at as early an age as possible.

© From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Anyway, Amis portrays his male characters more vividly. But it’s hard to like them, especially as they’re such a moaning and reactionary shower of old farts. For one thing, they spend a lot of their time whinging about everything has changed for the worse. Now admittedly, the belief that modern life is rubbish seems an inescapable trait of growing old. Well, I should know… But you don’t feel much sympathy for them when they start discussing politics and have “a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth… They varied this with eulogies of Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was that ran Singapore.”

Elsewhere, we hear how Alun “dreamt that Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk…” That actually sounds like one of Kingsley Amis’s real-life wet dreams, as he once described the dreaded Maggie as “one of the best-looking women I had ever met… The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty…”

In my view, British life did change and take a definite turn for the worse in the 1980s, with Thatcher’s Conservative government abandoning traditional industries and ushering in mass unemployment, squandering oil revenues from the North Sea, and basically marketizing and monetarising everything. The latter policy included selling off publicly-owned infrastructure to the highest bidders, the legacy of which is the terrible transport system, sewage-filled rivers and exorbitant energy bills that bedevil Britain in 2023. From Thatcher onwards, for a party that called themselves Conservatives, they weren’t very good at conserving anything, which makes Amis’s right-wing-Tory characters’ bellyaching about everything going to the dogs sound hollow. Still, Thatcher won the Falklands War in 1982 and emasculated the unions, which I suppose was good enough for them.

That brings me to my other bone of contention with The Od Devils. Its characters spend a lot of time prattling on about being Welsh, but they don’t feel very Welsh. They don’t come across like any Welsh person I’ve ever met, either on a cultural level – for instance, there’s barely a mention of the country’s beloved sport of rugby – or on a political one. Okay, they’re Tories, so you’d expect them to be dismissive of Wales’s main political traditions, exemplified by the likes of Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, the Liberals’ David Lloyd George, and Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans, and they carp about the ineptitude of local Labour politicians and describe the Welsh nationalists as ‘c*nts’. But you’d expect the trauma of Wales’s 1980s industrial decline – following the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, 25,000 Welsh miners lost their jobs in pit closures – to register at least a little on their radar. It doesn’t, though.

I knew plenty of Scottish Tories back in the 1980s who, while they thought Thatcher was the bees’ knees and regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty and the Union Jack, saw themselves too as Scottish to the core. Maybe some of this was a pose – tartan, whisky, golf, Burns’s poetry – but deep down they seemed to have a genuine love for Scotland’s traditions and fiercely supported the country in its cultural and sporting endeavours. I suspect these dual loyalties had often been forged by military experience during their youth, when they’d proudly served in Scottish regiments whilst also fighting for Britain.

But I didn’t get that feeling with Amis’s characters here. It’s like they’ve been transplanted from the English Home Counties, with Welshness slathered over them like the trappings of some prestigious club-membership they can show off and banter about, but underneath means nothing to them – unless, as with Alun, it can be turned into money. And there’s little or no talk in the book of World War II. Given the book’s setting and the characters’ ages, shouldn’t this have been a big thing for them? Wouldn’t the men have served in the Welsh regiments?

So, The Old Devils neither impressed me as a book nor convinced me as a representation of life in Wales nearly 40 years ago. Indeed, when I look at what else was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1986, I find it mind-melting that this beat both Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Margaret Atwood’s prescient The Handmaid’s Tale to the title. And it won’t improve my opinion of Amis as a writer of mainstream literary fiction. However, I’ll qualify that by saying that as a genre writer, I’ve enjoyed his output. I highly rate both his James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun (1968) and his supernatural novel The Green Man (1968). If only old Kingsley had written more spy and ghost stories, and crime, horror and science-fiction ones too…

Meanwhile, as the antics of Alun, Malcolm, Peter and co. increasingly set my teeth on edge, I found myself thinking of something my Dad liked to say: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

January 4, 2023January 10, 2023

Mad-lands

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 23^rd, 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 19^th 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 20^th, 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 24^th. HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15^th. 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 10^th 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, 55^th 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 25^th. 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 19^th century rather than the 21^st. 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

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

Britain gets Trussed

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

In a just world, the folk belonging to Britain’s Conservative Party would have been forced into mass exile by now, after foisting upon us the morally rancid Boris Johnson and the three years of lies, corruption, incompetence, embarrassment and disaster he presided over as Prime Minster. They made him party leader and PM in 2019, long after his myriad character defects had become public knowledge.

