Kakistocracy IV:Friends With Benefits.

"I've got more friends than I've had hot dinners. Some of them were losers but the rest of them are winners" - I Dig Everything, David Bowie.

Friends with benefits! Two friends who get on well, trust each other, and occasionally have sex without ever becoming an official couple. This situation usually continues until one party desires something more from the arrangement and the other does not or until one person develops a relationship with someone else. It works for some and not for others.

But in Toryworld, where all sex, all intimacy, is transactional, friends with benefits has developed a whole new meaning. It means your friends, already always in high places, will receive financial benefits for being your friends and you too will benefit from that. Most likely there's still sex involved but the important thing is that it's the country that is getting fucked and it's the government of Boris Johnson emptying their balls all over it and walking off with a self-satisfied smirk, probably sniffing their fingers.

Kate Bingham, the managing director of the private equity firm SV Health Investors, was, in May, appointed chair of the government's vaccine task force and handed a £670,000 budget. Kate Bingham is married to Conservative MP (for Hereford and South Herefordshire) Jesse Norman who attended Eton with Boris Johnson.

Bingham's not the only to have found favour in this Johnsonian chumocracy. Dido Harding, the head of the NHS test and trace operation and an old 'favourite' of these Kakistocracy blogs, is also married to a Tory MP, John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare), as well as sitting in the House of Lords on the Conservative side after being awarded a peerage by her close friend David Cameron, another Etonian.

Harding is, famously, a member of the Jockey Club. An establishment that gave Newmarket MP and current Health Secretary Matt Hancock membership when he entered parliament in 2010. Hancock handed out a £133,000,000 (recently expanded to £347,000,000) contract to the Northern Ireland healthcare company Randox Laboratories to produce Covid testing kits. Randox Laboratories, the sponsor of the Grand National, is the official healthcare partner of the Jockey Club and the Tory MP Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) works for them as a 'consultant' where he is paid £520 per hour.

Randox Laboratories, as with many companies being handed out Covid contracts under the Johnson kakistocracy, were not required to submit a tender for their contract. The policy consultancy firm Public First are another organisation who have benefited from their friendship with high ranking Tories. The company's owners James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, a husband and wife team, have been tasked with researching public opinion about the government's Covid messaging as well as managing public perceptions of the exams debacle this summer.

Frayne is a long time friend of the now departed Dominic Cummings and they worked together, in the past, at the Eurosceptic campaign group Business for Sterling and a right wing think tank given the chillingly Orwellian name of the New Frontiers Foundation,. When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, Frayne became his director of communications. Wolf, meanwhile, is a former advisor to Gove and was partly responsible for writing the Conservative manifesto for last year's general election.

Paul Stephenson is another Cummings associate who's having his palms greased by the government. The director of communications for the Vote Leave campaign is also the co-founder of a firm called Hanbury Strategy who have received £648,000 to research public attitudes and behaviours to the pandemic. Like Randox Laboratories, Hanbury Strategy were not required to submit a tender.

It doesn't end there, Tory corruption under Boris Johnson runs very very deep and a report this week by the National Audit Office found that, during the pandemic so far, a total of £17.3 billion of our, taxpayer's, money has been doled out in 'direct awards' to companies who did not submit a competitive tender. Not all of them were close personal friends of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Dominic Cummings but enough were for it to be far from a coincidence.

The NAO report highlights not just a huge waste of money (£155,000,000 on unusable face masks, £37,000,000 to Gabriel Gonzalez-Andersson, a Miami based middleman who helped broker a deal for PPE with a jewellery company, Saiger, in Florida) but also a huge bias in where that money ended up. The report confirmed the existence of high priority, or VIP, lanes in the procurement process where any company sufficiently well connected enough to get a recommendation from an MP, peer, or advisor were ten times more likely to win a contract than the suckers in the cheap seats.

