Snakes, stupidity and sycophants: the horror of the Johnson cabinet
Another day, another horror. The new cabinet has met for the first time. Oh, and Boris Johnson has made his Commons debut as prime minister. Horrors plural, then. We’re living in a Hammer film, my friends, but one looped over and over, where the protagonist enunciates only using vowel sounds and stuttering, and the plot is him wreaking revenge on a nation because he once lost a game of fives and has never gotten over it.
Here is all the action from the day. I am so, so sorry.
I swear to God this looks like the most awful dinner party of all time. This looks like a dinner party one would be personally offended to be invited to. The Guido Fawkes Twitter account described it as a “fantasy cabinet”, which pretty much tells you everything.
I’m not saying this is a good practice – because it isn’t – but you know how schools scheme to get all their lowest achieving students kicked out so that their table position isn’t affected? This would be the lot that you’d round up and drive off the premises without even opening the gates. This is a cabinet thicker than the bubbling tar on today’s roasting roads. This is a cabinet thiccer than Nicki Minaj.
I hope Sajid Javid AKA Spock wearing
a swimming cap is proud of himself. I hope the working-class, state-school boy is proud that he’s now chancellor of an administration pledging to make things easier for the wealthiest and most comfortable in society. I hope he thinks about his choices in life. I hope he’s thinking about them right now.
Sajid Javid thinking about his life choices right now.
Michael Gove here, who judging by the redness of his face is either defecting to Labour or has been sitting in the garden in the searing heat. Be your sunburnt best. Cute though, that he and James Cleverly are holding hands, if only so that their affair can be uncovered and Sarah Vine can write her “most personal and explosive column yet”, which she writes literally every single week.
I can just imagine lots of heartrending pieces about her teen son, but not about the time the couple left him in a hotel room, a bit like when David Cameron left his daughter in a pub. That’s the thing about Tories: their kids are like their morals, in that they’re disposable.
Anyway, I’m not saying the past three years haven’t been bad for all of us, but specifically bad for me, who had the indignity of being nominated for a prestigious Press Award, losing, and watching Vine win in a different category. It felt a bit like being punched in the face by excruciating prose.
What this is is when you bump into a colleague that you hate leaving the office at the same time, and have to exchange a polite hello. You’re both going the same way, but under no circumstances can you bear to spend another second in their company. So you are Amber Rudd, and you lie to Jacob ReesMogg that you forgot something and will have to pop back to your desk.
A vision of a future that could have been, had Johnson not avoided criminal prosecution over his £350m Vote Leave bus. I would recommend this clip of Ian Hislop on Have I Got News for You, talking about that particular case: “At the moment we’re just at the preliminary stage about whether when he was a public official he was telling lies and therefore abusing his office. It’s very similar to putting the Pope on trial and saying are you a Catholic? I would like him to have a fair trial, with a desirable result with him being imprisoned forever.” But now he lives in No 10. Truly; this country.
This is actually a really nice photo of Nicki Morgan, isn’t it? It looks like the picture from a Chelsea flower show brochure. Or the promotional material showing off the communal gardens of a new development of flats. And by “communal” I mean only for the private owners and not the affordable tenancy holders, who are allowed to play with nearby drainpipes and I guess maybe the odd bollard. But really they should stay indoors, curtains closed.
Here we have something with a garbage raison d’être and a street sweeping cart, in a joke that was far too easy to make.
Andrea Leadsom here, auditioning for a role in a female remake of Ocean’s Eleven, seemingly unaware that it was already made last year, and Cate Blanchett played a blinder. She looks great though. For a mother.
This is how Priti Patel should always be photographed, to portray the fact that she is Voldemort in a boxy jacket. A Priti name with an ugly ideology. A woman whose hobbies and interests on her Tinder profile are listed as: building Lego models of immigration dentention centres; cosy nights in chatting about reinstating the death penalty; and working holidays to Israel. As home secretary, Patel will be attending Cobra meetings, which is appropriate, cos she’s a snake.
Dominic Raab here, looking as he will always look, which is a man cast as the latest Bond villain, before having to drop out because of his gross in-real-life behaviour. So here he is, having made the switch to horror. The endless, endless horror.