Guest Post — Tony Jay, SCRATCHING AROUND… Part 2

More of the latest Letter from Brexitannia:

… So, last week, there were elections.

We don’t have Midterms over here, but what we do have are a series of staggered local elections for constituencies all over the country, and last week 200 local councils were up for the first time since 2018. Tory MPs have been muttering for months that they’d wait to see what happened in May before coming to any firm conclusions about Flobalob’s future accommodations, which is understandable when you remember that the average Tory MP is so spineless and venal they make Ted Cruz look like Steve Rodgers. As is typical of the breed, they’ve utilised every bullshit excuse imaginable to put off having to take a stand one way or another. “We have to wait for the results of the Sue Grey inquiry” they whined. “We have to wait for the results of the Police investigation” they moaned. “We have to wait for the results of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine” they didn’t actually say, but definitely implied. Behind the bullshit what they’ve really been saying is “We have to wait for the results of actual elections to see if he’s still box-office gold or a leaden drag on our chances of staying on the Westminster gravy-train” Corruption and dishonesty and treason are all just par for the course, but don’t you threaten my seat, you big bastard!

As the elections drew nearer the polls were so bad that the Tory Press was soon floating ‘exclusives’ claiming that the Party was worried about losing a whopping 800 seats, which was obviously a ridiculous number chosen because it gave plenty of scope to pivot to “It would have been worse without Boris!” headlines if losses, as expected, were under that. Wiser heads were talking about 200 to 300 losses being a bad night, with 400 losses being catastrophic for Flobalob’s chances of avoiding a vote of no confidence. One strong indication of what was expected to happen, and why, came from the constituency Tories who had to actually venture forth into the towns and cities of Lesser Brexitannia to campaign for votes. Their literature had no pictures of Flobalob, many of them didn’t even have the word ‘Conservative’ on them, and those that did often changed it to ‘Local Conservative’, which apart from the very apt League of Gentlemen connotations (“We didn’t burn him!”) sent a signal loud and clear across the land. Flobalob had become toxic on many doorsteps, and any losses would be blamed 100% on him.

They lost 485 seats. 63 of those in Scotland, 86 in Wales, which by my math means they lost 331 in England. That’s really, really bad.

They lost Westminster FFS. Westminster! Rendering Flobalob the first Prime Minister in history to live in a Labour run constituency. Scotland and Wales gave the Blue Rosettes as comprehensive a two-fingered salute as you could want to see. They did pick up a few new councillors in parts of London, some spots in the northwest and rural Scotland, but they were pitiful compared to the tsunami of Fuck Yous pouring in from everywhere else. The BBC’s outgoing Political Editor Laura ‘Luv U BoJo’ Kuenssberg was almost inconsolable and had to be dragged away from a digital map of constituencies lost and gained on the night because she kept on trying to ‘provide balance’ by colouring them in with a blue sharpie.

Despite the Tory implosion Nu New Labour didn’t really move the ball forward. Despite two years of relentless Establishment ball-licking and performative hostility to ‘The Left’ they finished the night with a net gain of only a handful of new councils and just over a hundred new councillors, taking some VERY Tory seats in London while losing some VERY Labour seats elsewhere. The immediate spin from Starmer’s handlers was that Labour had done so well in 2018 that there really wasn’t much room for improvement on this electoral battlefield, which must have come as a great surprise to the previous leadership who (like me) have quite vivid memories of the ‘moderate-centrists’ and their chums in the Media berating them endlessly for 2018’s ‘disastrous’ results. It’s also notable that the vast majority of the gains were made in Wales, where the Labour Party is distinct from the Westminster brand and considerably more Left-wing.

Backstabbing dishonesty and raging hypocrisy from the moderate-centrist moderates of the Labour Right? Well bless their hearts. I’m sure the FTF Guardian will get right on with correcting the record any day now. /s

The real success stories of the night came for the Lib-Dems, who picked up 224 seats in areas you’d expect the Tories to need in a General Election, and the Greens, who picked up 87 seats. Vast swathes of the South and Midlands weren’t voting this time, but my back of the envelope scribblings suggest that this bodes very badly for the Tories who could conceivably lose a major chunk of the not-actually-fascist part of their electoral coalition to the Lib-Dems (which is traditionally how the Conservatives lose landslide elections in Britain) while the Greens could gobble up a significant portion of the younger and more Left-wing electorate who cannot stomach Nu New Labour’s radical shift to the Right on cultural and economic issues.

