[Boiler]

John Crace raises a smile:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ver-dowden

While Momentum chose to rubbish Labour’s results – “What do we want? More antisemitism” – Keir Starmer turned up in north London to celebrate the victory in Barnet

Screenshot 2022-05-06 at 22-13-04 Sensible MPs avoid the airwaves after elections. Fortunately Dumb and Dumber were available.png (5.5 KiB) Viewed 5237 times

[Andy McDandy]

Marina Hyde's latest piece. A very funny look at the local elections:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -elections

The government’s entire policy programme currently amounts to a small timeshare hotel in Rwanda and George Eustice’s suggestion that people might want to give supermarket value ranges a go. It all feels like busywork, the appearance of action. Far from attempting to shape events, the government seems to wait for them to turn up – good or bad – and then react to them. They remind me a lot of a newsdesk – perhaps inevitably, considering the country took the bold decision to elect a newspaper journalist to run it. Hard to think of a worse-run business we could pick the next leader from. A football club, perhaps, or a care home chain.

Speaking of torpedoed flagships, whatever happened to levelling up, the supposedly overarching policy of the current administration? It ended up being one day in February, when Michael Gove reannounced a number of existing things as though they were new. Come to that, whatever happened to Michael Gove? The secretary of state for levelling up would have more visibility in a witness protection programme.

[Andy McDandy]

Marina does Beergate:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -of-living

Starmer’s soliloquy certainly wasn’t good enough for the Daily Mail, which this morning has wet its collective pants that the Labour leader has had the temerity to answer the one question the Mail would have screamed at him for months if he hadn’t.

[Cyclist]

I'm not going to post highlights, just read it

Sociopathy and stupidity worn like badges of honour in cabinet of all the talents
John Crace

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... he-talents

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... libel-case

Change of pace for Marina Hyde as she summarises the Wagnarok trial.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ing-crisis

Marina Hyde on clueless ministers, levelling up, homeworking, and the absolute absence of anything resembling thoufght in government.

Rachel Maclean, on to Monday’s breakfast shows to discuss the cost of living crisis. Who knows why the random nitwit generator machine had made it Rachel’s turn? Maybe Helen Whately was refusing to come out of her trailer. In many ways I refuse to believe Rachel even is the safeguarding minister – a huge part of me assumes she is just a character hastily assembled from discarded awayday ideas and then given a pretend job title that it would feel rude to argue with. “Just say she’s the ‘safeguarding minister’. Sounds like a thing.”

Of course, No 10 doesn’t tell you about the frontline service provision, preferring instead to intimate that this will merely be a just-deserts response to civil servants working from home. This is the chief bugbear of that incorrigible desk-sniffer Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose own work desk does not even feature a computer, but who has recently been slithering round Whitehall like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

“My experience of working from home,” Johnson explained at the weekend, “is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing.” Oh, you forgot what you were doing? Let us help you out. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE BEING THE EFFING PRIME MINISTER.

[Boiler]

To be fair to Johnson - no, really - I can imagine that being the scenario when he was writing his "chicken feed" columns for the Telegraph; could you really see him schlepping down to wherever the Torygraph is based to write them? No, any more than I can imagine Littlejohn doing a transatlantic commute to Derry Street twice a week to write his.

[Cyclist]

I don't need to watch PMQs, I'll just read John Crace's synopsis.

Johnson is so short of answers, he can no longer form complete sentences
John Crace

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ing-crisis

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... rish-sunak

Marina Hyde with the gunk tank and Crackerjack pen ready for the government.

I don’t mean to have lost focus, but remind us what “the job” was again? It feels a bit like we’ve passed the tipping point, and that all this other stuff is now so prevalent as to effectively constitute “the job”. You clock in for a shift of lawbreaking or defending lawbreaking. But if you want to do frivolous things like solve ordinary people’s problems, then, I’m sorry – you do that on your own time.

Johnson seems to have escaped further fines based on the defence that he works at home – a thing that, in all other contexts, he tells us is very bad. Indeed, the media campaign to force Britons to stop working from home and return to the office continues unrelentingly. As I said this week, Rupert Murdoch is positively obsessed with people returning to their commutes. And, as Cummings confirmed this week, the chief drivers of the anti-WFH push are the newspaper editors and proprietors who constantly harangue Johnson about what it’s doing to their sales. If only the PM could be straight with the public and explain that they should herd themselves back to the office in order to save Fleet Street. As tugs on the electoral heartstrings go, it’s up there with telling them to do it to save buy-to-let landlords or serial sex killers.

I remember a Tory party conference four years ago where Jacob Rees-Mogg was telling people not to panic at the Brexit chaos, on the basis that Brexit would be a success “because it is a Conservative thing to be doing”.

You’ve heard of fiddling while Rome burned; our version of that seems to be the country sliding into the howling hellfires while various government figures twat about on the side of the pit debating whether it would or would not be “Conservative” to help.

[Samanfur]

Does anyone else get the feeling that John Crace may be projecting slightly?