But instead, the Tory Party members have just elected another leader who will govern Britain from No 10 Downing Street. This is the gimlet-eyed careerist, self-publicist, charisma-vacuum and fifth-rate Margaret Thatcher impersonator that is Liz Truss.

Truss’s ascent to the top has seen many, convenient swerves in policy, belief and principle. From being an atypically-radical Liberal Democrat (at the 1994 Lib Dem conference she called for the abolition of the monarchy, which turned Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown into Paddy Meltdown) to being a hard-right Tory (in 2012 she co-authored the notorious treatise Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as ‘the worst idlers in the world’). From being an enthusiastic pro-EU Remainer (before the 2016 Brexit referendum, it looked like the Remain side was heading for victory and Truss wanted to be on the winning side) to being an enthusiastic anti-EU Brexiteer (the Leave side won… Quick, Liz, get on that winning side!) I know it’s an old cliché, but Groucho Marx’s observation, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… Well, I have others,” has never been truer here.

Her victory comes after a summer-long leadership contest that felt as interminable and punishing as Johnson’s premiership did. The eight candidates confirmed on July 12^th were less than inspiring. They included far-right, culture-war-obsessed moon-howlers like Kemi Badenoch and the self-aggrandising Suella Braverman. There was Nadhim Zahawi, estimated to be worth between 30 and 100 million pounds, who once claimed nearly 6000 pounds in taxpayers’ money to light and heat the stables on his estate in Warwickshire. And there was Johnson’s former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who makes Zahawi look like a pauper. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty – reckoned, thanks to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – allegedly sit on a fortune of 730 million pounds. During the leadership race, a 2011 video was dug up wherein a young Rishi boasted 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? “Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Eventually, the field was whittled down to two competitors, Truss and Sunak, and on September 5^th, after a soul-destroying two months of never-ending hustings, debates and idiotic ‘I’m-more-anti-woke-than-you-are!’-type bickering, the results of the party-membership vote were announced. It worked against Sunak that, by resigning as chancellor in early July, he helped set off the events that led to Johnson’s downfall. Thus, he was regarded by many (obviously dementia-stricken) Tory members as the Judas who’d done for their beloved Boris. And while I’m absolutely not implying that anyone in the Conservative Party is racist, there’s a teensy-weensy possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Sunak’s ethnicity might not have worked in his favour either.

Mind you, Truss didn’t win by the landslide that many people had expected. She secured just 47% of the support of those eligible to vote. Amusingly, days earlier, there’d been speculation that as PM she’d change the rules of any future referendum on Scottish independence, making it compulsory for the pro-independence side to get the support of half of all eligible voters to win – anyone not bothering to vote would be automatically counted as a ‘no’. If she’d applied that goalpost-shifting rule to her own leadership election, she’d have lost.

Now Prime Minister Truss has announced her new cabinet. Looking at the, er, talent that’s featured in the cabinet, the future for Britain – beset by a cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, war-in-Ukraine crisis, Brexit crisis and climate change crisis – looks bleak indeed. Appointees include Braverman as Home Secretary, a post previously held by the demented Priti Patel, though Braverman has the potential to make Patel look like a bleeding-heart liberal in retrospect. She’s expected to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke snowflake Winston Churchill. Indulging in brazen, lefty virtue-signalling, Churchill declared, “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” This will enable Braverman to get on with the business started by Patel of sticking newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and flying them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’.

Elsewhere, getting the portfolio of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the cobwebbed, monocled, top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg, surely history’s most Dickensian villain not actually devised by Charles Dickens. In the past, Rees-Mogg, whose fund-management company Somerset Capital Investment puts money into oil extraction and coal mining, has vowed to squeeze ‘every last cubic inch of gas’ out of the North Sea; called fracking ‘an interesting opportunity’ and likened its damaging geological effects to ‘a rock fall in a disused coal mine’; deliberately misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to back his claims that efforts to combat climate change are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unaffordable’; and, yes, blamed offshore windfarms for the rising cost of fish and chips. With him in position, the likelihood of Britain honouring its pledge to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is about as great as the likelihood that the famously stuck-up, affected and pompous Rees-Mogg has ever tasted fish and chips.

