Originally Posted by
GranthamPie
Theresa May imagined that she would be wielding a hundred seat majority like the One Ring; instead she merely persists, a kind of electoral skidmark. Where is David Cameron now? Probably with chaps from his year at school on an Arms Industry jolly, betting on which blindfolded tramp can successfully cross the surface of a frozen lake. George Osborne is now being called a “centrist”. Screwing over the disabled and hungry is considered a moderate standpoint these days. Presumably enforced sterilisation and labour camps is about to be rebranded as “cautious”. When other countries don’t like a politician they put them in prison; the only time our politicians go to prison is to visit their favourite prostitute and warn him that he's dead if he doesn't keep his mouth shut.
May has surrounded herself with a cabinet whose physical forms seems to have been damaged in the journey from their own pitiless dimension. Where do you get an inner circle like that? Possibly a ‘Boys from Brazil’ style breeding program, which began in 1945 in Berlin when some Russian captain had the presence of mind to kick Hitler’s nuts out of the flames so he could use them to buy British citizenship. These people will all take to the stage at their conference in a couple of weeks, playing to an audience who look like they’ve wandered in to hide from the Ghostbusters, in a televised conference that is, ironically, only ever watched by people on benefits. Michael Gove will get to simper around conference as a minister, looking like he could be taken out with a handful of salt, the larval stage of something horrendous.
Boris Johnson has managed to give the impression that if the Brexit deal isn’t to his liking, he might resign on principle. Boris and principle are incongruous terms, and the whole thing feels a bit like someone telling you they think their Alsatian has a strong sense of religious duty. Ken Clarke suggested that in normal times Johnson would have been sacked. As it is we’re just going to have to settle for him being incinerated in a thermonuclear war along with the rest of us.
The Conservative party doesn’t really do principle, it’s more of a pitch by elite interests at what they think the public might buy. The thought must occur to them that even Boris is not cartoonish enough, that in these dumbed down times, where seeing tragedy on a west end stage probably means going to a Bee Gees musical, something even more basic might be required. Step forward Jacob Rees-Mogg, a composite figure drawn from the nightmares of 18th century millworkers. He looks like a Punch cartoon of the first giraffe in England, and maintains the general air of someone who has had a **** to the Book of Deuteronomy. It might be quite apposite for the present state of things to have Britain led by a man who looks like he’s slowly walking it to a graveyard.
Rees-Mogg is the MP for NE Somerset (he got in on a platform of “Ooooooh, inne tall!?”) and belongs to a group of people for whom the phrase “Is the Pope Catholic?” is genuinely a matter for debate. Hats off to him for trying to bring religion into Conservatism, a movement largely based on coveting. His comments about abortion were probably fairly uncontroversial in elite Tory circles; rape and incest are the reason their family lines have made it this far. I mean if you want to live your life by the bible it’s quite clear that God didn’t want his son aborted, but you should be torturing your children to death around age thirty three. Which is why I’m increasing my air travel and water wastage.
The Conservative Party represents the interests of Capital. In the Victorian period, Capital was a book by Karl Marx which explained that our way of life couldn’t continue. Today, Capital is a radio station where my daughter listens to Sean Paul songs interspersed with adverts for dog food, but in many ways the message remains the same. Tories are there to represent the interests of Capital to the electorate. The interests of Capital are completely at odds with those of the electorate, so conservatism is alive with internal contradictions. There's obviously a disconnect between avoiding inheritance tax and trashing the environment, for example. Equally, the Tories will have to combine pandering to anti-migrant hostility with the fact our economy’s ****ed without them. No doubt Theresa May will find an elegant compromise. Perhaps having migrant workers spend the nights bobbing in the shallows, so they can shuffle up our beaches each morning before changing into dry work clothes that they keep buried among the dunes.
The contradictions of our society are managed by having an elite class who have internalised them, often through attending public school and Oxbridge (Oxbridge is a compound term formed from the words obnoxious and privilege). What we often think of as the self belief instilled by an elite education is really a kind of class exceptionalism, a belief that privilege is earned through talent and hard work, against all of the available evidence. If you doubt this, simply ask even the most left-wing Oxbridge graduate what role they think their background played in their success. One of the problems with left-wing discourse in Britain is that it seeks to moralise to its opponents without ever considering what they really think. A corollary of having a Conservative Party dedicated to misrepresenting the world to its own electoral base is that they try not to be honest in public. So if you're trying to shame them about something like inequality, you should be aware that many of them think inequality is a good thing, that it provides strivers with both incentive and example. Moralising with such people is like giving your cancer a good telling off.
So why am I moralising about them here? Well, partly because it’s raining and I have nothing better to do, but also because I think it’s important to understand the people who, very soon now, will be all that remains of humanity. Survival bunkers will be strictly for our elites. Done out like the inside of the Titanic, these heavily guarded bases will be the centre of efforts to repopulate the planet. That’s why wealthy older men have always been involved in the Miss World Pageant -they’ve been sourcing Grade A egg stock. While we’re watching irradiated skin layers tumbleweed down the road like somersaulting ghosts, they’ll be inside a hollow mountain, banging away on a mattress the size of the flight deck of the Ark Royal. The likes of Sepp Blatter and Richard Branson, bodies like wineskins, being repeatedly straddled by lobotomised beauty queens. As we mere citizens turn our lidless eyes to a charred pamphlet on how to fashion fall-out proof door seals from wet newspaper, our Overlords will be having a genetic contribution the consistency of Dairylea milked from them with a double-handed action more commonly associated with wringing out a wet flannel; Murdoch’s wrinkled comeface like a balloon you’d find in a dead pensioner’s flat. Excuse my venom but I hate it when you’re expecting an invite to something and it just doesn’t turn up.
Frankie Boyle
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