But that’s a conversation for a different time, this is about how badly the Tories did and what came afterwards.

The immediate aftermath of this pleasing repudiation of the modern Tory Party was an entirely predictable counterattack by Flobalob’s loyalists and their allies in the Far-Right Press. You may have heard of ‘Beergate’? Probably not, as scandals go it’s pretty much 1/6th of a bottle of Bud Light diluted with water fresh from a virgin stream, but it’s all they had on offer so it’s what they went with.

Basically, in the run up to the Hartlepool By-Election last year Nu New Labour’s current leader, the animatronic seat-warmer and monotone scold Sir Keir ‘Don’t call me Sir’ Starmer and his crack team of political masterminds (sarcasm alert) were campaigning in the region and held an event at Durham Miner’s Hall, after which they hung around chatting about how they all hated those smelly trots in the Party membership, had a curry and a beer (because even badly coded androids need fuel for their conversion engines), carried on joshing about expelling the entire membership so they could be replaced with serious people who at least spoke the Queen’s English correctly, then went off to lose the By-Election very badly because they’re actually rubbish at their jobs. Now, their awfulness aside, nothing they did was in violation of Covid rules at the time, but this is Britain, and the day when the facts of the matter have any relation whatsoever to what newspapers choose to report about it has not yet come and maybe never will.

You see, a Durham student called Ivo Delingpole (that can’t be real, what’s his sister called? Miso? – Ed) who just so happens to be the son of Flobalob’s university compadre and fellow Telegraph and Spectator staffer turned Breitbart ranter James Delingpole, just so happened to be passing by the Miner’s Hall (which is set in its own wooded grounds) when he just so happened to see Sir Keir Starmer standing in a window with a beer in his hand and was so incensed by the sight that he videoed the incident on the phone he just so happened to own (actually, that’s the believable bit) and sent it to noted Covidiot gobshite and Bille Piper despoiler Laurence ‘shame of the family’ Fox, who tried to tout it around as ‘proof’ that Covid was a conspiracy by the Elite to implant microchips in strawberries and ruin our relations with Lilliput (or something like that, he’s a deluded knob).

No one with a platform larger than a Twitter circle-jerk was particularly interested in the footage for nine months, but then, lo and behold, Partygate erupted on the scene and Flobby’s allies in the Press started insisting that it proved Starmer’s Labour were hypocrites because THEY TOO had opposable thumbs and could hold beer bottles in their hands while in the presence of other human beings, which was exactly like and 100% analogous to Flobalob having up to 12 boozy parties at Downing St during the much stricter Lockdown period and then lying about it to Parliament. That didn’t get much traction. Durham Police (the same Police force that let Flobalob’s former political advisor Dominic ‘On my planet I’m quite a looker’ Cummings off when he shat all over Lockdown restrictions in 2020) announced that they’d looked into the circumstances surrounding the event and concluded no laws were broken, end of scandal.

Until, that is, Flobalob’s growing unpopularity cost the Tory Party hundreds of council seats and aroused deep, deep anger amongst the Party stalwarts who had paid the price for his utter distain for plebian constraints. Flobalob’s allies could see what was coming and they got their distraction in first, with the odious Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail leading the way by launching a solid week’s worth of ZOMG!!! hyperventilation across multiple pages of his fascist rag touting “Devastating New Evidence!!!” about “Starmer’s Party Scandal!!!” Some of the more servile Tory MPs got on board, demanding that Durham Police investigate anonymous revelations from an ‘inside source’ that they had lied about it being a work event and in fact staffers were “pissed and partying” into the early hours while Starmer himself stripped down to a pair of Che Guevara boxers and danced to the Internationale while doing lines of coke off the perky breasts of Labour’s Deputy Leader, working class Northern strumpet Angela Rayner (I made that last bit up).

