Here we go again.
Like the shoe-stretchers my mum got me for Christmas, the Tories are the stinky gift that keeps on giving.
Let’s dive in…
1. Previously on The Week In Tory: thermonuclear tribunal magnet Boris Johnson battled to survive, as Steve Baker told the BBC “I believe the Conservative Party is the only party capable of good government”, and just behind him over half of that government resigned.
2. In a stunning return to form, prognosticator of prognosticators Jacob Rees-Mogg, that disturbing merger between The Child Catcher and the concept of rickets, predicted Boris Johnson would remain as PM for 20 years.
3. Johnson resigned the same day.
4. But being Johnson, his resignation didn’t achieve a f*cking thing, because he is still PM.
5. His own party described his not-really-a-resignation as “revolting” and “ridiculous”, and one cabinet minister who remained loyal to Johnson said “That speech was a f*cking disgrace”
6. Because Johnson is now out of power, he remained in power, and not only appointed a new cabinet but also invented a completely new job as a reward for top supporter Peter Bone, a child’s drawing of their vampire grandad.
7. If you thought the last lot of ministers was bad…
8. The new Northern Ireland secretary had to ask officials if he needed a passport to go to Northern Ireland.
9. And new appointee Sarah Dines attempted to excuse Chris Pincher sexually assaulting people by saying the fact the victim was gay “doesn’t make it straightforward”.
10. And another over-promoted mediocrity, Lia Nici, began her ministerial career by repeating the disproven slur that the deputy leader of the opposition had spread her legs in parliament to distract the poor PM.
11. Anyway, on this occasion it seems Leave does not mean Leave.
12. Johnson said he had learned from mistakes over parties, and that’s why his main reason for staying in office was so he could continue to use the country house which is the PM’s official residence, because he’d scheduled a massive party there.
13. The PM then reassured the nation he would announce no new policies, because he didn’t have a mandate.
14. Three hours later he announced a new policy which was – you’ll be amazed to hear – yet another cut to social care, which broke yet another of his own election promises.
15. Johnson also admitted that while he was foreign secretary, he had held a secret meetings with a known senior KGB agent, who he met during his weekend getting absolutely hammered at the “anything goes” party palace of a billionaire friend (whom he later ennobled).
16. This week’s sex scandal was a leaked recording of Johnson offering a job to a woman he’d had an affair with.
17. This replaced last week’s sex scandal, which featured Johnson offering a different job to a different woman he’d had an affair with.
18. And that replaced the previous week’s sex scandal, where he’d been found getting a blowjob off that woman in his official government office.
19. And that replaced a sex scandal relating to rumours he’s got his hairdresser pregnant and she’d had to move to Canada and go into hiding.
20. Anyway: blowjob woman – try to keep up – is now his current wife, and as we face devastating cuts to benefits, leaks revealed she and Johnson blew £200,000 to terrifyingly vajazzle their Downing St flat, which included thousands of pounds spent on literal gold wallpaper
21. Despite spending over £3000 on a replica of the drinks cabinet Rudolf Nureyev owned – the ownership of which is vital to leading a nation, as I’m sure we all agree – their defenders waved aside their profligacy by insisting Boris and Carrie “didn’t even have a salad bowl”.
22. Anyway, Johnson’s lucky successor now faces a (presumably quite short) career surrounded by the sort of baroque decorative horrors normally only seen when intrepid reporters follow revolutionaries into a gaudy, despotic presidential compound.
23. Disgusted by Johnson’s greed, Michelle Donelan quit as Education Secretary after just 31 hours, but still took her £16,000 severance.
24. This week’s third Education Secretary is James Cleverly, a stunningly successful one-man campaign to disprove nominative determinism.
25. Cleverly uncleverly packed his team with talent, starting with Andrea Jenkyns, who had just been filmed cosplaying as an irradiated lemon, and flipping the bird while shouting “just you wait and see” at voters, which I assume she did out of respect..
26. She was joined in Education by Brendan Clarke-Smith.
27. Those three are now in charge of education.
28. As part of their earnest campaign to finally get an honourable leader scandal-ridden Johnson, the candidates leaked dossiers listing the involvement by their rivals in drugs, using prostitutes, tax dodges, illegal loans, and secret illegitimate children.
29. 15 candidates have put their names forward, or 11 if you only count Grant Shapps once.
30.Priti Patel is tipped to stand, unperturbed by the fact her flagship Rwanda policy is not only illegal, but that the small-boat migration it “fixes” has doubled since she announced it.
