Britain’s broke, but ‘them’s the breaks’
Ros Wynne-Jones standing up for you and your family
IN millions of households up and down the country tonight, there are people worrying about how to afford their next food shop. In millions of others, the red bills in brown envelopes are stacking up.
Millions are still mourning the 180,000 who died from Covid in the UK. Millions are walking past the shuttered-up shops of Britain’s high streets. Millions are worrying about the empty fuel gauge in the car and wondering how to get to work.
More are worrying about how long they will have to wait for the operation they desperately need, or the social care they can’t arrange for their loved one, or the flammable cladding on the side of their home.
But, to coin a phrase, “them’s the breaks”.
Boris Johnson’s premiership blew up yesterday in the bonfire of his vanity and lies, leaving government paralysed at a time of grave economic and other emergencies.
And that was the phrase he had to offer. Not sorry. Not thank you for the honour. Just “them’s the breaks”.
During his pathetic final days clinging to power, Britain’s tinpot Trump has done untold damage to our country.
His last Butch Cassidy stand, “You’ll have to dip your hands in blood to get rid of me!” may have barely lasted the time it took to say “Four Seasons Total Landscaping”. Yet still he clings on like an ingested tapeworm. As his onetime Svengali Dominic Cummings tweeted: “If MPs leave him in situ there’ll be CARNAGE.”
Parliamentary committees have been cancelled. There is barely a Secretary of State in position who has previously been in the job, and junior ministers have been brought in from the furthest reaches of the Tory talent pool, like seatfillers on an ITV awards show.
In other news, the Prime Minister has revealed he’s a threat to national security by finally admitting he met former Russian KGB officer Alexander Lebedev without his minders while in government. And this is only one of the industrial-scale scandals in which he is mired.
For now, we are left with a sitting duck Prime Minister, a man whom his own party holds in contempt, and from whom all power has ebbed away. A man incapable of dealing with the deep crises enveloping the country. People across Britain face all kinds of serious and worrying problems. One in 30 people are once again infected with Covid. The number of customers with persistent debt problems at one major bank has risen by a third.
The school summer holidays are rapidly approaching with no plan to feed children whose families simply cannot cope with rising food and fuel prices. War in Europe is escalating, and a trade crisis is threatening Northern Ireland.
Yet as Angela Rayner told the House of Commons yesterday: “We don’t have a functioning government.” So dire was this crisis that at certain times of the day yesterday, she said, “only two ministers” had been left able to “approve secret service use of sensitive powers”.
With no one at the helm, the prospect of a solution to the rail dispute looks alarmingly distant. Tens of thousands of people’s holiday flights have been cancelled amid chaotic scenes and staff shortages at airports.
These problems are being felt all over the country, from the leafiest suburb to the tallest tower block. But they are being felt acutely in the so-called “Red Wall”. This was the constituency that via Brexit gave Boris Johnson his mandate. He was the Heineken Tory leader, the unpalatable brew that could refresh the parts other Conservative leaders could not reach.
Yet Johnson badly misjudged an electorate he knew little about in his privilege. If he thought they wouldn’t care about his lockdown partying, and the sordid, abusive goings-on inside the elite Carlton Club he was quite wrong.
Increasingly, his Red Wall MPs understood their constituents were disgusted by the suitcases of shame wheeling in and out of Downing Street at the height of Partygate. Parties that went on while they said goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime, and HRH The Queen, a paragon of British virtue, mourned painfully alone.
Johnson thought these people shared his morals, the affairs, the scattered children, the refusal to say sorry, and the joy of skiving off at Peppa Pig World.
But he was so wrong. The same people that wanted Jeremy Corbyn to “put a bloody tie on” wanted Boris scrubbed off its spotless front step.
The moment Stoke North MP and junior minister Jonathan Gullis, hater of the “woke, wet and wobbly” and Ashfield’s Lee Anderson MP resigned, the writing was on the Red Wall.
Leaving Boris Johnson to deliver a final lie.
“I want you to know,” he said at the Downing Street lectern, “that from now on until the new Prime Minister is in place, your interests will be served, and the Government and the country will be carried on.”
The country will be “carried on”. But not by Johnson or his cronies.
It will be carried by the people who have learned how to carry it under the weight of 12 years of austerity, and nearly three of Covid.
The foodbank volunteers, the good neighbours, the nurses and the teachers, the delivery drivers and the care workers now face an even tougher challenge of holding Britain together through a time of unforgivable political hiatus.
But, hey, as the Prime Minister said self-pityingly in his not-quiteresignation speech – them’s the breaks.
‘‘ Number of customers in persistent debt at one bank has risen by a third