Durham Police, as obedient as ever to the populist bellowing of Tory-adjacent nutters, announced that they were opening an investigation due to this “new evidence” the Daily Mail had invented revealed claimed to have. Suddenly we had ‘Beergate’ and even the normally very Starmer friendly FTF Guardian got in on the act, chin-stroking about how damaging this could be to him. Starmer had called for Flobalob to resign on the grounds that he was under investigation, hadn’t he? (No, he hadn’t, he’d called for him to resign for lying to Parliament about the parties the London Metropolitan Police were investigating) Didn’t that mean he had no choice but to resign now or be exposed as a hypocrite? We’re just asking questions, m’kay?

Now, personally, I can’t stand the spineless little shit and would happily see him booted from leadership for his atrocious pandering to the Right’s Culture war bollocks and cynical abandonment of every pledge he made to get elected leader, but I’m not going to pretend that ‘Beergate’ is anything more than a transparent attempt to Both Sides Flobalob’s Partygate mess and bury coverage of the Local Election results. OTOH, I’ve got zero sympathy for the incompetent morons who had NINE FUCKING MONTHS to get their story straight about what really went down in Durham but were still left blindsided and fumbling for a response when the Daily Mail, a propaganda rag so dedicated to savaging the opponents of the Far Right that it supported Adolf fucking Hitler, decided it was the only bullet they had in their arsenal and fired it off.

These are supposed to be professional political operators, the self-branded ‘adults in the room’ who were going to “restore efficiency and authority” to Labour’s leadership machine after spending the previous five years throwing one long spiteful tantrum against everyone who had conspired to steal their Party – their Party – away from them. Instead, they’ve been exposed as naïve fumblers high on their own supply who couldn’t organise a shit-throwing contest in a monkey enclosure. Time and again, they’ve failed to carry out the most basic groundwork expected of a political party and left their cardboard cut-out leader with egg on his face, losing votes, losing support and generally acting like they think it’s still 1995 and they can’t understand why everyone else isn’t rediscovering tie-dye and dancing to their Britpop remixes.

Starmer was painted into a proper corner over this because his team didn’t have the political instincts to take it seriously back in December, much preferring to spend all of their time waging factional war on the Left of the Party and commissioning endless focus groups of Tory voters to tell them how many flags they should shag to be considered ‘serious’. They gave contradictory accounts of what the Durham event was about and who (Deputy Leader Rayner, in this case) was actually there, giving the Tory Press all the ammunition they needed to spin a “If they lied about that, what else are they lying about?” narrative that Starmer and Co couldn’t easily push back on. Starmer was left with no choice but the announce that, if the Police found he’d broken the rules and issued him with one of the Fixed Penalty Notices Flobalob had already received, he’d resign as Party Leader, which meant that Rayner had no choice but to make the same promise.

This is doubly infuriating because, while she’s said some things that will come back to haunt her, Rayner comes across as very authentic, understands exactly how vile the Tories are and goes for the jugular every time she gets the chance, which is probably why the crew around Starmer (and those who see themselves as the inheritors of the post-Starmer purged and purified Nu New Labour Party like Wes ‘only anti-Semites to the left of me’ Streeting) hate her so much. Her temerity in having an elected role in the Party (so they can’t just have her demoted) while still being quite Left-wing on most issues drives them incandescent with rage, and they’ve tried and failed to hobble her on at least two occasions that I can think of. Unsuccessfully, of course, because as noted, while they might think that they’re the wired young superstars of cutting-edge neo-Blairite politicool, in reality they’re just an incestuous clique of sexless hairpullers whose only marketable skill is in being useful to pro-Tory journalists when they need an “even this moderate Labour source thinks taxing the rich more is a gateway drug towards Leninism” quote for an article in the Times. Rayner and her team have run rings around them, emerging from each power struggle with authority enhanced and a spring in her step.