31. In fact Patel, the Garden Gnome of Sauron, has done so well that the Royal Navy has now threatened to “walk away” from its job of stopping migration, because her policy has, in their words, “spectacularly backfired”.
32. Under party rules you only need 8 supporters to stand, but Ben Wallace – who was favourite just 3 days ago – couldn’t even scrabble together that many, so has decided to remain being simultaneously our defence minister and a life-model for ornamental rubber doorstops.
33. Don’t feel too sorry for Ben Wallace, because reports say he’s been discovered taking £10,000 donations from a law firm lobbying to overturn UK sanctions on Putin, which falls under the defence portfolio of … let me check … oh yes, Ben Wallace.
34. Liz Truss – Cunk on Foreign Relations – has decided to turn the tide on the massive unpopularity and failure of Johnson, and her strategy was to label herself “Boris Johnson continuity candidate”, proving she understands this as much as almost everything else.
35. We also welcomed Sajid Javid, a cartoon of pure greed superimposed onto a competitively evil gonad, who this week was described as “a complete shit” by one of his own backers.
36. Javid’s pitch to the nation is based on his competence, and I suppose only overseeing the worst health waiting lists in history while ignoring basic precautions over Covid is a step up from his predecessor, Milk Tray Man cosplayer Matt Hancock, who fiddled while 180,000 died.
37. Jeremy Hunt has decided to stand as the least-insanely-right-wing candidate, and chose Esther McVey as his running mate, describing her as a “star”.
38. If she’s a star, it’s a white dwarf, in that she’s incredibly dense, and generates absolutely no new material.
39. Hunt needs to win over his party of economic geniuses who left us with the slowest recovery from recession in history, the highest debt for 200 years, highest tax since 1947, highest inflation for 50 years, most expensive housing in Europe, and the worst economy in the G8.
40. To do this he wants to reduce corporation tax – already one of the lowest in the OECD – to 15 per cent so we can compete with NOBODY BECAUSE WE’RE ALREADY LOWEST.
41. And then, fully attuned to the needs of the country, he said his top priority was to end the ban on fox hunting.
42. Meanwhile Nadhim Zahawi, the cross testicle now in charge of our money, had an extraordinarily productive first four days in office.
43. He announced an end to austerity (the 17th “end of austerity” pledge since 2019), and then three days later promised 20 per cent more austerity cuts
44. Meanwhile he lost half his staff, campaigned to sack his boss, and got investigated by the National Crime Agency and his own department. All in four days.
45. He followed up by HMRC announcing they had “red flagged” him over his opaque tax affairs before he even got the job.
46. HMRC said a red flag is enough to stop you from getting an MBE, so “the idea he could be chancellor or even prime minister is unbelievable”.
47. Fellow candidate Grant Shapps refused to get drawn into trans culture wars, the first time he’s ever been clear about identity.
48. Even so, one MP said “The last time Grant said he’d help me win an election I nearly ended up in prison”, so I think we’ll put him in the “maybe” column.
49. Rishi Sunak is standing for PM so he can overturn the disastrous economic legacy of Rishi Sunak.
50. He’s campaigning in the belief that the nation wanted to get rid of the guy who was fined for illegally partying, and would now vote for the other guy who was fined for illegally partying.
51. It’s going well: his fellow MPs described Sunak as “a treacherous bastard”.
52. “Honesty Candidate” Rishi was chancellor of UK while avoiding tax by registering as citizen in another country, claiming his wife didn’t pay tax cos she was from a third, being paid by a trust fund in a fourth, and secretly breaking the rules of his job to hide money in a fifth.
53. Sunak told the media he is a “serious candidate for serious times”, which will come as a shock to those who remember the actual chancellor being unable to work out how to use a credit card when he was paying for petrol in the Kia Rio he pretended he drove.
54.Equally ept Tory MPs sent completely independent tweets backing Sunak, but forgot to remove the instruction “add your own infographic below”.
55. Steve Baker’s opening – and, as it turned out, closing – gambit was a campaign based around a riddle in the style of an optician’s sight test, upon which was superimposed a photo of Baker with what looked like a meat cleaver through his head.
56. His campaign lasted less than 8 hours, but he greeted reality’s latest challenge to his fantasy world in his traditional style, displaying the ever-so-pleased look of a man who is simply desperate to be asked if he’s finished his Rubik’s Cube yet
57. He immediately lent his backing to Suella Braverman, a human-sized gerbil that has mindlessly gnawed through very nearly half of a borrowed copy of International Law for Dummies.