From wikipedia.com / © Cantab12

Meanwhile, casting a rotund shadow over everything is Boris Johnson, who hasn’t gone away. It’s widely assumed that Johnson and his followers – in Trumpian feats of delusion and reality-denial – believe that the British public still love him. Also, they believe it’s only a matter of time before Truss slips up and Johnson, ‘a prince across the water’ like a not-so-bonnie Bonnie Prince Charlie, will return to the fray, become PM again, save the Conservative Party and save the country. I imagine Johnson and co. are already conspiring to facilitate Truss’s slipping-up, and sooner rather than later.

To conclude on a Scottish note… On September 5^th, in her painfully inept victory speech, Truss paid tribute to Johnson by claiming he was ‘admired from Kiev to Carlisle’. This was meant to elicit a round of applause from the audience, but Truss was so flat of tone and lifeless of gaze that the audience didn’t get their cue and several moments of tumbleweed-infested silence ensued. Carlisle is the most northerly town in England, which suggests that for once Truss had got something right. Beyond Carlisle is Scotland and no one there can stand the sight of Johnson – not even the Scottish Tories.

And the next morning, in Boris Johnson’s farewell speech as PM, when he wasn’t comparing himself to Cincinnatus (the Roman statesman who retired from office to lead a quiet life on his farm but then, when duty called, returned to Rome to lead again – as a dictator, though Johnson didn’t mention that bit), he compared himself to a booster rocket: “Let me say that I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.”

Boris Johnson calls himself a rocket? At last, he’s said something that people in Scotland would agree with. He’s a rocket.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

July 12, 2022July 14, 2022

Make it stop

From wikipedia.org / twitter.com

I firmly believe that if the Covid-19 virus, aeons from now, evolves into a multi-cellular organism, and further aeons from that, evolves into a humanoid being with homo sapiens’ abilities of thought and speech, it will look and sound a lot like Britain’s current, though hopefully soon to be ex, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The big, blonde, blobby and bloviating Johnson and the humble 50 to 140-nanometre-wide Covid-19 virus already share many characteristics. Both of them made life miserable for large numbers of people in the early 2020s. And both have similar effects on the human physique. They both induce headaches, exhaustion and severe respiratory problems. Though with Covid-19, the respiratory problems are the result of it filling the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, which seriously reduces their capacity to take in oxygen. Whereas with Johnson, the problems come from exposure to his non-stop idiocies, venality, lying and gaslighting, which destroys your will to continue breathing.

Meanwhile, just as Covid-19 keeps mutating and keeps coming back at us in a dismayingly endless series of variants, such as the alpha, beta, delta, gamma and omicron ones, so too has a variety of Johnson variants appeared over the years.

The 1980s saw the Bullingdon Johnson variant – he was an enthusiastic member of the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford University dining club for posh yobs, who liked to strut around in tailcoats, waistcoats and bowties, wreck restaurants and burn money in front of homeless people. This was followed by the Sacked Trainee Journalist Johnson – the Times dismissed him when they discovered he’d made up a quote for a front-page story – and the Criminal Accessory Johnson – he agreed to supply his old Bullingdon mate, the businessman and future jailbird Darius Guppy, with the address of a journalist to whom Guppy wanted to administer a severe beating.

In the 1990s there emerged the Lying-about-Europe Johnson, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, who’d offered him refuge after his fall from grace with the Times – as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing nasty and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain, helping generate the Euro-scepticism that eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.

Around this time, certain Johnson variants appeared that have persisted to the present day. For example, the Racist, Homophobic Johnson – he’s described black African people as ‘piccaninnies’, described gay men as ‘tank-topped bumboys’, called Chinese workers ‘puffing coolies’, likened gay marriage to bestiality and compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’. That last remark, made in a notorious column in the Telegraph in 2018, was followed by a 375% rise in incidents of Islamophobia reported in the UK.

So too emerged the Shagger Johnson – he’s had extra-marital affairs with Marina Wheeler, whom he married in 1993 a dozen days after his marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen was annulled, with Petronella Wyatt, allegedly with Anna Fazackerley, with Helen Macintyre, with Jennifer Arcuri, and with Carrie Symonds, whom he married in 2021 following the end of his marriage to the long-suffering Wheeler. He also tried to punt Symonds into a six-figure-salary job in the Foreign Office in 2018, while he was Britain’s Foreign secretary and she was still his mistress.

