Kakistocracy XXII:Gas Panic!

Considering this government talks so much hot air you'd think one thing we'd not be in danger of running out of would be gas. Not least because Boris Johnson, writing for The Sun ahead of the EU referendum he so wilfully weaponised to instal himself in Number Ten, had claimed that once we'd left the EU "fuel bills will be cheaper for everyone".

As with almost all of Johnson's claims, that turned out to be a lie. Wholesale prices for gas have surged 250% since January, and 70% since last month alone, and energy bills are soaring. So who are the Tories offering to help out at the onset of this crisis? The home owner, perhaps someone in the red wall who may have voted Conservative for the first time ever in the last general election, or the huge gas supplier?

Do you really need to ask? Despite all the talk of 'levelling up' (a fundamentally meaningless slogan, like so many the Johnson incarnation of the Tory party are fond of - Get Brexit Done, Build Back Better, Let The Bodies Pile High), Kwasi Kwarteng, Johnson loyalist - as all in cabinet must be - and Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, has announced that he is happy to let small businesses fold and for gas bills to continue to rise so that the large gas providers don't have to take a hit.

The party of business, it seems, is not the party of small businesses. The party of levelling up, it also seems, has no interest in levelling up. Merely of talking about levelling up. How much of the current 'gas panic' is down to Brexit is a moot point (and one the BBC, who I normally defend, don't seem overly interested in discussing) but it's notable that though other European countries are affected, it seems the UK is the most directly, and most severely, affected.

Maybe afflicted would be a better word with this administration. While Michael Gove has been raving, in his suit, in an Aberdeen nightclub (after refusing to pay the £5 entrance fee because he was, at that point, the Duchy of Lancaster - Pass the Duchy indeed), the rest of the country has been tightening its belt. Not just because we all need to to pay our soon to be astronomical gas bills but because we're getting skinnier because so much food is disappearing from supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.

Last month, with some friends, I had a Sunday lunch in Kintbury in Berkshire. I had a pizza and that was fine, tasty even, but when the serving staff came to take our order they quickly ran through a list of foodstuffs that were not currently available. Quite often, in the past, that was just a case of saying the beef wellington is off or the goat's cheese roulade has run out but this time it felt like about half the menu wasn't available.

The shelves in my local shops in London are noticeably barer too. Okay, it's not like anyone I know has starved and it's not as if there's no food in the shops at all but considering the sunlit uplands we were promised it's not looking good. Project Fear is starting to look very much like Project Reality. Brexit was always going to be a shitshow but wise observers always suggested a slow puncture rather than a blow out.

Higher gas prices, small businesses folding, food shortages. None of this was written on the side of the bus and even what was, that promise of £350,000,000 per week to fund the NHS, turned out to be a lie. As if anyone expected otherwise. Despite Boris Johnson campaigning on the back of that multi-million pound promise and despite promising in the Tory manifesto for the 2019 election that National Insurance contributions would not be raised, what do you know? NI contributions ARE being raised so that they can fund the NHS!

The lies are so densely layered now it's hard to see where one ends and where the next one starts. When Theresa May met with the EU's chief negotiator Michael Barnier during her accursed (primarily by Boris Johnson) tenure as PM, his words to her were chillingly prophetic:- "we trust you, Theresa, but we are not sure how long you will be prime minister and we don't trust what we think is coming next".

He was right. It's best not to trust liars. They have a tendency to lie. Which is the most basic form of untrustworthy behaviour. Peter Lilley is not one to let it bother him. He's long been one of the most egregious, and nastiest, characters in Toryworld (my friend Rob cites Lilley's derogatory remarks about single mothers during the Major years as a reason for his lifelong interest in politics as well as one of many reasons he would never vote Tory) but, last week on Newsnight, he astonished me by sinking to yet another new low.

