On Wednesday, the former environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, on whose watch the deregulated post-Brexit waterways of Britain turned into rivers of human excrement, with only Feargal Sharkey to speak for them, tried to score a sarcastic point off Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary. Cooper “can’t even get the name of the country right, talking about the Kigali government”, Coffey told the house, a hot wombat wrapped in tea towels. “We’re talking about Rwanda, a respected country that has recently been president of the Commonwealth.” Kigali is the capital of Rwanda. The Tories have sent three home secretaries there. It wasn’t the burn Coffey thought it was.
A party of dreg folk is taking us into a war in the Red Sea, under the command of a defence secretary, Grant Shapps, who pretended to be lots of nonexistent people online to promote a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme and once declared a lower insurance on ride-on lawnmowers a Brexit benefit. Perhaps Shapps’s Corinne Stockheath persona is an expert on marine warfare as well as online marketing. The war may be right. It may be wrong. But allowing Shapps to pursue it is like giving a ride-on lawnmower to a monkey, a monkey with improbably named imaginary friends. But it isn’t just that this final crumbling crop of Conservatives are idiots. Many of them are also evil.
“The law is our servant, not our master.” Which comic-book sci-fi supervillain dictator said this? Was it Darth Vader in the lost Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)? Was it Thanos, Titan’s eternal deviant warlord from the Marvel universe, or Darkseid, his tyrannical DC comics counterpart? Or was it Thulsa Doom, the demonic wizard enemy of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Iain Sinclair’s Nietzschean 1982 fantasy Conan the Barbarian? No. It was the Tory human and MP for Newark, Robert Jenrick, only last week!
Jenrick has form in finding the law an inconvenience, after his unlawful approval of the Tory donor and former Asian Babes porn magnate Richard Desmond’s billion-pound Isle of Dogs development in east London was called out in 2020. Ironically, Desmond’s popular pornographic magazine Barely Legal was significantly more legal than the approval of his housing development. I don’t know about you, but while I am sexually aroused by both legal and barely legal development approvals, development approvals that are actually illegal disgust me.
Perhaps this incident, and Jenrick’s April 2023 conviction for driving at a sickening 28mph above the speed limit, threatening slow-moving elderly Tory voters and slugs, explains his hatred of law. But even the Tories’ beloved Margaret Thatcher believed “The first duty of government is to uphold the law… [and when it doesn’t] nothing is safe – not home, not liberty, not life itself.” A government that’s above the law invokes spectres of administrations Europe has been glad to see the back of, abetted by Rishi Sunak’s attempts to cosy up to Italy’s former teenage neo-fascist activist Giorgia Meloni, with whom he shares an interest in pointing at mobile phones while laughing.
As our government fondles fascist tropes, I realise why the 2022 Finnish action film Sisu struck such a chord with me when I watched it over Christmas. It’s late 1944 in the Lapland war. The Nazis have lost control of Finland and we follow a single retreating Waffen-SS platoon, its tank commander Bruno Helldorf aware it’s game over for the Third Reich if and when he gets back to Berlin. So, while laying waste to the land behind him to render it useless for anyone hoping to reclaim it, Helldorf resolves to make off with as many local resources as he can – principally Finnish gold and Finnish women – to feather his nest for the future when the campaign he is a part of inevitably collapses. Sound familiar?
Because the Tories, and I beg forgiveness of anyone personally offended by this comparison, resemble nothing so much as Sisu’s rapidly retreating tank unit, laying waste to the health service, to theatres and art galleries, to crumbling schools, to international agreements, to our global reputation, to media impartiality, to the judicial system, to the scientific community, to the hopes and dreams of a generation of would-be musicians, to beloved and trusted cultural institutions, and to all of our rivers and beaches and wildlife, while they make off with the money they looted from PPE contracts, or the funds they lobbied government to give to their friends, or the paid positions they secured in the House of Lords. If anything, the current iteration of Conservatives makes Sisu’s rapacious cartoon fascists look like they lack ambition. Women and gold? When deliberately bankrupted councils are sold off to big business interests and run as investment zones, it will be a never-ending payday for Tory cronies.
But the thieving resource pirates of Sisu have reckoned without one thing – the retaliation of a middle-aged goldminer, Aatami, and his dog, whom everyone has underestimated, and with whom I and all the other underestimated middle-aged Liam Neeson fans identify enormously. A stupid online image criticising Keir Starmer for doing his job as a lawyer and defending clients, as the law requires him to, which the dirty tricks Tories released on Wednesday, shows they will be fighting the next election without any moral scruples, with the cooperation of the Tory press and cowed media. Where is our Aatami?
Well, luckily, we have dozens of them – Sharkey, Peter Stefanovic, Marina Purkiss, Chris Packham and all the online truth-tellers who forensically unspin the spin, all coalescing around the ferocious Finnish goldminer’s dog that is Carol Vorderman. Circulate their insights and throw a spanner in that tank. And remember, Robert Jenrick is our servant, not our master.
Stewart Lee appears with Celya AB, Fern Brady, Rob Brydon, Rob Delaney, Kevin Eldon, Rosie Holt, Athena Kugblenu and Nish Kumar in Belter for the Shelter, in aid of Hackney Night Shelter, at the Hackney Empire, London, on 1 February
