Obscene, intolerable and wrong.. it has got to stop
There is a rumour doing the rounds that Boris Johnson will resign in the spring, once he’s “got Brexit done”.
Not because he’s burned out or over-stressed, to be clear. Carrie Symonds hasn’t grown tired of the wallpaper at No10, baby Wilfred isn’t yet demanding a trampoline in the rose garden.
No, “sources close to the PM” believe he’ll step down because he can’t possibly survive any longer on the measly prime minister’s salary of just £150,402.
It’s alleged that he’s privately complained it’s not enough to live on.
To be fair, since he gamely stepped up to steer the Good Ship Blighty, he has sacrificed a jolly nice £275,000 a year writing for the Telegraph.
He’s also had to forego the small fortune he made from speeches.
He could trouser £160,000 in a month from these bookings, more than his whole year salary now without the pesky trouble of trying to blunder through a pandemic and out of Europe.
It’s also just shy of the average price of a flat in Scotland. Quite a lot of pocket money to lose, eh?
Plus the man has an unspecified number of children to pay for and a former wife to placate. Cripes. At this rate, he may have to cut back on the Tignanello red (£180 a bottle).
So who is in the least surprised that this utterly tone-deaf, offensively privileged buffoon feels no obligation to feed poor children during the school holidays in England?
Who could seriously claim to be shocked that a man so immersed in wealth, so unfamiliar with the reality of the masses and so lacking in any form of humility would find it easy to shirk off the campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford – while at the same time praising the young man’s “terrific” efforts?
Of course, it reeks of hypocrisy and out-of-control arrogance. This is what we’ve come to expect from Johnson and chums. We’ve grown grow so used to being patronised and ddismissed.
But it is wrong – outrageously, obsceobscenely, intolerably wrong. And it must stop.
ThThe past week or so has surely bebeen the tipping point? Every sesensible person in the land shshould be furious. This bunch in ccharge really believe they can do oor say whatever they want. So the likes of Tory council lealeader Mike Bird, of Walsall in the West Midlands, are emboemboldened to issue flippant nonsenonsense: “Marks and Spencer are supposupposed to be the most expensive for food but you can buy three meals for £7 there.”
And Tory MP John Penrose can admit he voted against the free school meals plan because “chaotic parents” are to blame for sending children to school hungry. His wife, incidentally, is Conservative peer Dido Harding, head of the disastrous NHS Test and Trace scheme.
They like looking after their own, these Tories. It’s the ordinary and the struggling and the poverty-stricken they’re not keen on taking care of.
This has become a country where Home Secretary Priti Patel tweets her sadness over the drowning of a young family of migrants in the English Channel – including children aged nine, six and one – like she has no responsibility.
This despite spending her days
dreaming up ways to thwart such journeys (she’s considered a wave machine, along with a “floating wall”, if you don’t mind).
And despite being warned by a government report nine months ago that desperate refugees would take increasingly desperate measures as legal asylum-seeking routes had been deliberately closed off by…wait for it…the Government.
“A policy that focuses exclusively on closing borders will drive migrants to take more dangerous routes, and push them into the hands of criminal groups,” the report said.
The Iran-Nejad family, KurdishIranians, sold everything they had to pay smugglers £21,600 to transport them to Britain on a flimsy boat through driving winds and five-foot
waves. It is heart-breaking. Save The Children said: “The English Channel must not become a graveyard for children.”
What a terrible indictment that any government should need such a reminder. But that is where we have reached. Johnson and his gang of inadequates have brought us to this point.
Enough is enough. There has to be an end.
On Tuesday, the United States have their chance to free themselves from their very own Offender in Chief. Nerves are a-jangling. If Trump wins again, it means the famed “populist revolt” that brought him to power is not truly over, it hasn’t yet “had its day”.
And that would be unbearable because we have our own revolting populist choice to turf oout. The Th damage da of tthe last few years year will not bbe easily easil undone undo in the States, States or here, but b change has to sstart. It simply simpl must. must