Nine While Nine:Inside No.9 S1.

"Do you remember a time when angels? Do you remember a time when fear? In the days when I was stronger. In the days when you were here" - Nine While Nine, Sisters of Mercy

Between 2011 and 2014 I didn't, quite remarkably it seems to many, have a working television. So I missed the first ever episode of Reece Shearsmith's and Steve Pemberton's black comedy anthology Inside No. 9. Since then I've seen several, well a few, episodes but I've never really sat down and watched them all back to back. 

When series six aired earlier this year, and the five earlier series' all reappeared on the iPlayer, I decided it was time to finally do so - and time, too, to write about it. I knew I liked it (Shearsmith and Pemberton are always good and the few episodes I had seen had not disappointed me) so instead of just writing about how much I liked it or writing about what happened in each episode (they are all half-hour long standalone short stories, often featuring multiple guest stars along with Pemberton and/or Shearsmith) I thought I'd, instead, list, in reverse order, my favourite show from each series.

In a personal, even arbitrary, way. Starting with the worst one (which certainly doesn't mean it's bad) and going on to reveal my favourite. If anyone is left reading by then. If anyone ever started in fact. The only episode I can remember seeing from the first series is A Quiet Night In. I'd enjoyed it so the fact I rate it as the least impressive of the six probably says something about the overall quality of Inside No.9.

In an episode that features almost no dialogue whatsoever, Shearsmith and Pemberton play slightly clumsy burglars with a design on a fancy modernist house. Inside the house we meet Gerald (Denis Lawson) and Sabrina (Oona Chaplin) as well as their home help Kim (Joyce Veheary). Gerald and Sabrina are soon so engrossed in eating soup, watching Eastenders, listening to Rachmaninoff, and fighting over the TV remote that they don't even notice when the flailing thieves break in.

We see the pair of crooks hiding, trying (unsuccessfully) to text each other quietly, and comically failing to steal certain objects. They're almost like Laurel and Hardy  but when Paul (Kayvan Novak) knocks on the door hoping to sell his cleaning goods there's a twist (as there so often is in Inside No.9) and it's not the only one.

Badfinger's version of Without You plays out over the closing credits. Last Gasp throws its twist in early and acts, more than any of the other episodes in series one, more as a morality lesson than anything else. Or at least a play that asks us to question our own morality in a money and celebrity driven world.

Graham (Pembeton) and Jan (Sophie Thomson) live in a suburban cul-de-sac with their terminally ill daughter Tamsin - or Tam-Tam (Lucy Hutchinson). As a special birthday treat they've arranged to have bland, Michael Buble style, pop crooner Frankie J Parsons (David Bedella) round to meet her but when Frankie, who Jan seems much more a fan of than Tamsin, collapses and dies blowing up a balloon Graham soon realises he could make some money out of his misfortune.

The problem is so do Frankie's personal assistant Si (Adam Deacon) and Sally (a brilliantly icy Tamsin Greig) who is there as a representative of Wishmaker UK who have arranged the visit. I laughed when Jan mistakenly thought Billy Joel sang La Bamba but, other than that, Last Gasp was actually quite dry. Yet very watchable.

Sometimes Inside No.9 goes so dark that it can slightly overlook the comedy aspect but that's not the case with Sardines, the first ever episode of the show. For the first twenty or so minutes it's funny and then, towards the end, it takes a very dark turn which includes a brilliant and chilling twist.

Rebecca (Katherine Parkinson) and Jeremy (Ben Willibond) are hosting an awkward engagement party (some of the guests would clearly rather not be there) in their father Andrew's (Timothy West) large stately home. As kids, they'd always play the titular game of sardines there and, for old time's sake, they're doing it again. Soon the cupboard Rebecca is first to start hiding in is full to bursting.

She's joined by her uptight brother Carl (Pemberton) and his camp partner (Shearsmith may be in cupboard but he's certainly not in the closet), Jeremy's attractive ex rachel (Ophelia Lovibond), and office bore Ian (Tim Key) who gets to deliver an amusing, because it's so out of character, line when he tells Rebecca to "chill out, bitch". 

Also in the game, and thus the cupboard, are Jeremy and Ian's boss Mark (Julian Rhind-Tutt), his partner Elizabeth (Anna Chancellor), and an old school friend who goes by the name of Stinky John (Marc Wootton). Between Stuart's jokes about bumming and Carl failing to get wood, a terrible secret is gradually revealed that involves both cub scouts and carbolic soap.

