Guest Post — Tony Jay: Met Abets Mr No Regrets But As Grey Rejects Then Place Your Bets…

… On If The Party Ejects And Then Resets Before Britain Elects.  Part III (and last, for the moment) of this Letter from Brexitannia installment:

It was always, absolutely, definitely going to happen. The very nature of the beasts involved made it an exercise in Pavlovian inevitability, but by the citrus-flavoured kisses of the Man from Delmonte, literally the only way they could have been more blatant about it is if they’d tattooed “Laws R 4 Loozerz” on their shaven taints and performed this dance of the seven bullshits via the medium of naked synchronised swimming.

I speak, of course, of the decision made by the London Metropolitan Police Force, popularly known as The Met, the Order of Paramilitary Freemasons, Those Wacky Whitewashers, or just The Filth, to shit with great force and infinite contempt upon the very concept of blind justice by concluding Operation Hillman – their half-arsed ‘investigation’ into multiple incidents of alcohol fuelled rule-breaking at Number 10 Downing Street during the 2020 Lockdowns – with a final blast of Fixed Penalty Notices addressed to various low-level civil servants and nameless petty officials while somehow sparing any further embarrassment to that globulous splat of lardy vileness whose house it (currently) is, namely our esteemed (Sub)Prime Minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Now, you may ask, how is it even possible that 126 FPNs could be issued to people identified by The Met as being present at one or more of the 12 illegal gatherings they claimed to be investigating, but Flobalob, who was at 6 of them, only got a single FTN, and that for the “ambushed by a cake” surprise birthday party organised by his tardily legitimised [Spermbaker Apparent]… err, Wife Mark#3?

That’s a very good question, and so’s this one.

How could The Met justify fining, say, a junior assistant to the Prime Minister’s Permanent Private Secretary for being at the same illegal gathering as the Prime Minister without also fining the Prime Minister? How does that work, exactly? If the gathering is illegal, attendance is illegal. If all are equal before the eyes of the Law, how can some attendees be given fines while others (the hosts, in fact) escape unscathed?

Basically, because it’s The Met, baby. Protecting those with Establishment cred is what they do. Effectively it’s all they do. There’s nothing else. If you’re not wired into the In-Crowd by birth, wealth or patronage then The Met couldn’t give a single solitary fuckadoodle about you. In fact, if you’re not in the In-Crowd, then as far as they’re concerned, you’re nothing more than a potentially illegal trespasser within their metropolitan demesne who deserves, nay, demands, to feel the full majesty of the Law Unbound manifest around your head, neck and exposed kidneys in the form of an enthusiastically wielded truncheon, and that’s if they don’t just shoot you dead for being flagrantly brown. They’re not so much corrupt as they are misnamed. It’s not a Police Force per se, it’s a publicly funded private security militia with occupation duties over a city of 9 million sullen natives and a duty to serve and protect only the ‘right’ kind of people.

Because of that, it’s not like any of this is in the least bit surprising. Indeed, Flobalob knew and boasted back in April that he would only be investigated for 2 out of the 6 illegal gatherings he was known to have attended and had been assured he would only get one FPN. It was in the papers and everything.

So, who told him that, then?

(Activate Hong Kong Phooey voiceover mode) Could it have been mild-mannered Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Professionalism [Is that a joke? Nope, not a joke – Ed] at The Met, Bas Javid, brother of Johnson’s Randian Health Secretary Sajid ‘On Sontar, hedge funds you’ Javid, who possibly let the information slip during a quiet little sibling meet-up at a prohibitively expensive London eatery? No! Of course not! How dare you even hint that such a storied and respected officer at such a prestigious organisation could have violated his sacred duty in such a puerile way. Don’t you know that D.A.C. Javid recused himself from any role in Operation Hillman? How could he possibly have known what the other senior officers he worked and socialised with every single day were planning to do (or not do) with the damning evidence implicating his brother’s loathsome boss in shit tons of lawbreaking? /s

Anyway, it doesn’t matter who it was (that’s for the inevitable long-running Judicial Inquest into systematic corruption at The Met to uncover sometime around 2040) as long as we know it actually happened. Someone with a direct line to the most senior echelons of The Met tipped Flobalob off two whole months ago that the fix was in and provided all of the necessary detail to put his mind at ease. Given that this is The Met we’re talking about it’s still resolutely unsurprising. Amateurish cover-ups that leave their institutional reputation in tatters are pretty much their USP. You’d think that an organisation with so many Square & Compass enthusiasts in its upper ranks would be better at drafting effective plans, but I suppose this is what comes of confusing the theoretical Masonry of the ambitious social climber with the practical Masonry of someone who can build things that don’t immediately fall over.