Boris Johnson’s conversation with Sue Gray in a meeting that never happened

Gray: You don’t get it, do you? You disgust me. You tell lies to the country and parliament and get away with it time and again. And you’ll probably get away with it again. The police might have been craven halfwits, but I’m not. So I’m going to publish everything. The photos clearly show you attended multiple parties in Downing Street and the public deserves to know the truth.

[Boiler]

Does anyone else get the feeling that John Crace may be projecting slightly?

[Samanfur]

Marina Hyde is even more unimpressed than usual. It's hard to pick the standout quotes from this:

Three cheers for police blindness: where would our leader be without it?

[Boiler]

Marina Hyde writes:

No drive, no spine, very little vision: even science can’t explain the creatures clinging on to Johnson

The things Boris Johnson says to the 1922 Committee are far more revealing than the things he tells the silly old public, and on Wednesday he explained to backbenchers that Britain wouldn’t have won the second world war if Churchill hadn’t been pissed. This comparison simply makes me picture Churchill giving Johnson a hugely disdainful look up and down, and saying: “Well, sir, you are useless at your job. But I shall be sober in the morning.”

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -gibberish

Marina Hyde's latest:

The imperial measures nonsense is all part of the “bonfire of red tape”, which will certainly be something to cluster round in lieu of half the nation being able to afford central heating this winter.

For the record, nine “bonfires of red tape” have been announced since Johnson became prime minister, suggesting police should investigate this arsonist for serial insurance fraud. Of course, like the Springfield Tire Fire (est. 1989), the “bonfire of red tape” has in fact been burning continuously for even longer than that, with the flames fanned every time a Conservative prime minister is up the creek. Which, given the past few years, has been exceedingly often.

Meanwhile, Alan Partridge's mystery drawer makes an appearance.

Carrie’s chatelaine skills are called particularly into question, with the Times reporting some kind of character clash with the former housekeeper, which the prime minister’s wife denies. There seem to have been disciplinary proceedings against this housekeeper, though these were subsequently dropped and she left with a payoff and an NDA in 2020. Mesmerisingly, it all seems to have hinged on her alleged “inappropriate handling of a personal item” found in Boris Johnson’s bathroom, which she denied. According to the Times, “the nature of the item is unknown”. So … I’ll leave it with your subconscious.

[Youngian]

Mesmerisingly, it all seems to have hinged on her alleged “inappropriate handling of a personal item” found in Boris Johnson’s bathroom, which she denied. According to the Times, “the nature of the item is unknown”. So … I’ll leave it with your subconscious.

This woman was a seasoned pro who’d been in the job since Blair was PM. Flushed his stash down the bog sounds the most likely answer.

[Oboogie]

Mesmerisingly, it all seems to have hinged on her alleged “inappropriate handling of a personal item” found in Boris Johnson’s bathroom, which she denied. According to the Times, “the nature of the item is unknown”. So … I’ll leave it with your subconscious.

This woman was a seasoned pro who’d been in the job since Blair was PM. Flushed his stash down the bog sounds the most likely answer.

And there was me thinking it was Johnson's cock.

[Andy McDandy]

So it was drugs or a dildo.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... lee-royals

Marina Hyde shares her thoughts on the jubilee and monarchy in general. Funny.

[Andy McDandy]

The morning (or afternoon) after the night before, what better than waking up next to lovely Marina Hyde?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... confidence

Last night’s unsuccessful leaderplasty leaves the government hideously disfigured but staggering on; and the prime minister the subject of headlines like “let me get on with the job”. Which, considering the circumstances that brought us here, is a little like Fred West pleading to be allowed to get on with finishing someone’s loft extension.

Johnson apparently told his cabinet “this is a government that delivers on what people in this country care about most”, which feels bold, considering that a poll yesterday indicated 60% of the country wanted him to sod off to a long, long Sartrean afterlife on the Hannibal lecture circuit. Johnson’s mission-aborting government is arguably the UK’s worst delivery service, making even Yodel and Hermes look as if they go the extra mile to serve. “We tried to deliver even one half-arsed policy but you were out.”

Today’s other official angle is that last night’s horror show allows the government to “draw a line” under leadership speculation, and to stop the Tory infighting. A reminder: things we’ve done fairly recently to stop Tory infighting include: having a referendum, having two general elections, and having no-confidence votes in both the past two leaders. How’s it working out for us, would you say?

It remains remarkable that some years into the experiment, we are no closer to discovering what, politically, Boris Johnson actually likes, other than being liked. A lifetime of hollowing himself out with narcissism and personal ambition seems to have meant that when he finally became prime minister, he had no idea what to do with the position, and even less interest in finding out.

...the late Ray Liotta in Hannibal. You may recall the scene in which this useless and corrupt government official has been so skilfully drugged that Lecter is able to feed him mouthfuls of his own brain while he retains a form of consciousness. This will be Boris Johnson’s summer.

[Boiler]

From that:

Nadine Dorries, the missing link between the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, whose botched attack on Jeremy Hunt contrived to describe her own party’s earlier pandemic preparation as “wanting and inadequate”.