A corrupt and narcissistic leader has backed himself into a corner after a dirty campaign, driven by propaganda and lies; he has trashed international treaties, justifying his actions through deliberate political and historical falsehoods, propagated for decades by pliant client media; and now he is looking for a way out of a seemingly doomed situation.
But that’s enough of Boris Johnson’s Brexit disaster! Putin’s war in Ukraine isn’t going well either!! I’m here all week!!! Try the fish!!!! Sorry, you can’t. We’ve run out. Try the Own Brand I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fish Fish Substitute, you lazy extravagant peasant. But you’ll have to wait until later, after chef has done a 4pm emergency run to the yellow-stickered discount aisle. You might have to just have Party Eggs™®. Get a job! Then get another job!! And don’t forget to tip your waitress!!! Oh, there isn’t one. They’ve all gone back to Europe. Sorry.
In my Buxton hotel dining room a confused young Englishman, new to the short-staffed set-up and unacquainted with the pretentious Euro-concept of lids, placed a fuzzy British Jaycloth™® over the budget breakfast buffet platter of fried eggs. Tiny blue-and-white microfibres burrowed into the yolks. Britain is those eggs. Brexit is that Jaycloth™®. I haven’t decided who the man putting the Jaycloth™® on the eggs is but when I do this bit will end up as a Swiftian slice of satire, rest assured. (Does it work if the man is Tim Wetherspoon? Arron Banks? Roger Daltrey perhaps? I will ask Ian Hislop, who is in charge of these things.) And since you ask, if anything the Jaycloth™® fibres made the eggs even more delicious, free from the food standards fascism of Brussels. Another Brexit bonus!
Why doesn’t the British press pursue the crimes of Johnson with the dedication with which it covers Wayne Rooney’s gradual metamorphosis into a cross between a Grange Hill geography teacher and a pastel drawing of my rotting face after drowning? Stories we never get to read, when Conservative corruption is cited under parliamentary privilege or in as yet unresolved investigations, are ignored here but highlighted in the foreign press, where we are now viewed as a failed fascist state where the trains still don’t run on time.
Feeling like the Sue Gray report of public transport, I sat stationary between Finsbury Park and Stevenage for 45 minutes on Tuesday despite people being deported, the curtailment of the right to protest, the crushing of critical broadcasters and the disappearance of liberal arts and humanities from the curriculum. What’s in it for me?
Here the media has focused instead on the fact that the carbon-based lifeform Keir Starmer sometimes needs to eat foods, which are then turned into energy by his body. The waste is then removed by a process called defecation, leaving a foul byproduct that Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail has vowed to go through with a fine-toothed comb, determined not to allow the Labour leader to get away with it.
In contrast, due to a hedgehog pate-overdose at Eton, Johnson can only turn food into energy if it’s in the form of surprise birthday cake, mini fridge wine, or £27,000 of Daylesford Organic luxury meals. These were sneaked in the back of No 10 by a courier, so somebody at least thought it looked bad whether it was legitimate or not, though the fact that the massive boxes were branded “Daylesford” and had photos of contented-looking cows on them rather gave them away.
Daylesford is owned by Lady Bamford, wife of JCB billionaire Lord Bamford, whose yellow diggers Johnson never misses an opportunity to prat about on photogenically, even visiting Bamford’s Gujarat factory during his busy India trip. If there was an Egg And Bacon Flan for Excavators scandal, it has been overlooked.
Why don’t the press explain the simple truth that Johnson’s insistence his oven-ready deal could serve both Brexit and the Good Friday agreement was either stupid or dishonest? Johnson threw people on both sides of the border under his bullshit-covered Brexit bus. And now he’s driving that bus back over them, and blaming the EU for the squelching, even as he throws the vehicle into reverse.
At PMQs, a jabbering Johnson began by reaching for the same empty flagons of rhetorical drywank that recently saw even his not especially ethical propaganda adviser Munira Mirza walk away in shame to do something less soul-destroying. Johnson’s opening move was to dampen Starmer’s first question by suggesting the Labour leader is unable to decide what a woman is. Again.
This crudely exploited culture war standby, which serves neither side in the debate, had previously been stood down. Johnson had switched from joking like a panel show twat about trans people at a Park Plaza hotel dinner on the 29 March, to praising Tory MP Jamie Wallis the next morning, after he came out as trans: “The Conservative party I lead will always give you, and everyone else, the love and support you need to be yourself.” Try telling that to Allegra Stratton.
Johnson’s platitudinous toss was another example of him having his cake and eating it. But there’s precious little cake in, for example, the “red-wall” seats, where millions of EU hardship fund monies remain unmatched by the Brexit government. Ironically, during lockdown, Boris Johnson did have a cake, and he also ate it, but then tried to say he didn’t have a cake after all, Jenkins, and anyway it was horrible. It’s a shame his Brexit promise, that we could have our Brexit cake and eat that too, turned out to be not even “half-baked”. Ba-da-boom! I’m here all week!! Try the gruel!!!
• Rescheduled national 2022 dates of Stewart’s 2020 tour, Snowflake Tornado, Edinburgh fringe shows and dates for the 2022/3 show, Basic Lee, are all on sale now
