A few minutes after the fat piglet proved to be a little less slippery than his supporters had expected, Operation Save the Big Dog launched, with loyal MPs putting their faces in front of any television camera that it was happening. The first was Nadhim Zahawi. “There was a vote,” he said. Nothing happens to him. “Fifty plus one is majority and Boris did it much better than that.” Ehh, let’s just say I’ve seen better. If anything, it means worse than Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, both of whom ended up as prime ministers.
The Secretary of Education continued. Struggling to explain the magnitude of the joy he would feel around the world over Boris Johnson’s miraculous triumph, Zahawi set out for Ukraine. Thousands of people who had taken refuge from Russian airstrikes on the Donbas would take to the streets to cheer on the convict. In addition, Volodymyr Zelenskiy would be offering prayers for Johnson’s temporary salvation. As if that were a sign, the Ukrainian president did tweet his pleasure. He takes Boris’ work as a therapist very seriously. There will be 80 guineas and two head tanks for this intervention.
James Cleverly also spoke, highlighting once again the fallibility of nominative determinism. It was a clear victory for the Condemned, he insisted. And there was no one else in the party who could have won even 60% of the vote. Because the rest of the cabinet, including him, was completely desperate and there was no one who could be trusted to get dressed in the morning. Nor is it that the convict could handle it, judging by the state he is in. Every day it looks more and more abandoned. And even if there was a cabinet minister capable of rivaling him, most of the back benches were just a bunch of congenital disloyal snakes. It was not the best announcement for the Tory party.
In any case, the backbenchers were even more upset. Peter Bone, who had conspired against Maybot and declared her missing after his vote of confidence, now openly said that Boris – a smaller majority and all – had proved to be a winner and should be left alone. It was not up to dissenting deputies to replace a prime minister except when it suited them. In its defense, its synapses are only connected at random intervals, so it may take a while to detect the contradiction.
Adam Holloway insisted it was all the BBC’s fault for showing images of the Hannibal Lecter-like convict. Anthony Hopkins could sue for that. Lecter looked much better than Johnson right now. The eyes are barely open, the legs are just memory memory, the skin is dry and pale, and the child’s haircut is falling apart.
You’d almost suspect Johnson had been in the cake after his own smelly TV clip. But the reality is that it’s not class A drugs that make Boris so hopelessly incoherent. He emphasizes this state through his natural sociopathic narcissism. It is now a rarity to complete a sentence. Exactly transcribe what he says and you have the babbling of a three-year-old.
At least Michael Fabricant will never die wondering why he has never been promoted to a serious job. Now, think only of some of the smart quarters (bow to Suella Braverman and Oliver Dowden) that have come to the cabinet and start to see how incredibly tenuous Micky Fab is. Something he seems determined to prove every day. His view was that he expected the convict to do even worse, so this was a massive result. Er. I’m not sure that was the right line.
Bob Seely was refreshingly frank and pragmatic. He didn’t care much for Boris. I never had it, I never would. But number 10 had made him a cash offer for his constituency on the Isle of Wight which he had not been able to turn down. So Johnson had voted. And he would continue to do so as long as the dosh kept coming. The relationship was totally transactional and Seely could not have been happier.
The idiot idiot’s place of pride in the Conservative Wankocracy was for Brendan Clarke-Smith. He argued that he was sick to death of the people who were arming his Covid tragedies to have a pop in Johnson. The pandemic was over and everyone should be silent about their losses: hadn’t Brexit been the goal of forging a new generation of British rigid upper lip? – and keep going. So your mother died? Great shit. Everyone has to grind for a while. So why not be happy for Boris instead of breaking the law?
Cabinet ministers such as Liz Truss, Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak were much more neutral in their support. If one of them had the imagination, ingenuity and talent, they would be looking to relieve the convict. But they are all desperate, so they did the bare minimum, hoping that someone else would be the first to nail Boris. No one did, so they were forced to sit like the tailors’ mannequins while Johnson made a television clip, as deaf as his call to Conservative MPs the day before, at the start of the cabinet meeting.
The day after Boris’s music died, he ended up with only four Conservative MPs bothering to attend a debate on public life standards. Obviously, the others must have felt that they had done enough. Labor’s Angela Rayner opened with a simple plea. Johnson had done his best to undermine the integrity of his office and should not be allowed to escape by diluting the ministerial code.
You might have thought it was a relatively uncontroversial proposal, but Michael Ellis called for a discrepancy. Then he always does. That’s the point of it. He is the body of the convict’s dogs to clean up his shit. Guardian of the king’s stools.
Ellis was suppurating and ahhhed, always so humble. It was not that Boris wanted to weaken the ministerial code. It was that he wanted to make her stronger by making her weaker. Schrödinger code. Someone as respectful as Johnson could not be expected to obey the law. There should be room for maneuver where Boris could do whatever he wanted and decide if he had broken the law. And that also applied to his peers. It’s a shame to have to fire someone you liked.
Just another moody day in Westminster.