As Johnson has shimmied up the slimy pole of politics, from Member of Parliament to Mayor of London to leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, further variants have materialised. There’s been the Partying with Oligarchs Johnson – in 2018, while Foreign Secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a severe hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Oddly enough, Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. The Talking Gibberish Johnson has also been observed – blabbering about Peppa Pig during an address to the Confederation of British Industry or filling the 2021 Tory Party Conference with excruciating riffs on his ‘Build Back Better’ slogan, such as ‘Build Back Butter!’ and ‘Build Back Beaver!’

Of course, we can never forget the Corrupt Johnson – detected, for instance, during the Wallpapergate saga wherein he and his missus tried to get Tory Party donors to foot the bill for more than 200,000 pounds’ worth of refurbishments to their flat, or during Johnson’s abortive attempts to get dodgy MP Owen Paterson off the hook after the Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that he be suspended for breaking paid advocacy rules. Nor can we overlook the Breaking Lockdown Johnson – he seemingly presided over non-stop partying at No 10 Downing Street while the nation was under strict lockdown rules to slow the spread of Covid-19, which resulted in the police issuing 126 fines to Johnson, his wife, his Chancellor and their staff, making No 10 the most lawbreaking address in Britain during the pandemic.

Obviously, the most virulent variant is the Big Fat Liar Johnson, which basically manifests itself every time he opens his mouth. To Conrad Black, media magnate and owner of the Spectator, in 1999 – make me Spectator editor and I won’t become an MP! (He did.) To the people of the constituency of Henley in 2001 – make me your MP and I’ll step down as editor of the Spectator! (He didn’t.) In response to claims that a mistress had to have an abortion in 2004 – it’s an inverted pyramid of piffle! (It wasn’t.) During campaigning for the 2016 Brexit referendum – if we leave the EU, we’ll be able to give an extra 350 million pounds to the National Health Service every week! (We weren’t.) To Londoners – I’ll build a garden bridge across the Thames! (He didn’t.) To Northern Irish Unionists – I won’t stick a trade border in the Irish Sea between you and the rest of the UK! (He most certainly did.)

To Keir Starmer – as Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, it was your fault Jimmy Saville escaped prosecution for his crimes! (It wasn’t.) In response to Partygate – I didn’t know about the parties! / The parties weren’t my fault! / I didn’t realise they were parties! / They didn’t actually break any rules! / I was only at them for a minute! (He did / They were / He did / They did / He wasn’t.) On the scandal involving the promotion of MP and serial groper Chris Pincher to the position of the Tory Party’s Deputy Chief Whip – I didn’t know he was a sex pest before I appointed him! (Oh yes you did.)

The Pincher scandal proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for those Tory politicians who’d supported Johnson or at least tolerated him. Last week, his ministers and MPs turned against him, first with the resignations of Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Education Minister Sajid Javid, and then with a deluge of resignations by MPs serving as ministers of state, private parliamentary secretaries and trade envoys. Even David Mundell, the embarrassingly cringy and spineless MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, the constituency I’m from in Scotland, quit his position as Trade Envoy to New Zealand. On July 7^th, Johnson at last accepted that the game was up and announced his resignation as Prime Minister. Here was a scrape that even he couldn’t squirm, worm and wriggle his way out of. The greased piglet, as David Cameron once called him, had finally been degreased, and spitted, and roasted.

Or had he? People have noted that his supposed resignation speech suspiciously lacked mention of the word ‘resignation’. Indeed, it lacked anything hinting at the vaguest feeling of remorse or apology. And Johnson only agreed to resign on the condition that he remain in post as ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister until the autumn, after a new Tory leader and Prime Minister has been chosen. Ominously, Johnson’s old advisor, now bitter enemy, Dominic Cummings tweeted on the matter: “I know that guy & I’m telling you – he doesn’t think it’s over, he’s thinking, ‘there’s a war, weird shit happens in a war, play for time, play for time, I can still get out of this, I got a mandate, members love me, get to September…’ If MPs leave him in situ there’ll be CARNAGE.”

Yes, just as we dread that Covid-19 will never be defeated, and will become a permanent, malignant feature of our increasingly fraught world, so Boris Johnson might never depart either. God help us.

May 16, 2022

Scorpion tales

Here’s a hypothetical question I’ve heard many times. If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time, find the young Adolf Hitler and kill him? In Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone, for instance, the hero puts this question to an old man who lost his son in World War II. The old man replies that he’d stick a knife in Hitler’s heart “as far as she’d go… and then I’d twist her… But first, first I’d coat the blade with rat poison.”