The now Baron Lilley, who studied with Michael Howard and Norman Lamont at Cambridge in a group that became known as the Cambridge Mafia (Leon Brittan and John Gummer were also members), suggested that it didn't matter that the British government were not honouring the promises they made in the Brexit agreement.

One they helped draft, signed off on, campaigned on, and won an eighty seat majority on the back on. Instead he suggested it was a bad deal much like the ones the Germans were offered during the Treaty of Versailles following the end of World War I. I don't know if you remember what happened in German political history in the decades following the end of World War I but a quick Google will show you that it's probably not the route to be following.

We won't be able to afford the gas bills, for a start! Perhaps Lilley's faux pas, which hardly anyone seemed to pick up on, is the reason so many senior Conservatives, and all the government, refuse to appear on Newsnight. They didn't bother at the height of the pandemic so why do so now? Fuck the national broadcaster and fuck the nation.

Before he was removed as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (and we'll come to that reshuffle soon enough), Robert Jenrick, as loyal a lickspittle as Johnson could wish for, was given a fortnight's notice by the BBC's flagship news show that they'd be devoting an entire programme to the ongoing housing crisis and they'd like him to come on the show to be asked questions about it.

Jenrick, who never had trouble finding time in his diary to sign off unlawful housing developments to the Tory donor and former pornographer (Asian Babes, Readers Wives, and Barely Legal were all his) Richard Desmond, refused. As did every other Conservative minister and every single Conservative backbencher. Almost as if somebody, somewhere, had instructed them to do so.

Whilst it's long been very clear that the current incarnation of the Tory party don't care if people's lives are ruined what is remarkable is that they barely bother to even hide the fact any more. An estimated one million people in the UK are affected by the housing crisis. They live in unsafe houses that are now worth nothing and they fear they could burn down, with them and their family in them, at any moment.

Not only do these million people live in permanent fear of both losing their lives, losing their home, and losing all their savings, they pay an exorbitant fee to do so. Instead of working together to try and solve this crisis, the government and the housing industry are continually passing the buck between each other. When you consider that £1 in every £5 that is donated to the Tory party comes from the housing development industry you'd think it would be in their mutual interest to do so.

Otherwise the only reason they'd be giving the Conservatives such vast sums of money is so that they can get permission to build unsafe homes and that surely can't be right? That'd be so dangerous and amoral you'd surely imagine no government could sink so low. But this is the Conservative party of Boris Johnson and there is, so far, no depths to which it will not sink.

Instead of policies that improve people's lives or solutions to the problems of Brexit, Covid, the climate crisis, and the housing crisis, we are offered a meaningless reshuffle, an endless culture war, and infantile bellicose posturing. Let's take the reshuffle first.

Nobody at all will miss the utterly useless Gavin Williamson (whose last big moment in the job was not being able to tell the difference between black football player Marcus Rashford and black rugby union player Maro Itoje - I'm guessing football and rugby union are both ball sports played on a field so that must be why Williamson got mixed up, can't think of anything else it could've been) and the general consensus is that Nadhim Zahawi is a hard worker who delivers results so that can only be an improvement.

Let's withhold judgement until he actually does something in the job. Elsewhere Dominic Raab was effectively demoted from the position of Foreign Secretary (presumably because of his disastrous handling of the situation in Afghanistan) and replaced by Liz Truss. A woman so stupid that she once claimed that drones were scared of dogs. We can look forward to more classic bantz from her now she's been moved into one of the Great Offices of State.

Another who's bound to be good value for money, entertainment wise only sadly, is new Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries. Dorries has eaten the anus of an ostrich live on television, and was paid handsomely to do so, and has also tweeted to say that there is a real danger that we are "dumbing down panto" in this country (who knew that was even possible?). She was also heavily implicated in the expenses scandal so she's not just an idiot, like Truss, but she's also a crook.