A company named Faculty has received nearly a million pounds in government contracts over the last eighteen months and Conservative life peer Theodore Agnew, Baron Agnew of Oulton, surely coincidentally, has a £90,000 shareholding in that company. Agnew was given his peerage by Theresa May but a cursory look at some of the people Johnson has put in to the Lords gives us a measure of the man.

There's Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian born billionaire owner of The Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley who edited that paper and supported Johnson's mayoral campaign in London, Michael Spencer of NEX Group - a Tory donor, agricultural mogul Aamer Sarfraz - a Tory donor and former Tory treasurer, the former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox who has expressed support for the IRA and defended Gary Glitter's right to download child pornography, three of the only Labour MPs that supported Johnson's Brexit vanity project (Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart, and Frank Field), and, just to keep it in the family, his own brother Jo.

Friends OF the government simply can't fail but neither, as we've seen this week in the case of Priti Patel - Westminster's own Gripper Stebson, can friends IN the government. Patel received the lightest of slaps on the wrist for the 'accidental' and 'unintentional' bullying of her staff. A situation so obviously bent that the Prime Minister's independent advisor on ministerial standards, Alex Allan, walked out of his job in disgust at it. 

Accidental bullying! Have you ever accidentally bullied someone? Did Peter Sutcliffe accidentally murder thirteen women? Did Hitler accidentally invade Poland, gas the Jews, and start World War II - the deadliest military conflict in history. Perhaps they should claim it had all been an accident and history would be kinder to them. Accidents, as Elvis Costello said back in 1979, will happen but when Boris Johnson is driving his clown car through the heart of government they seem to happen an awful lot. It's like the fucking dodgems out there.

Earlier this year, when talking about how she'd happily report her neighbours for gathering in groups larger than six in their gardens, Patel said "it's all about us taking personal responsibility" but, it seems, that personal responsibility of which she and her colleagues are so keen to impose on us does not extend to them. The rule setters, not for the first time this year - fans of Barnard Castle eye tests will recall, don't have to adhere to the rules themselves.

The former Treasury permanent secretary Nick MacPherson is on record as saying that "things have to be very bad indeed for a Cabinet Office inquiry to find fault in a minister – the system is rigged to conclude the contrary" suggesting the scale of Patel's bullying, unintentional or not, was huge. She's done wrong, she knows she's done wrong, she knows we know she's done wrong but she also knows she will suffer no consequences for it whatsoever and if she wasn't in one of the most important jobs in the country already she would be probably be promoted, rather than disciplined or sacked, for her bullying.

No wonder she's always smirking. Is there a single person in the country who believes Patel's bullying was accidental and was there a single person in the country who expected Boris Johnson to take decisive action or to boot her out over her behaviour? I seriously doubt it. Boris Johnson rewards fealty above all else and history has shown him to be a huge admirer of bullies, from his father to Donald Trump, so Patel is a perfect fit for the upper echelons of the Johnson cabinet. She could kick a dog, stick a firework up a cat's arse, and mug Captain Tom and she'd still be sitting pretty. To quote John Crace, priti vacant. To quote myself, Priti the cunt.

It'd be a tragedy to be governed by such people even in the best of times but with each new day seeing over five hundred Covid deaths (and the total UK Covid death toll standing now at 54,286 - still the highest in Europe), a Brexit deadline looming into view amid confusion and anger, and rumours of Boris Johnson becoming bored of the job and quitting in the new year to be replaced by either Michael Gove or Rishi Sunak it's worse than a tragedy

It's certainly a strange time to announce a £16 billion increase in defence spending. Hardly anybody's visiting other countries at the moment let alone invading them. Johnson's done this because he knows it plays well to his base. Or at least I hope he has. The only alternative could be that he has knowledge of, or is planning, a war in the foreseeable future. It'd be one way to detract from his many grievous failings.

It saddens me to the pit of my soul that people I love and care about, and who I believe love and care about me, have voted for, and defend this venal excuse of a government, stuffed to the gunnels with corruption, fuelled by dirty money and blatant lies, and kept in check by a cabal of ignorant, incurious, and uncultured bullies like Patel.