Recently, whilst looking at the dire state of the world and feeling fearful about the future, I’ve wondered about a variation on the time machine / Hitler question. In the future, after manmade climate change has decimated the environment and pig-ignorant ‘populism’ (i.e., fascism) has run society into the ground, who would the remnants of humanity choose to eliminate if they had a time machine and could send an assassin back to, say, the late 20^th century? Who would they remove from the timeline in the belief it’d change history for the better? The young Donald Trump? The young Vladimir Putin?

Neither. I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the guy the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch’s media operations have, over the last five decades, caused massive damage to human well-being. He promoted the voracious, greed-is-good, market-über-alles destructiveness of neoliberalism with his support for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He’s done his best to ignore, distort and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence for manmade climate change. Via Fox News, he’s created in the USA a paranoid, xenophobic, extreme-right-wing ecosystem whose millions of inhabitants believe Donald Trump’s lies and will probably vote him again, or someone even worse, into power in 2024 and turn the world’s biggest superpower into an authoritarian state. Yes, Murdoch has seemingly had a finger in everything shit that’s happened in modern history, in everything’s that propelled humanity further down the road to hell. No wonder Murdoch’s son James resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020, sick of the oceans of toxicity created by his father.

It says little for Britain’s newspaper industry that Murdoch owns a swathe of its national titles: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday. These played a prominent role in influencing the 2016 vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, which led to the economic, diplomatic and cultural shambles of Brexit. No surprise there, either. The ghoulish old Antipodean tycoon once famously remarked that he could intimidate one country’s leader, in No 10 Downing Street, into following his wishes, whereas he couldn’t intimidate the combined might of 28 countries’ leaders represented in Brussels.

But Murdoch constitutes just one head of the hydra that is Britain’s predominantly right-wing press. Among the newspapers sold nationwide, only the Guardian, Daily and Sunday Mirrors and Sunday People could be described as having a political stance leaning any way towards the left. Elsewhere, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, right-wing and totally honking mad, are owned by the billionaire Frederick Barclay. Resident on the island of Brecqhou, which is administered by Sark in the Channel Islands, Frederick and his late twin brother David once tried to avoid Sark’s tax-inheritance laws by having Brecqhou declared independent of it. That’s ironic considering the Telegraphs’ vehement opposition to Scottish independence.

Another billionaire, the non-domiciled Viscount Rothermere, owns the equally right-wing Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. About the Mail, I once wrote: “…you might just view the never-ending diet that the newspaper serves up of ignorance, prurience, grubbiness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, snobbery, racism, misogyny, Little Englander-ism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, immigrant-bashing, anti-intellectualism, tittle-tattle, curtain-twitching, pseudo-scientific quackery, petty-bourgeois fulmination and general all-round barking right-wing insanity and conclude there’s no hope left for the human race and try to book yourself a one-way passage on the next space probe to Mars.”

And let’s not forget the Daily and Sunday Express, near-clones of the Mail titles, though aimed at an even more demented readership who are additionally obsessed with Madeleine McCann, Princess Diana and the British weather. These used to be owned by millionaire and one-time porno magnate Richard Desmond, but are now the property of Reach plc, which publishes the Mirror. Presumably, Reach hasn’t tinkered with the Express formula because it’s decided to milk those barmy readers for money while they’re still alive.

Over the past few months, Britain’s right-wing newspapers have been fighting the corner of Boris Johnson, ever since they realised the fragility of his premiership. As PM, Johnson hasn’t been so much skating on thin ice as clog-dancing on it. It’s transpired that during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the UK had been put in lockdown, Johnson and his cronies turned No 10 Downing Street into an endlessly partying, boozing frat-house that paid zero heed to the strict non-socialising rules imposed on everyone else. (Intriguingly, Murdoch’s Sun, usually the gobbiest of Britain’s tabloids, has kept relatively quiet about ‘Partygate’, as it’s been dubbed. This may have something to do with James Slack, the Sun’s deputy editor, being Johnson’s Director of Communications at the time when No 10 was boogieing away the lockdown blues.)

The self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious Johnson is a creature of the self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious British press. He started off working at the Times, until he was sacked for fabricating a quote, then found employment as the Telegraph. Max Hastings, then-Telegraph editor, has since said of Johnson: “…he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.” As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing spiteful and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain. These helped fuel the Euro-scepticism that birthed the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit. No wonder the right-wing press barons love Johnson – he’s one of their own.