The ending chilled me far more than the more traditional horror of the well acclaimed series finale The Harrowing. Something of a Hammer spoof, we're invited to a large, cold, dark gothic house made of stone. Its inhabitants are spooky Hector (Shearsmith) and Tabitha (Helen McCrory) as well as the bedridden, and severely disabled - he's said not to have a mouth which makes it hard to understand how he consumes the milk and rusks that constitute his diet, Andras (Sean Buckley), Hector's brother.

Because of Andras, or perhaps for other reasons, Hector and Tabitha never go out. Until the night the show takes place where an unnamed event is simply too important for them to miss. So Katy (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is employed as a carer and house sitter for the night. Katy invites her goth friend Shell (Poppy Rush) round and Shell, of course, loves the bleak gothic nature of the house.

Not least the stairlift, which she describes as being like "Chessington for old people" (though it reminded me of a scene in William Castle's terrifying 1961 film Homicidal, a Psycho rip-off but I didn't know that when I saw it as a kid). The house is full of grisly Hieronymus Bosch style paintings of hellish religious scenes, a bell rings ominously, there's salt around one of the beds, and the word 'mischief' is delivered in a very threatening way. It gets eerie but there's still time for a funny line when Shell mixes up Po (the Teletubby) with Poe (Edgar Allan).

The Harrowing is good but I had such high hopes for it couldn't ever live up to them. That's why I preferred The Understudy. The Understudy introduces us to frustrated actor Tony Warner (Pemberton). He's playing Macbeth at the Duke of Cambridge theatre but he's also doing voice overs for tampon adverts . He's jealous of his fellow actors and desperate to play Uncle Vanya at the Donmar.

His understudy Jim (Shearsmith) would be happy for Warner to move on too. He's keen on getting Warner's gig and his fiancee Laura (Lyndsey Marshall), the Lady Macbeth understudy, is even more ambitious than he is. It seems inevitable from the start that they will soon 'inhabit' their intended roles in very real ways.

Not least when Tony gets pissed, vomits on stage, and swears at Banquo. Set into 'acts' (introduced with roman numerals of course, who could be so pretentious?), there's a very weird joke about David Suchet shitting himself, a very rude one about fingering, and a brilliant cameo by Rosie Cavaliero as Tony's dresser Kirstie.

The twist, of course, is exquisite. The second best in the series. It's also, in my opinion, the second best episode. My favourite was the unpromisingly titled Tom & Gerri. Tom (Shearsmith) is a primary school teacher who lives with his girlfriend Gerri (Gemma Arterton plays an aspiring actor) and while carrying out some perfunctory and highly unprofessional marking becomes slightly obsessed with a tramp, or 'indigent', that he can see from his window.

Migg (Pemberton) soon enough appears at Tom's door to return Tom's lost wallet and Tom, retrospectively unwisely, invites him in for a drink. When Migg reveals he's met Tom's hero, Charles Bukowski, more whisky follows - and then even more. 

The drinking reaches levels Bukowski himself would be proud of. Soon enough Tom is missing work, has lost his phone, and has started to look like an Oliver Reed werewolf. Migg, too, is not who he seems to be. What does he want from Tom? A bed for the night? Company? Warmth? Or something more?

When Tom's friend from work Stevie (Conleth Hill) calls round, the extent of Tom's spiral becomes evident but what happens next is properly chilling and caught me totally off guard. I'm even chilled to the bone typing this, and thinking about it, now.

Tom & Gerri was Inside No.9 at its very best. It raised questions about homelessness, alcoholism, depression, and identity but at its heart it was simply a very spooky drama. I'm not sure if I laughed all that much throughout the whole series but I was gripped, eventually, by every episode and none more so than Tom & Gerri. I'll be starting series two soon.

Help! The Social Instinct or Why do Humans Co-operate?

I never realised just how much in common I have with a cleaner fish? It's not that I'm fish (though some may remark I drink like one) or even that I'm particularly clean (I'm not, I'm dirty - in both good and bad ways). It's more that sometimes I do things that could broadly be considered altruistic. I see the benefits of co-operation and believe people working together for a common purpose is better than the 'everyone for themself' theory of life.

It's why, politically speaking, I align much closer to socialism than to capitalism. But, like those cleaner fish, I like to be seen to be good almost as much as I like to be good. Like them too, I understand that if my actions are honourable it won't just be those at the end of them that will benefit. I will too, often in indirect ways. Also like the cleaner fish, sometimes I get a bit greedy, take a bit more than I should. Then I feel ashamed about it and end up getting punished for my actions.