58. Also backing Braverman is Desmond Swayne, the reanimated corpse of Alvin Stardust.
59. Penny Mordaunt, who is a real person and not a minor Addams Family character, has all we expect from a prospective Tory PM – she’s a former magicians assistant who impressed the public by failing to make it into the top 10 in a celebrity diving show on ITV2.
60. Mordaunt pitched herself as the Competency Candidate, and to prove it her inspiring campaign video was based around footage of convicted killer Oscar Pistorius, a murdered Labour MP, and a Paralympian who hadn’t given permission to appear, and demanded to be removed.
61. So the Mordaunt campaign had to be relaunched less than 2 hours after it started, which is easily 1 hour and 53 minutes longer than anybody expected Mordaunt’s campaign to remain in one piece
62. It is rumoured that cursed dildo Jacob Rees-Mogg will also throw his top-hat into the ring.
63. If he teams up with Penny Mordaunt we can simply cancel parliament and replace it with repeats of The Munsters.
64. Also standing – sorry, I know this is taking a while – is Kemi Badenoch, the former equalities minister who opposes equality, refuses to condemn conversion therapy, mocked gay marriage, and published a much-mocked report denying the existence of racist police.
65. She described herself as possessing a “nimble centre-right vision”, and somehow managed to misuse all of those words.
66. Tom Tugendhat demonstrated how much the public wanted him, by publishing an opinion poll in which his name didn’t even appear.
67. Having ethically demanded more thought, nuance and depth than Johnson’s cretinous habit of endlessly repeating three-word-slogans, Tugendhat launched a campaign using a TWO-word-slogan, and repeated “clean slate” about 16 times during a 2-minute TV appearance.
68. His grasp of detail is such that his proposed solution to Brexit is to form a new mini-EU comprising neighbours who aren’t part of the EU. It would contain the UK, Ireland (already in the EU), Sweden (already in the EU) and Norway (associated with the EU as part of the EEA).
69. Tugendhat – remember, this is the clever one – went on to explain that he could solve the NI crisis because he’d fought for his country, although I’m not sure if “I’m a British soldier and want to have a fight” is as quite likely to defuse tensions in Belfast as Tom thinks.
70. Rehman Chishti was seemingly invented merely so he could be defeated, like a nameless pre-titles bad guy in a Bond movie.
71. Research found only 27 per cent of his own constituents know he exists.
72. Chishti pretty much guaranteed his return to obscurity by launching his bid for power with a publicity photo that aimed for “staring at manifest destiny” but landed on “I can’t work out how to use the toilet on this train”.
73. And bewitched thumb Mark Jenkinson tweeted that his campaign would involve blowing smoke up his arse and promising the moon on a stick. I’m not joking. He really did.
74. Anyway, polling shows the highest-rated potential leader is Dominic Raab, who isn’t even standing.
75. Raab scores a mighty 4 per cent, and is – I repeat – the most popular candidate. Nobody that is actually standing got more than 3 per cent.
76. And even the pointless Raab was massively beaten by candidates called “None of the above” (30 per cent) and “Don’t know” (28 per cent).
77. But to prove they’re all completely different to the widely-hated Boris Johnson, every single candidate backs Johnson-era austerity for the poor, tax cuts for the rich, illegally shipping people off to Rwanda, removing your human rights, and trashing international law.
78. This last one – illegally breaching the NI Protocol – has this week led to the govt being sued for millions in compensation by our own ports, who were forced by the government to spend a fortune on Brexit protocols, which are now being illegally cancelled by the government.
79. Meanwhile, Johnson’s final straining turd into the recoiling palm of a disgusted nation – his resignation honours list.
80. Amongst those expecting to join the 768 unelected members of the House of Lords (the Commons only has 650 members) are the following dignitaries:
81. There is Paul Dacre, gigantic Boris Johnson fan and former Daily Mail boss, who, as guardian of our national morals, listens so little and bellows “c*nt” so often that his meetings have become known as “the vaginal monologues”
82. And finally, Nadine Dorries, the dumbfungled physical manifestation of a fight outside Greggs, who may soon become a peer with a life-long say over our national politics, despite being out of her depth on a sheet of graphene.
Times are hard. I hope you’re all OK.
If you can help a food-bank, please do. That’s the priority right now.
If, after that, you still have a bit of spare cash, I’ve got a book coming out, which explains how we got here. With jokes.