Now the Tories, they can clearly see the threat a high-achieving mouthy northern success story could pose to their recent annexation of the so-called ‘Red Wall’ northern working class constituencies, and just as clearly they could see the factional advantage in making Starmer’s circle choose between defending or attacking a rival, which is probably why the week before the local elections was dominated by another Daily Mail horror show where they set their readership’s stubby little pant-phasers to cum with erotic fantasies of Rayner being a low-class slut who deliberately flashed her fanny at Johnson in Parliament because that was the only way her dull, Northern wits could conceive of combatting his honed Oxfordian rhetoric. It was so disgustingly misogynistic and crass [par for the course with the Daily Heil – Ed] that there was immediate blowback, with even Tory MPs coming forward to describe a pervasive culture of sexual grossness in Westminster, and the revelation that 56 MPs (Out of 650! Including three cabinet ministers!!) are currently being investigated after accusations of sexual misconduct.

Holy Self-Own, Batman! Are we sure these guys aren’t on our side?

Then it came out that one Tory MP (I am not making this up) had been looking at porn on his phone, in Parliament, while sitting next to female colleagues! Not once, but twice! Who was this pervy rotter, asked a red-faced nation? Tories filed on to the TV to agree that this was all terrible and there should be an investigation, but shouldn’t the dirty little harlots bear some of the responsibii… uh… what I mean to say is, yes, this is terrible, really awful, something must be done. The list of outraged Tories eager to give their opinion included Neil Parish, the MP for Tiverton down in deepest, rural Somerset, where men are lonely and sheep carry mace, who went on GB News and told its viewership of six Incels and twelve Nu New Labour staffers with notepads full of insights into their target demographic that whoever this odious creep was, he should be “dealt with and dealt with seriously.”

Can you guess where this is going?

Upon being exposed as the Pornowatcher General, Parish tried to claim that this was all a big old misunderstanding. He’d actually been using Google to research tractors [quiet at the back – Ed] specifically the Dominator series [I won’t warn you again – Ed when his search had stumbled upon a similarly named ‘Adult Entertainment Site’ completely by accident. Quite reasonable, yes? Could happen to anyone. I’m often browsing through sites dealing with “Deep Ploughing” or “Seed Scattering” and ending up blasted in the face by really risqué images of soiled farm equipment. It’s a hazard we’re all familiar with, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve typed in ‘BBC Light Entertainment’ and spilt my milkshake all over the dog’s back.

That said, Mr Parish, what about the second incident?

He’s resigned now. Hasn’t ruled out running for re-election, though. Because Tory.

All of this was in the News, vying for space with the ongoing tick-tock wait for more Police FPNs to stack up beneath the Downing St letterbox. Dirty, tawdry Tories, Labour on the offensive, ‘Woke’ issues getting airtime and the forces of organised misogyny getting a bloody nose, then the swinging left-hook of the local election results landing flush on Flobalob’s chin… all gone. Flushed down the memory hole for a week by ’Beergate’ and the ADD of our News Media. Granted, it’s done some collateral damage to Flobalob’s position in passing, with his allies belatedly begging the Daily Mail and other rags to stop hyping the story after Starmer and Rayner’s offer to resign if fined shone an eleventy-billion watt spotlight on Bully Bunter’s refusal to do the same, but still, that’s not a lot of silver in that lining.

So, where are we now?

Well, Flobalob and Co got their breather and repositioned their nonsense cannons for another deafening salvo of national distraction. While the useless tubster himself fled the country to go and pretend to be a wartime statesman in Finland and Sweden (wait until they learn that the UK doesn’t actually have much of an Army with which to support the… oh, they must have checked, they’ve just asked to join N.A.T.O.) he left his preening Foreign Secretary, the for some unknown reason always very pleased with herself Liz ‘Do I look Prime Ministerial in this hat?’ Truss and his gormless Deputy PM, the often fundamentally baffled Dominic ‘Pakled Smart!’ Raab to deal with the fallout from the Northern Ireland Assembly elections, which as usual consisted of smearing themselves with shit and dancing naked in front of the bonfire that Brextremists light whenever they need the distraction of a run of Europe-bashing headlines in the papers, but as ever, this posturing is incredibly dangerous and risks putting half a million living and breathing people back under the daily threat of sectarian violence and bombing.