The problem with this reshuffle is that it is merely, to use a cliche, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The boat is still heading directly into the iceberg while we all argue about statues and pantomimes. Writing in The Guardian last week, Polly Toynbee summed it up best when she observed that "the most damaged of the prime minister’s dented shields of inadequates are out, to be replaced mainly with other willing obedients" before going on to note that "who sits in what chair round the cabinet table really doesn’t matter, when there is no ideological difference between them, no real left and right".

All that matters is their fealty to Johnson, to his lies, and to his culture wars - and in the case of poor Robert Jenrick even that wasn't enough. The main problem with this cabinet is not that it is staffed by inadequates but that it is managed by one huge inadequate. Until that changes the rotating cast of clowns, cronies, and crooks that serve him matters about as much as which jester or harlequin performed at which medieval court. 

Where Johnson leads, lying that the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has offered to 'mediate' the EU/UK Brexit based row over Northern Ireland, his willing little toadies follow and it's left to those who are no longer desperate to climb the greasy pole of career advancement to point out his folly. A few years ago, it would seem ludicrous to cite Theresa May as a voice of reason but, in Johnsonian times, she has emerged as one.

Up to a point. It was May who pointed out that the AUKUS deal that the US and the UK have agreed to sell Australia nuclear submarines (thus, meaning Australia now have to renege on a deal they had already agreed with France to buy submarines - but not nuclear ones) may provoke war with China if China should, as seems almost inevitable, invade Taiwan.

Johnson wouldn't rule out a future war with China which seems pretty crazy considering that, along with the US - our ally in this deal, we have just lost a twenty year war with Afghanistan - to devastating effect. A country whose military is far, far less developed than that of China.

It at least made a change for Johnson to be hinting at an actual war as opposed to a culture one. Recently, Tory donor John Booth has, disappointingly, been appointed chair of the National Gallery as Johnson and his cronies gradually move forward in their plan to turn the country's cultural institutions into their own political mouthpieces.

That's disappointing. I very much enjoy visiting the National Gallery and, from now on, I will continue to do so (while at the same time as keeping an eye on if, and how, Booth's appointment affects the place). While I like visiting the National Gallery, regular readers (like they exist) will know that I LOVE going out for walks but even the countryside even though it is certainly not free from Tories.

The countryside has always been political but I was disappointed to read, just this morning, that all public footpaths must register as such by 2026 otherwise lose their right to be so. While it seems inevitable that major paths (Offa's Dyke, The London LOOP, The Capital Ring, etc;) will not hesitate to register, smaller paths may be converted into private land (something the country is hardly short off) which will clamp down further on our hard earned right to roam the land we live and work on and the land on which we will, most of us, die.

The land does not belong to a small minority of us. It belongs to all of us - or at least it should do. Which brings me, neatly, to the part of the blog where, to prove I'm not 100% a complete grump, I tell you about the nice things I've done, the stuff that has made me happy, and it seems to make sense, bearing in mind the last paragraph, to start with those walks.

The start of our Thames Path odyssey has been put back owing to Shep's ankle injury but Adam, Pam, and myself made it down to Bognor Regis where we walked along the coast, through the fields, and along the Arun to Arundel (or at least Ford) and last weekend I met with Simon and his adorable dawg Dora for an impromptu but highly enjoyable stroll around Limpsfield Common near Oxted in Surrey.

I've been visiting cinemas (Censor at the Curzon Bloomsbury, Herself at the Peckhamplex, the latter visit costing me less than 30% of the price of the former) and I've been going to art exhibitions (Rodin at Tate Modern, Paula Rego at Tate Britain with Sanda - so coffee, cake, and chat too, Nero at the British Museum, and Ryoji Ikeda at 180 The Strand) and, best of all, I've been chatting to friends and (some) family (Michelle, Adam, Vicki, Mum, Dad, and nephew Alex).

More of my life is joyful than it is miserable but the bits that involve this government are never good and they never will be. It's time they were gone because, without them, life's a gas. Or at least stands a much better chance of being one.