Either by myself or by society in general. But, at my core, I am a social creature - and that's because I am a human being and human beings are social creatures. They co-operate and co-operation is the ultimate human superpower. It's how we've survived and it's how we've thrived. It's how we've come to take over the entire globe. For better and for worse.

I spent last night sat at home staring at a computer screen (much like most days and nights of my life these days) but instead of arguing with strangers on social media, I attended, via Zoom (it'd been a while, I nearly forgot how it works) the Humanists UK Voltaire Lecture 2021 with Professor Nichola Raihani. She's a a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London (UCL) and she's written a book, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World, which covers the research she's done on human co-operation and how, as well as if, that is reflected in the animal kingdom.

If the book is anywhere near as good as the talk (and I suspect it is even better) then it's definitely worth reading. Professor Raihani was an engaging speaker and, at times, a funny one. Her subject was interesting anyway but the amount of research she'd put in, from deserts to tropical islands to laboratories, meant that she was supremely qualified for the task in hand.

Raihani's first slide was an image of rush hour on the tube in London. Most of us will be familiar with that - or something similar. It's very busy. The tube train opens its doors at the station. Lots of people get off and lots of people get on. Most of the time, this passes off without incident. Now imagine if chimpanzees travelled to work and back on underground trains. 

The situation would play out very differently. It's likely many passengers would end up covered in bites, scratched, or with faeces smeared all over them. The Northern Line can be tough but, with chimps on board, it's quite easy to imagine a much less pleasant commute. A tube full of chimps would be a very dangerous place to be.

That's because our closest ancestor, the great apes - chimps, gorillas, orangutans, aren't big on the whole co-operation thing. Mostly because they have considerably smaller brains than us. Because the ape brain is small the diet required to feed it, primarily fruit and leaves, can usually be found near to home relatively easily. Our large human brains demand an energy rich diet and to get that mix of food, historically, we have had to work together with our fellow man to find it.

Be that hunting together, creating farms and allotments, or inventing grocery shops and supermarkets. Evolution demanded co-operation of us and we responded favourably. If we had not, we'd probably not be here. I'd not be here, you'd not be here, and even this blog wouldn't be here - which is a pity as I think we can all agree it is the pinnacle of all human achievement thus far.

That's a joke by the way (some people have trouble identifying them on the Internet). More seriously, and back on topic, what is co-operation? It's not the bland team building exercise our corporate owners force us to undergo (often involving doing lots of weird things with our hands - see below). It's acting in ways that benefit others.

Sounds pretty straightforward. But very few other animals do it. Some do though - and it's not necessarily the ones you might have imagined. Step forward meerkats, mole rats, pied babbler birds, white-fronted bee eaters, ants, and, yes, the cleaner fish.

One form of co-operation is teaching, helping a pupil to learn skills that will be useful to them later in life. It occurs, in some form, in every human society on Earth but is not unique to humans. Let's take our old friends, the chimps. While it's easy to find evidence of young chimps watching older ones perform tasks in order to learn there is no conclusive proof that the adult chimp is intentionally teaching.

Young chimps are so good at learning by observation there is simply no need for formal education. That's not the case with us humans and that's not the case with the meerkat. When they're not endlessly parroting their repetitive 'simples' catchphrase, meerkats love nothing more than chowing down on a tasty meal of scorpion. But catching scorpions is anything but 'simples'.

So adult meerkats teach their young how to safely handle them. To begin with the young meerkats are given dead scorpions to deal with. When they've mastered that they're upgraded to damaged scorpions (often ones who have had their sting removed) and when they've got the grip of that they're finally allowed to receive their prey live and intact.

I'm not sure if I totally buy the next point but it has been suggested by some that this is the reason that cats bring dead mice and birds into their owner's homes. Being cats, obviously they think we are their pets and not vice versa. So what they're, supposedly, doing is showing us how to kill mice and birds so that we don't starve.

How kind of Tibbles. The pied babbler uses Pavlovian conditioning in its life lessons. When food is delivered to the young it is announced with a call. Much like your mum shouting 'your dinner's ready' when you're a kid. When there is a perilous situation, the pied babbler will let out its 'dinner's ready' call to lure its chicks to safety. 

