Time has lost its meaning. No longer linear. The Newtonian laws of physics discarded. Rather, time now bends and twists, reaching back on itself. Forget the circular, we are now moving forwards into the past. The present becoming ever more fragmented into an 11-dimensional world. Each with its own reality and space-time continuum. Things are now out of date before they’ve even happened.
Not so long ago, a government published its legislation programme at the beginning of each parliament. MPs on all sides more or less knew where they stood. No more. Rishi Sunak has created a quantum government. One that’s racing ever faster to oblivion. It began with the first reset. A month or so after he took office. That reset crashed and burned. Of course it did. He’s hopeless. The politician who is rubbish at politics.
That reset was inevitably followed by a second reset. One in which Rishi was the change candidate for a government that had been in power for 13 years. Sometimes, he’s frighteningly stupid. The rest of the time he’s just frightening. His self-destruction almost unmatched among recent prime ministers. And that’s including Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
As each reset inevitably fails, so we have been presented with more and more. The arc of failure is ever faster. Reset piled upon reset. First once a month. Then once a fortnight. Once a week has come and gone. As has once a day. Now a reset policy is dead in the water before it’s even happened. Politics reduced to a barnyard performative farce.
And who better to front up the latest embarrassment than the home secretary, James Cleverly? Any prime minister’s useful idiot. Someone who would do or say anything in exchange for the trappings of power. Who doesn’t actually believe in anything. Beyond his own survival. Just give him a shiny toy for his office desk and he’s a happy boy.
So shortly after 4.30 on Monday afternoon, Jimmy Dimly swaggered into the Commons to give a statement on legal migration. To basically say that the prime minister’s immigration plan up till yesterday was no longer the current plan. Moreover, the former plan had never actually been anything to do with Sunak. It had belonged to a previous government that had nothing to do with the present one. Keeping up with Dimly’s stupidity is surprisingly hard work.
It was like this. Immigration was far too high. Jimmy D knew this because all the far right of the Tory party were complaining about it. Not that there are any sensible centrist Tories left. Being mad is now part of the brand. Anyway, back to immigration. He had no idea quite how it had got so high. It had sort of crept up while no one was looking. And as usual there would be hell to pay when he found out who was responsible.
Brexit. People had voted to take back control. To kick foreigners out of the country. And he, the Great Dimly, was all for being as unpleasant to immigrants as possible. It’s what people wanted. Sadly, he wasn’t quite bright enough to join the dots. To make the correlation between the UK leaving the EU and immigration going up. That Brexit had all been based on a lie. That without immigrants our economy would barely function. Would be in recession.
“So I am introducing my five-point plan,” Jimmy D continued. Like so much of what the home secretary says, this was untrue. It was actually the five-point plan that Suella Braverman and “Honest Bob” Jenrick had wanted to introduce, which Sunak had vetoed because it was insane. Honest Bob was on the government frontbench looking pleased with himself. His default setting. At the mention of the five-point plan, he ripped off his shirt and raced the length of the chamber. Yelling “get in” and “death to all foreigners”. So sweet.
Point one, said Dimly. Clear out the dependants of scumbag international students. Point two. Get rid of all foreign care and NHS workers. Fuck them! Point three. Get rid of all other foreign workers in shortage areas. Fruit and vegetable pickers. Go back to wherever you came from. There were no points four and five. They had just been there to sound comprehensive. As if this was thought through. Or maybe Jimmy D just couldn’t remember them. Maybe four and five were just to be more and more beastly to foreigners.
There we had it. Dimly sat down with a huge smirk. Revelling in his own smugness. His intellectual inferiority. Because what he had just done was effectively torch the economy. There would be no one left to fill the vacancies in the NHS and social care sector. Public services that were already on a knife-edge would now implode. Hospitality and agriculture would be dead.
But what the hell? Who cared about the economy so long as halfwits like Lee Anderson were happy. Far better to do that than actually to explain to people that there were serious consequences to delivering the half-arsed ideas they had promised. Crediting voters with intelligence was no way to go. Even better, it wasn’t even as if this lunacy would win them an election. What he was really doing was creating an impossible mess for Labour to inherit. Win, win!
By now, Jimmy D was on a roll. Completely deranged. Laughing and congratulating himself on his lobotomy. Labour didn’t have a plan, he observed. Before in the same sentence saying they did have a plan. Which he thought was the same as his. To make the country economically ungovernable. It’s a view, I suppose. Still, he waved his arms around a lot. So he got some exercise.
You’d have thought the Tories would have been out in force for this one. Turkeys voting for Christmas. But only a hardcore of about 30 had appeared for the statement. All but one – George Eustice, who got disapproving looks from his colleagues – had come to hail their Caesar. It was only right that the NHS and social care be dismantled. And they would all be delighted if their mums and dads were the first to die as a result. It would be an honour for them to die knowing that they had paid the ultimate sacrifice for an England for Little Englanders.
Dimly bathed in the glory. Next stop, Africa. To sign a treaty declaring that Rwanda would be really nice and wouldn’t shoot refugees as it had in the past. That should do it. What could possibly go wrong?
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A year in Westminster: John Crace and Marina Hyde live in London and online. On Monday 11 December 8pm-9.30pm GMT, join John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar for a livestream discussion on another year of anarchy in British politics. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
