I've not written one of these Kakistocracy blogs for about two and a half months. I said I'd stop when Boris Fucking Johnson was finally deposed. Either stop or start a new series of blogs about the new Tory administration. Maybe call them Can't Truss It or something. Maybe give Liz Fucking Truss a few months just in case she turned out to be better than Johnson.
But it's not taken that long, has it? She's been in position for less than a month and the first couple of weeks of that basically involved nothing more than wearing black, looking sad, and curtsying to King Fucking Charles. Although she even managed to do that badly.
It didn't take long for us to realise that Truss is just as bad, possibly even worse, than Johnson. That shouldn't have come as a surprise. She served under Johnson. As did many in her cabinet. Therese Coffey, Ben Wallace, James Cleverly, Alok Sharma, and Alister Jack have all stayed in the cabinet and the likes of Kwasi Kwarteng, Brandon Lewis, and Jacob Rees-Mogg have all been promoted from cabinet meeting attendees to full cabinet members.
Despite their best efforts to make it look like there's a new regime, there isn't. It's the same old band playing the same old shit songs. Just with a different singer. Imagine Liz Truss trying to sing. She can barely fucking speak. Most of her sentences are so badly constructed that if you were to analyse them you'd think a four year old had come out with them.
She certainly can't listen. She's, at least, been open about the fact she is prepared to be unpopular. Which is just as well, really, because she certainly is. Since she's become PM, Labour have surged into a 33 point lead in the polls. If that was to be reflected in a General Election (as it should but probably won't be) that would mean there would be just three Tory MPs left. Truss and Chancellor Kwarteng would be not just out of cabinet but out of their jobs.
It would be no better than they deserve. Certainly there is already talk of letters going in to Graham Brady demanding her removal. Kamikwazi Kwarteng (I don't know who first coined this apt nickname for the arrogant Chancellor but I've seen both John Crace and Stewart Lee use it and I'm nicking it) has finally u-turned on his disastrous mini-budget (which he called a 'fiscal event' in the hope it would avoid serious scrutiny, a name that reminded me of Putin calling his war in Ukraine a 'special military operation') but not before he crashed the pound to an all time low, caused people's mortgage repayments to go through the roof (and people hoping to get mortgages to suddenly be refused them), caused chaos in his beloved markets and had to be semi-bailed out by the Bank of England.
It did, however, make for a nice little earner for Kwarteng's former boss - the hedge fund manager Crispin 'Odious' Odey. The plan to abolish the 45% higher rate of income tax in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland was a boon to the ultra rich, the 1%, and would leave the poorest even poorer. At a time of an unprecedented cost of living crisis.
At the Tory party conference in Birmingham, Kwarteng described all of this as a "little turbulence" which has not endeared him to most of the British public. The conference slogan this year is GETTING BRITAIN MOVING but, as the always excellent Marina Hyde has already pointed out, the only way Britain is moving is far away from the Tories. Hopefully towards Labour and other progressive parties. Hopefully not in to the arms of the far right who tend to exploit these situations.
Not that the Tories are not to the far right themselves. When Michael Gove and Nadine Dorries start to look, comparatively, like voices of reason you begin to see we are in seriously troubled times. It's likely Gove and Dorries just want to cause shit for Truss and Kwarteng, that's their style, in the hope of getting rid of them and replacing them with someone more to their liking. In the case of Dorries, I'd guess she wants Johnson back in and in the case of Gove it's hard to imagine him working for anyone but himself.
He is, after all, a Tory and Tories, as we know are always self-serving. The few that weren't, the misguided ones who genuinely thought Conservatism was the way forward - David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart, were all kicked out of the party by Johnson. Following the Johnsonian purges the Tory party is a hollowed out Brexit fan club and if blind faith to a disastrous idea is the entry level test you end up with a party consisting solely of dregs like Truss, Kwarteng, and Health Secretary Therese Coffey.
Yep, that's our current Health Secretary and while it may be cruel to laugh at a photo of her looking the worse for wear (everyone's allowed a drink and a smoke now and then) I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more from her before this shitshow is over - and it won't be good. We may even look back to the halcyon days of Matt Hancock.
For now though, Truss and Kwarteng are using up all the bandwith we have for contempt - and rightly so. They've behaved despicably, dishonestly, and cruelly. They're not fit for their jobs and they were not elected by the general public to do those jobs. It seems almost impossible to seriously imagine Truss calling a General Election now when she and her awful party are so likely to be obliterated. So we have another year and a half, maybe longer, of this agony to survive.
The damage they will do to the country in that time will be enormous. They should never ever be forgiven. I used to end these blogs with a few words about what I'd been doing, who I'd seen and chatted to, in an attempt to inject them with at least a tiny bit of positivity. Now we've moved on from the supposedly jovial, but deadly approach of Johnson to the deadly, joyless, approach of Truss I'm no longer going to do that. Instead I end with one simple message. Remove these bastards from power as soon as possible. Save the country they profess to love but so clearly hate.
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