The little liars! The ultimate sacrifice is to give one's own life for the benefit of the group and, in Brazil, there is a certain type of ant (Forelius pusillus) that does this. Not because it's depressed. It seems unlikely ants experience depression. The Forelius pusillus ant nests underground but forages on the surface. After a day's foraging the ants all return to the nest but to evade predators some ants stay behind and conceal the entrance to the nest.

In doing this the ant ensures its own death as it is not possible for ants to survive overnight outside in the temperatures they have there. That's elevating taking one for the team to the next level. A collection of dead ants would be a seriously big clue as to the whereabouts of the nest so the heroic ants walk away from the nest and die elsewhere.

The Captain Oateses of the insect world. Some animals co-operate not just with their own family or even their own species but, like us humans, with complete strangers. The bluestreak cleaner wrasse, or cleaner fish, offers a cleaning service for other, often larger, fish on Pacific coral reefs.

Larger fish, like groupers, pull up at the cleaning station and the cleaner fish remove these 'client's' dead skin and any parasites on it - by eating it. Which gives them a meal. The problem is that the cleaner fish prefer the much tastier mucus and living tissue of the larger fish than they do the ectoparasites that live on the surface of thm.

Every now and then one of them can't resist a nibble at a client. Punishment can be swift but effective. The larger fish will chase the nibbler and for fear of being eaten themselves they learn their lesson. Sometimes even bystanders, other fish in the queue for a clean, intervene.

We had previously thought this kind of 'third party punishment' is unique to humans. Sometimes a male and female cleaner fish will work together at the cleaning station and it has been observed that should the female take a bite out of a client she will be instantly reprimanded by the male fish. Should a male fish have a little nibble, the female fish will let it pass.

Make of that what you will. In human society, punishment often results in retaliation rather than enforcing co-operation. For punishment to work in our society it must be seen to be legitimate and it must be paired with rehabilitation. Retribution on its own, an eye for an eye and all that, is ineffective in creating an ordered society.

A great example of a company who provide rehabilitation for ex-offenders is Timpson, the high street shoe repairer, dry cleaner, photo processor, and key cutter. 10% of their workforce are ex-offenders and job retention is very high. Training is given in all their services with the notable exception, amusingly and for obvious reasons, of key cutting!

Human co-operation, or what we might call altruism, is often done, at least partly, because of the reputational benefits it provides for the person performing the good deed. This lead Raihani down an interesting avenue of research. She started studying online fund raising pages, people running marathons for charity etc;, and looking at the psychology of donations.

If a man visited a donor's page and gave a larger sum than average, the men that followed him would often get into what we might call a 'generosity tournament' and try to donate even more. Women would be more inclined to simply match the previous amount. Interestingly should the person carrying out the charity activity be a woman, and even more so an attractive one, the male donations tended towards the larger side.

Men showing off to impress women is hardly anything new (and we took an interesting diversion into extreme religious shows of devotion, sticking spikes in your own skin etc; and found that even there it was men who performed the most unpleasant looking acts of self-harm, as if impressing God is even more important than impressing a woman) but it seems here there is an element, too, of simply showing off.

To other men as much as women. It has been noted that cleaner fish are much less likely to bite their clients if there is an audience watching in the form of a line of future customers. These are side effects, both advantageous and undesirable, of our capacity for co-operation but, elsewhere, there are genuine victims of the human instinct for co-operation.

The first example given was of Uber drivers arriving at an airport, collectively turning off the apps that announce their availability, and waiting for a price surge before turning them on again. Thus making more money for themselves, and even more for Uber, but raising the price for their customers.

If it's hard to feel sympathy for international jetsetters and Uber customers, there are cases that are far more deserving. Co-operation can lead to cronyism and nepotism (slides of Johnson and Trump needed no background explanation here) and sometimes, inside our own bodies, some of our cells decide to work together against the interest of others.

We call that cancer and that's the sort of co-operation that we could do without. But, on the whole, co-operation has been good for humans. Despite creating overpopulation, we saw only recently how well we all co-operated when, during the height of the still ongoing Covid pandemic, we really had to. Our next challenge will be to co-operate to solve, or mitigate against the worst of, the existential climate crisis.

So far we have failed. My personal take is that nations, especially nations led by some of the dreadful leaders we have now, don't co-operate as well as individuals. If you've ever found yourself wishing for a 'strong leader' you're probably guilty of electing these people. People who don't seek to solve our problems but merely look to exploit them for their own benefit.

