More wheels fall off the Tory clown car
ARISTOTLE believed it took a human 40 days after birth to break into its first laugh.
But even a foetus within burping distance of a TV this week would have struggled to contain stomach ructions at the noises coming out of the Tory conference.
It felt like they’d taken a multi-billion pound bung from the EU to put on Expo 17, showcasing all that is lamentable about the current state of Britain, thus discouraging other countries from following our path.
Much has been made of Theresa May’s speech, which wasn’t so much a car crash as a high-speed collision between Eddie Stobart’s entire fleet of trucks and the annual output of Nissan’s Sunderland plant on an earthquake-hit Spaghetti Junction. But that was just the tip of an iceberg of faeces that surged from the Manchester sewers this week. I’ve become well used to the hilarious sights at these conferences: Young chinless wonders guffawing at their fat, pin-striped seniors who are calculating the chances of slipping them their hotel room key; fewer regional accents than you hear at a Swiss finishing school; halfempty audiences who look like they’re auditioning for The Only Way Is Dignitas; mad-eyed Planet Redwood xenophobes wishing every British citizen was as white as the Dover cliffs; City spivs with shiny heads and iron hand-shakes... all dreading having to leave their sanctuary to hear angry working-class locals call them a shower of Beaufort Hunts. But this conference was something else. Its only avowed aim seemed to be winning the youth vote back from Jeremy Corbyn, yet with policies that couldn’t have been less attractive to the young had Jacob ReesMogg vowed to train more nannies and raise chimney sweeps’ wages by a halfpenny. The entire week was a metaphor for the confused, comical, shabby, deluded, divided, backward-looking, and ideologically bankrupt state Britain now finds itself in. Due mostly to a party with an average membership age of 71 who wet themselves at the merest sight of Boris Johnson. And what a sight.
The last Bullingdon Boy standing is ready to claim his birthright, mowing through his Government’s flimsy Brexit policy like a randy aristocrat through a cellarful of scullery maids.
He’s issuing ultimatums through right-wing newspapers, insulting the wage-capped masses by saying he’s struggling to live on £140,000 a year and cracking jokes about dead bodies in Libya when he’s supposed to be Foreign Secretary.
His new slogan is “Let the lion roar” which really means “Let the liar roam”.
The PM believes she’s clever by not sacking him on the John Major logic that enemies are best kept inside the tent peeing out, rather than outside peeing in. But Johnson is so pathologically incontinent May is wading in a river of urine, right up to her chain necklace, minus a paddle or a boat.
No greater symbol of this paralysis could there have been than those letters falling off the slogan behind May as she spluttered through a speech that was meant to inspire her people to go forward sure of its destiny.
When all most of us could think, after coming out from behind the couch, was if footage of that speech had been offered to the BBC as a re-make of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em they would have turned it down on the grounds that Frank Spencer would never look so hapless.
It almost makes you pine for a safe pair of Tory hands like Ted Heath’s.
Or maybe not.
The entire week was a metaphor for bankrupt Britain