It saddens me deeply but it doesn't ruin my life. This second lockdown (the lockdown in name only, a lockdown that only affects things that bring you joy, a true Tory spirited lockdown) is not as much fun as the first one. First time round people were keeping each other's spirits up, talking about getting back to normal, saying "when this is all over", promising to build a better future, and it happened in spring with the sun shining and the flowers were blooming.

For many it was, of course, terrible but for the rest of us we had hope, our friends and family had our backs, and nature, sunshine, music, Kahoot quizzes, and long walks kept our spirits high. Some of this is happening now but not all of it and not with quite so much hope attached to it. The Tory party took some stick for its catastrophic handling of the first wave of the pandemic and though, in terms of the death toll, they've been caught out again with the second wave they've, this time, been very quick to distract us with culture wars, defence spending announcements, and other far less important things than our health.

They don't care how many people die but they do care if any of the blame sticks to them and they will do whatever they can to make sure as few people as possible hold them responsible - which, if you think about it, is a complete refusal to do their actual job. Doing my job feels like all I have been doing of late but I have been fortunate that I have a longer three day weekend and I've spent that watching some great television (Small Axe, Pepe the Frog:Feels Good Man, The Night Notre-Dame Burned), listening to some great music (Huey, Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, and Nemone on Six Music, Late Junction on Radio Three, and Dan Whaley's Out of Limits show on Burgess Hill Radio), and writing lots of blogs.

I've also been chatting to friends. This morning I had a long call with my friend Simon in which we spoke about politics but also talked about our great holidays in America (adventures in Atlanta, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans were all touched on) and even made vague plans to hopefully visit again next year. A train journey from Chicago to San Francisco has been mooted and I would hope, should we make California, we'd be able to hook up with our friends Owen and Annasivia on our arrival. 

That's all dependent on Covid, Trump not starting a Civil War, and our own personal situations but it was good to be making plans again. I wish I'd been able to meet Simon for a few beers this afternoon and shoot the shit with him. He's such good company that time with him, as with many other friends, flies by and makes me feel so much better it almost counts as therapy. He can make me laugh so hard tears roll down my cheeks.

This weekend also marks the birthday of my friend Michelle's daughter Evie. Evie will be five on Monday and she, and her mum, are two more people who fill my life with joy. Last year I was up in Wales, in beautiful Llangollen, to celebrate Evie's 4th birthday with dinosaurs, bouncy castles, and a cake. When the candles were blown out and all the little kids sang happy birthday (penblwydd hapus) to Evie it was so touching I nearly cried.  

It's a disappointment I can't be up there for what will be some very different celebrations this year and it's a disappointment I can't meet up with Simon in The Southwark Tavern in Borough or The Crown and Cushion near Waterloo so that I can feel like I'm living rather than just existing. But, with news now of three potential Covid vaccines, I feel hopeful that in the spring we may be coming out of this dark period of history. 

At least regarding coronavirus. With the removal of Trump from high office I also have hope we will eventually rid our country of our own cruel, negligent, corrupt, uncaring, self-serving, and bullying government and that that too will make life feel worth living again but in the meantime let's not forget that Boris Johnson, his cabinet of cronies, and his extended chumocracy of friends with benefits have profited handsomely from our sacrifices, our sadness, and our misery this year. Normally when Boris Johnson fucks one of his mistresses he's long gone by the time she has to clean up the mess. Now he's fucked the entire country it doesn't matter if he stays to help clean it up or not. The mess, this time, is too big. The way people call him Boris suggests they think of him as a friend, it's a trick he's played on us all, but this particular friend, I'm afraid, has no benefit whatsoever.

*Thanks to the journalists Jonathan Freedland, David Conn, Marina Hyde, John Crace, David Pegg, Rob Evans (not that one), Juliette Garside, Martin Fletcher, and Felicity Lawrence for compiling and collating information on the chumocracy and other Tory misadventures which have been used in this piece.