Unsurprisingly, their coverage of Partygate, in which they’ve tried to defend and big up the lawbreaking blond oaf, has been nauseating. First, there was the insistence, made most forcibly by the Daily Mail, that Johnson’s breaking of his own Covid laws was unimportant because Russia had just invaded Ukraine and, well, DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON? More recently, they’ve dedicated their front-page headlines to ‘Beergate’, the hoo-ha over the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer – or, as he’s known in the right-wing press, ‘HYPOCRITE STARMER’ – having a beer and curry at a constituency office in Durham last year while lockdown rules remained in force. Starmer claimed no rules were broken, but the local police have, under pressure from the media, launched an inquiry into the incident. The assumption in the editorial offices of the Mail and the rest is that if Starmer is found to have broken lockdown rules too, their beloved Boris will get off the hook for his own, proven misdemeanours. (He’s already had to pay one fine for a lockdown breach and more fines are likely on the way.)

Starmer has just declared that he’ll resign as Labour Party leader if the police do issue a fine to him over Beergate. This was evidently intended to put some clear, blue, moral water between him and Johnson, already fined but not resigned. However, if he thought this would earn him some credit from the newspapers, he was mistaken. The Mail promptly responded with the headline: STARMER ACCUSED OF PILING PRESSURE ON POLICE.

The more I think about these rags, the more I think of the fable about the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion stings the frog to death, even though this will condemn it to death too, because it’s in its ‘nature’. It’s what it does. It can’t not sting.

The poisonous right-wing nature of much of Britain’s press is a headache for the Labour Party. How can they ever get a fair hearing when those newspapers are programmed to blindly support their Conservative opponents no matter how corrupt, venal and idiotic they become? A quarter-century ago, Tony Blair’s policy on this was to cosy up to them. He got so thick with Rupert Murdoch, the Scorpion King himself, that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids. In return, the headline THE SUN BACKS BLAIR appeared on the front page of Murdoch’s number-one British tabloid prior to the 1997 general election, which saw Blair win power. But such sycophancy has its downside. If you get too close to the likes of Murdoch, you end up either stung to death, like the frog in the fable, or with so much poison in your own system that you become toxic yourself. The latter outcome happened to Blair. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind describing ‘El Tone’ as a paragon of virtue in 2022.

Still, I don’t have much sympathy either for the supporters of the last Labour Party leader, the atypically left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, who blamed negative British press coverage for all their hero’s woes. Yes, aware that Corbyn represented a threat to the wealthy, powerful interests of their owners, those newspapers bombarded Corbyn with every slur going, that he was a terrorist sympathiser, an anti-Semite, a traitor, whatever. But Corbyn, whom I’ve always regarded as a decent bloke, engineered much of his own bad luck. He was a hopeless communicator. He seemed to be living still in the 1970s, when he’d been a compadre of old school socialist Tony Benn, and never responded to the attacks made against him with the imagination and agility necessary in the changed media landscape of the early 21^st century.

Actually, there’s proof close at hand that, to be successful, a political party doesn’t need to be backed by the majority of newspapers, and can triumph despite most newspapers stinging at it continuously with their scorpion-tails. In Scotland, only one newspaper, the National, supports the Scottish National Party’s policy of Scottish independence. The other Scottish newspapers – north-of-the-border editions of the right-wing ones I’ve just discussed, such as the Scottish Sun and Scottish Daily Mail, and locally published ones like the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record – oppose the SNP and leap at any opportunity to excoriate it and its leader Nicola Sturgeon. (It’s noticeable how, in the headlines of the utterly wretched Scottish Daily Express, the British PM is always referred to as ‘BORIS’ whereas the Scottish First Minister always gets a contemptuous, misogynistic ‘STURGEON’.)

Yet the SNP have been in power in Edinburgh for the past 15 years and have topped the polls in eight Scottish elections in a row, most recently the council ones on May 3^rd that saw them increase their number of councillors by 22. A large part of this is surely down to Nicola Sturgeon herself. Whatever you think of her politics, it’s hard to deny that – unlike Johnson – she speaks like a normal human being, communicates her meaning clearly and generally exhibits some semblance of empathy and integrity. Obviously, this influences a sufficiently large number of Scottish voters, who choose to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears over the crap they read in the newspapers.

Let’s hope that, when the time comes, British voters as a whole choose to do the same.