I'm glad that Professor Nichola Raihani collaborated with Humanists UK, their Chief Executive Andrew Copson, and chair for the evening Professor Alice Roberts (current President of Humanists UK) to put together such a varied, fascinating, and fun talk. I didn't even get to write about menopause theories (of mammals it is only humans and some whales that switch off their ability to breed so long before they die) and I was never quite certain why so many pictures of Marge Simpson appeared on my screen.

Although I was pleased to hear the Animal Magic theme tune, Group Forty Orchestra's Las Vegas, accompany one video (even if it made me feel old, Animal Magic was last aired thirty-nine years ago and Johnny Morris died in the last millennium). Thanks to all involved in this evening and thanks to Adam for the heads up. A day after the death of Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk what could be more appropriate than attending a Voltaire Lecture? Other than, of course, co-operating with my fellow humans by sharing this account with them. If only cleaner fish could read. 

Fleapit revisited:Rose Plays Julie.

Who are we? Where do we come from? What makes us who we are? Are we even the person we think are? All of these questions are asked in Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy's emotional, disturbing (in places), and spellbinding new film Rose Plays Julie. 

The answers we get when we ask these questions are not always the ones we want. Even though they may be the ones we need. Rose (Ann Skelly) is a young veterinary student in Dublin whose adopted mother has died and has, somehow, discovered the identity of her biological mother and is determined, in a rather unorthodox fashion, to build a relationship with her.

She wants the warmth and love of her mother but, equally, she has a lot of questions she wants answering. Ellen (Orla Brady) is a successful actor (judging by the size of her house) who is separated from her husband and now lives with Rose's younger sister, Eva (Sadie Soderall). At first, she is reluctant to allow Rose into her orbit but, via some behaviour which in any other circumstances would be considered stalking, Rose gets to know her and she Rose.

Rose is less interested in the roles Ellen plays, costume dramas seem to be her speciality - at one point she mentions she's playing a "nun with psychic powers", and far more eager to learn who her father is and what the story is regarding her being put up for adoption. Not least because Ellen clearly did not do the same for Eva.

At first, Ellen is reticent to give Rose too much information regarding her father, fearful of dredging up memories long buried. But, soon, it is revealed that Rose's father is the successful and wealthy archaeologist Peter Doyle (Aidan Gillen). Rose employs the same methodology to enter Peter's life as she had done with Ellen but this time with an even more complex plan.

Rose, donning a wig and using her birth name Julie, offers her service on an archaeological dig that Peter is overseeing and soon a friendship blossoms between them with only Rose/Julie fully aware of the true nature of their relationship. Peter, meanwhile, appears trapped in an unhappy marriage with Teresa (Catherine Walker).

Rose Plays Julie touches on themes of identity, belonging, retribution, knowledge of oneself, and the acting out of multiple personas but it does so in an avant-garde, almost offhand, way that, at first, is difficult to get a grip on. When an event takes place, the camera turns away from the 'action' and instead captures the 'reaction', often in the steely, yet somewhat blank, eyes of Rose.

Her thousand yard stare and her often cold and mechanical way of communication suggests a person at some remove from their circumstances but it is to Skelly's, as well as the directorial team's, credit that we warm both to Rose as a person and to her 'mission'. One which mutates quite drastically as more information about her back story is revealed.

There are scenes of people crying alone in their cars and an inordinate amount of footage of the back of people's heads as they either walk away or we wait for them to turn around and face the consequences of their actions. Liminal spaces like car parks and hotel rooms feature heavily too in a film that never shies away from overt symbolism.

Scenes of dogs, cows, and horses being put down range from sad to squeamish but the veterinary euthanasia that Rose has to watch seems to in some way echo the situation she has found herself in (healthy animals are destroyed instantly and literally, healthy people are destroyed more slowly) and when Peter talks about his love of archaeology (his desire, he claims, is to uncover the past) you have a very real sense that his words will come back to haunt him.

It's hard to imagine a film like Rose Plays Julie being made, or at least reaching a wider audience, before the Me Too movement, and if these revenge and retribution dramas seem in danger of becoming a genre of their own then that is not indicative of a dearth of imagination amongst film makers but instead a clear signal that the problem is widespread, these stories have been ignored for too long, and that women won't stay quiet any longer.

In that respect alone, Rose Plays Julie is a worthwhile film but it's more than just mere polemic. It's an interesting, and unusual, story told in a captivating and offbeat fashion and, what's more - once you're invested in the characters, it packs a heavier emotional punch than you might initially expect. 

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.