Basically, Pro-Brexit parties came a flimsy second to the various anti-Brexit parties in Northern Ireland’s Assembly elections, which of course meant the dull, grey Christofascists of the Democratic Unionist Party drumming their feet and refusing to agree to any kind of power sharing at the Stormont Parliament until everybody agrees to pretend that the elections never happened and that their dull, grey God is the best God of all. In effect, what it meant was the DUP demanding the immediate trashing of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which, to cut a long story very short, is the part of the withdrawal deal Flobalob signed with the EU in 2020 that puts an imaginary customs border down the Irish Sea in order to avoid a real customs border going up on the Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland border, because that would violate the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles and brought peace to the Province.

Despite the fact that the NIP is the very thing Flobalob claimed was the diplomatic masterstroke which would allow him to ‘Get Brexit Done’ back in 2019, his Government has been whining about it ever since. That’s understandable, since applying it in any honest way means Northern Ireland enjoying all the prosperity of being in the EU’s single market and customs union, plus the security of remaining under EU regulations, while the rest of the UK sinks deeper into small country, no friends, no standards, no hope, malaise, and eventually that would lead to the rest of the UK seeing in bright colours and bold print how fucking stupid Brexit was in the first place, and probably a much greater chance of Northern Ireland wanting to go the whole hog and unite with the Republic, which would lead to all kinds of other problems that we don’t need to go into.

Anyway, what it boils down to is two years of Flobalob’s Government lying to the British people about the NIP, claiming that it was always supposed to be a temporary fix that would be renegotiated afterwards (it wasn’t, it’s a bloody treaty) constantly threatening to enact Article 16 (which lets either side unilaterally alter the terms of the NIP if it judges it to be causing damage to its economy) before inevitably backing down, pretending that all of the issues with trade are down to EU intransigence, endlessly putting off doing the actual work of building customs border posts on the mainland, so we’ve got an insane situation where UK goods entering the EU via Northern Ireland are subject to taxes and tariffs, but goods coming the other way out of the EU aren’t, so the only people losing out are UK producers.

Flobalob did infamously say “Fuck business”, which I guess means we’ve got proof he can tell the truth about some things.

With the DUP squealing and thrashing around like Judge Doom after a Dip enema, Flobalob’s mob are threatening the NIP again, claiming that they’re only concerned with ‘saving’ the Good Friday Agreement. Basically, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is all about ‘saving’ Russians from the horrors of Nazism. It’s all bollocks, purely designed to whip up anti-EU feeling and let Flobalob grandstand before the Autumn General Election he’s apparently been threatening to call, but that doesn’t mean it’s not doing real and lasting damage to Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world. We’ve even had junior officials given fake credentials and slipped across the Atlantic on a hush-hush mission to try and convince the US Government that everything is just fine and they’re just stringing the stupid Unionists along. Have a guess how you think that went.

It’s all just so exhausting. All of this nonsense is entirely due to Flobalob needing to pander to the Far-Right members of his Party so that they won’t send letters to the 1922 Committee calling for a new leadership vote. That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that. It’s the same reason we’re threatening to deport asylum seekers to processing centres in the famously Wakandalike stability of Rwanda, to sack tens of thousands of Civil Servants, to enact legislation that will ban protests and make it illegal for journalists to publish stories the Government doesn’t like.

The list goes on. This country is being systematically shredded of everything vaguely worthwhile just so a damaged man-child can avoid having to spend some time on the naughty step. Personally, I think that price is too high, but so far not enough Tory MPs agree with me.

By the time this is posted I’m sure a dozen other outrageous things* will have happened and left this looking woefully behind the times, because that’s how we roll these days. And you think you guys have problems. I’d kill for your problems. But killing is wrong, so I’ll just drink instead.

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• Michael Gove speaking in (very dry) tongues on the BBC, Lee Anderson MP’s 30p a day cookery advice for the poor, Rachel MacLean MP’s suggestion that poor people “just get better paid jobs and work more hours”. The crap never stops. It’s like Coldplay doing Church Music all the bloody time.