A cat got hit in our road one night, expiring all too slowly, yowling in enormous pain. People stood on the pavement in their sitcom pyjamas, knowing the kindest thing to do would be to run into the traffic and whack it with a spade. In the end, as the north London wokerati procrastinated into their tofucinos, a punter cruising for the empowered sex workers that often line the lane, his eyes on the kerbside commodities and not the potholed road, squished it unknowingly before driving off to try his luck elsewhere. The dreadful wait was over. And likewise, it’s so tiring, just waiting for this awful government to die.
Won’t someone put the Conservatives out of their misery? We had my hamster mercifully put to sleep and buried in a sock, and its Rotastak ™ ® hamster housing system flogged through the classifieds, because it had something called “wet tail”. But the Conservative party has Alex Chalk, MP for Cheltenham, proliferative ileitis in human form, and I don’t see his house being put on Gumtree while he’s stuffed into a massive sock and tossed into a hole in his garden.
The rapidly decomposing Conservative administration is in a strange position. As long as Keir Starmer continues his strategy of not saying anything much about anything in particular, and isn’t outed as the true identity of the Zodiac killer or the man behind the Crazy Frog, it’s almost certain the Labour party will win the next election, even though Starmer’s actual positions on the burning ethical issues of the day increasingly resemble a series of incomprehensible smears on a toilet window. Keir Starmer is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but he isn’t accompanied by any sound and fury, just by some rustling and the smell of a Febreze car air freshener.
In turn, the Conservative party, wrecking as much of Britain as possible before its ousting, is now a furious mangy fox, somehow shut inside a vacant Dorset holiday let, ruining the sofa, the spare bedding and the dusty collection of DVDs of Richard Curtis movies and Ricky Gervais standup specials, before the nice lady from the agency arrives on Monday morning and sets it free, retching in horror at the stench and filth.
Keir Starmer is that nice lady from the agency. Lee Anderson is that stench. Robert Jenrick is that filth. Our international reputation is that sofa. Our asylum system is that spare bedding. Our energy policy is those Richard Curtis movies. And our waterways, clogged with human excrement and used wet wipes while everything in them chokes and dies, are those Ricky Gervais standup specials. Or something.
In the time until their electoral immolation, the Conservatives’ strategy seems to be to propose policies that are either unworkable at best, or at worst, illegal, to outrage liberals, cause conflict, and create an easily scapegoated class of lawyers and do-gooders, in the hope that the fractious environment this fosters might enable them, somehow, to cling to power. It can only be a matter of time before the Conservatives suggest public castration is a good idea, and that the severed genitalia of asylum seekers should be flung to swans, simply so that Lee Anderson could call anyone who objected a woke snowflake on GB News.
The Conservatives want us to try to do sardonic liberal funnies about the barges, about the crackdown on “crooked lawyers”, about the now near mythical chimera of the Rwanda policy, and about the idea Robert Jenrick appeared to come up with live on the Today programme on Wednesday morning, of “removing the asylum support” of those who declined to be entertained indefinitely on £9.50 a week on an overcrowded floating firetrap, and leaving them “to fend for themselves”. Abandoning people, undocumented, to a life of illegal work and criminal activity is one way of reducing the asylum backlog, I suppose. That and having asylum seekers’ genitals fed to swans. They want us to talk about these stupid, impossible things in order to draw fire. So let’s ignore their ideas.
And turn instead to their language. On Tuesday, Lee Anderson said asylum seekers that don’t like barges should “fuck off back to France”. Don’t get me wrong. I love swearing. Indeed, if you listen to Radio 4’s The Reunion on Sunday you will hear how I was jointly responsible, with the composer Richard Thomas, for the largest amount of swearing that has ever been done on television anywhere in the world ever in history, in the libretto of the woke musical Jerry Springer: The Opera. But there is a difference between swearing as entertainment and swearing as government policy.
Cheltenham’s Conservative MP, Alex Chalk, his tail wet with the juice of his own rotting intestines, quickly defended Anderson’s Fuck Off Back to France Initiative, calling the language “salty”, the fucking twat, and choosing to misunderstand the fact that asylum seekers can’t be deemed illegal migrants until they have been processed.
In reality of course, asylum seekers cannot fuck off back to France as Mr Anderson’s Fuck Off Back to France Initiative suggests because a) their status has not been processed and b) the mechanism allowing us to fuck unprocessed asylum seekers back off to other EU member states no longer applies because of fucking Brexit. The Fuck Off Back to France Initiative is another cynical example of a Conservative policy being announced before it has been properly fucking stress-tested, simply to create a fucking reaction.
And what does Lee Anderson care? He knows the party is on the way out. And what does it matter if his Fuck Off Back to France Initiative is unworkable in real terms? In a sense it has already worked. Anderson knows his future is not as a politician, but as a speaks-his-guts entertainment personality. He should fuck off back to GB News.
Basic Lee tour dates are here. A fun-size ™ ® version of the show is at the Stand’s New Town theatre, Edinburgh, 11-20 August
