Roland the Farter was the jester star of the court of Henry II, shattering the dignity of society once a year when, during the king’s raucous Christmas celebrations, he would deliver his explosive volleys on demand. The Farter would have served Boris Johnson’s swiftly decomposing Brexit government well, characterised as it is by a daily succession of stinking yet plosive announcements, designed only to distract from its rapid public unravelling. But instead of Roland the Farter, we have Nadine Dorries, whose unfiltered gob-flatus exposes deeper truths than the festive flatulence of the famous Roland could reveal.
Last Monday, Dorries opened the 70s lost-property drawstring PE kitbag of her mouth and let out a whole Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber West End musical’s worth of cats. Dorries is a Natural Fool that Shakespeare would have recognised, an accidental wisewoman free from the social restrictions of the ordinary citizen. In a Westminster world of lies, Dorries lets slip accidental truths even while all around her try to conceal them. In vino veritas.
First, in an ill-thought-out attack on Johnson’s belatedly conscience-stricken critic Jeremy Hunt, Dorries explained how, on Hunt’s watch, her party’s pandemic preparation was “wanting and inadequate” for six years. No one told her the Conservatives aren’t really supposed to admit this. Dorries’s wall-spaffed testimonial incriminates the Tories as a whole. It’s an own goal just asking for another of her compellingly incoherent testimonies at a future parliamentary select committee investigation, where she’ll end up insisting Bupa should be privatised.
Then, like a cruel parent revealing there’s no Santa to a crying child, Dorries explained: “The Conservative party donors have said they aren’t going to support the party if the prime minister is removed. I think a number of MPs in marginal seats need to hear that and need to understand what they are doing; £80m, those donors have donated to the Conservative party over recent times and it’s those donors that have helped us win the elections.”
Nyaaaagh! Dorries reconfirmed in one fell swoop the sham of our democracy, where hard cash buys influence. But she didn’t understand she is at least supposed to pretend, post-Paterson, that this isn’t the case and that everyone is acting on principle for some higher purpose. For Dorries, MPs are not servants of the people who elected them, but latex-clad lapdancers required to gyrate for money on the groins of the party donors who own their asses, while members of the public on 30p-a-day meal budgets press their faces up against the windows of Spearmint Rhino, salivating over the complimentary World Famous Wings.
But it’s always been obvious, I suppose. Johnson, for example, never misses an opportunity to disport himself internationally, swimsuit-issue style, on the yellow bonnet of one of Tory donor Lord Bamford’s JCB earthmovers. Bamford seems to see his £10m bankrolling of the Conservative party as an extension of his digger marketing costs. Having Johnson charitably obliged to splay himself on the dirt bucket of the nearest excavator once a month is cheaper than paying for an advertising campaign. Johnson is a Lamb’s Navy Rum calendar model from Bizarro World, the Caroline Munro of earth-moving equipment. The front of his metaphorical white leather swimsuit is tantalisingly always unzipped, suggesting his throbbing JCB could make the earth move for you too. Buy more diggers, peasants!
And if you’re the sort of person that always found your local Threshers a little too pretentious, then you’re probably already a customer of Tory donor Lord Choudrey’s Bestway’s Bargain Booze chain, the alcohol retail equivalent of a stainless steel pig’s trough filled with White Diamond. Keep the peasants drunk or they may realise what’s going on! It’s not clear how Choudrey benefits from bankrolling the Conservatives, but Bargain Booze’s cheap-and-cheerful image seems extremely on-brand for the party of Partygate, Wine-Time Friday and Dorries’s late-night lobby face. Johnson’s sniff-suffused victory speech after last week’s confidence vote suggests a Vicks Sinex bung can’t be too distant either. Suddenly, the fact that it is in reality Tory donors such as Choudrey and Bamford who set the national agenda seems all too obvious.
But by the middle of the week, Dorries’s indiscreet revelations were eclipsed. The party lurches in freefall from one unchecked announcement to another, bullet points designed to get Big Dog through the day. We were told once more we were the world’s fastest-growing economy, but on Wednesday the Financial Times revealed our long-term prognosis is the second-worst in the G20, with only Russia suffering more than us. The only thing worse for long-term economic growth than Brexit, it appears, is being sanctioned by the rest of the world for having started a war. Depending on which shell-shocked spokespatsy was doing the press round, taxes were either being raised or cut and the definition of what “building a hospital” actually meant was being recalibrated to retrofit the claim that 40 new hospitals were being built, when they weren’t, and never were. But how to keep this stuff out of the public eye?
Roland the Farter’s showstopping climax was an act entitled “Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum”, namely the simultaneous performance of a jump, a whistle and a fart. By accident or design, Dorries is that jump. She is that whistle. Dorries is that fart, parped out into any situation to cause indiscriminate dismay, in the hope that the ensuing stench will distract from the Brexit government’s ongoing wide-scale corruption. Johnson rewrites the rulebooks, as billions bleed into the companies of fast-tracked friends. But Johnson got all the big calls right, the big calls being the words “Buller! Buller! Buller!” shouted by an entitled youth in the debris of a trashed Oxford restaurant while £20 notes are burned in the faces of the homeless on the street outside.