What *does* matter is what came afterwards. There was the usual half a day of breathless Breaking News coverage and heavy rotation of the idea that, somehow, the ‘greased piglet’ had managed to get away with it once again (“How does he do it?” – chortle), but that’s to be expected from a fully compromised News Media that operates within a concentrated solution that is one part nudge-nudge careerist savviness to three parts uncut Conservative propaganda. When you edit every news report with wholly undue deference to an exhaustive laundry list of institutions, individuals and narratives that simply cannot, under any circumstances, have their integrity questioned, the story more or less writes itself, BUT (and it’s a Kardashian sized one) what happens when the story involves two or more entities on that long, long list coming into conflict with each other? It’s one thing to pick a side when it’s a matter of, say, the entire financial, journalistic and political Establishment against a bunch of dirty trots who need to be put in their place, but it’s another tub of sour cream entirely when the conflict you’re covering is Blue on Blue.

Recall, if you can, that after months of insisting there was nothing to investigate around Partygate, the only reason The Met opened Operation Hillman at all was because, a) the Good Law Project (think the Lincoln Project but staffed by lawyers) took them to court over their decision, and b) rumour had it that senior civil servant Sue Grey’s own report on the Lockdown-violating Party culture at Number 10 was going to be considerably harsher than the ‘see no evil’ exercise in back-scratching her reputation had led everyone to expect. From day one the commonly received wisdom was that The Met had acted to shield Flobalob by delaying the release of the Grey Report and giving his cancerous Government that well-worn “I can’t possibly comment on matters that are currently being investigated by the Police” defence to hide behind for a few months.

Well that excuse was always time-limited, and from the moment The Met unveiled its masterpiece (a piece entitled ‘A Lighter Touch for a Whiter Wash’) before the assembled national media there were spikes of contrarian anger showing up on the background scheissmograph. It was soon clear that, in their rush to protect Flobalob from himself, The Met had gone waaaaay too big and trodden on too many toes.

Basically, what they’d done was take the evidence from Grey’s report, in particular the statements made to Grey (in what we can generously call ‘good faith’) by low level civil servants and Downing Street staffers implicating themselves in law-breaking activities and used them to target the vast majority of their Fixed Penalty Notices. But for everyone higher up the totem-pole, for the senior managers, invited guests and Downing Street officials who had refused to go on the record to Grey and later retained the services of expensive lawyers, there was a very different degree of scrutiny. They were sent basic questionnaires to fill out (“Did you commit a crime? If ‘Yes’, tick box A. If ‘No’, tick box B. If ‘Do you know who I am you uniformed oik?’, have your people tick box C and please accept our humblest apologies for wasting your time.”) and if there was even the merest hint of a suggestion that any of them could possibly imagine themselves to be innocent of some kind of deliberate wrongdoing, regardless of whatever photographic evidence existed, The Met simply took their word for it and moved on.

You can see this most clearly in the one FPN that Flobalob did receive. That was issued for something he admitted to early on in the scandal under the guidance of Suella Braverman, the half-deflated haemorrhoid ring he had installed as Attorney General (in Name Only) because of her stubborn ignorance of the actual law and craven loyalty to Johnson’s diktats. Once he retained actual lawyers (paid for by fuck knows which oligarch donor) The Met dropped to its knees and moved immediately into firm strokes with full eye contact mode.

And bear in mind, one of the parties he definitely was questioned about was the Abba-themed booze-up in the Prime Ministerial apartments on November 13th (more on that date later) where Wife Mark#3 and her closest chums were all celebrating the firing of bulb-headed technoanarchist Dominic Cummings from his role as Johnson’s chief political advisor. The music was apparently so loud that it could be heard throughout the Number 10 complex and Flobby himself was up there, but according to The Met they couldn’t class this as an illegal gathering because (please return your seatbacks to their full and upright and locked position) according to their lawyers, Wife Mark#3 and her friends were actually having a ‘strategy meeting’ (no doubt debating the best way to incorporate the tenets of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ and ‘It’s A Rich Man’s World’ into the next Tory manifesto) while Johnson was in a side bedroom interviewing Henry Newman, one of Wife Mark#3’s close, personal friends, for a job in his administration, so…uh… necessary workplace activity, yeah?

Uh, no. Admittedly, this is far from the worst thing Flobalob has ever done in a bedroom, but as an excuse that the country’s best funded Police Force chose to accept… nah.

It’s no exaggeration to say that there was naked fury amongst the ranks of the Civil Service; already gutted, overridden and degraded by decades of Tory vandalism, now being forced to carry the can for Flobalob’s culture of pissed-up lawbreaking. That got even worse when a secret meeting was called between Grey and Johnson in which he pressurised her to leave her report unpublished (on the grounds that everything in it had already come out and wouldn’t she like a Damehood?) She – apparently – told him where and how deep he could shove his request and began the formal process of informing everyone she was going to name and shame in advance of publication. Flobby evidently rang up the odious pondscum running the Daily Mail requesting their aid, because they immediately ran one of their typically hatemongering headlines accusing Grey of ‘playing politics’ with her report and ‘enjoying the limelight’ a bit too much for someone who is supposed to be a faceless bureaucrat.

The real nut-punch would occur over the weekend, though, after news of the secret meeting had come out and gone through the usual gaslight pas de deux (there was no meeting – there was a meeting but she asked for it – there was a meeting but we don’t know who asked for it – okay there was a meeting and we asked for it but there’s nothing wrong with that, why are you such a bore, leave him allloooonnnnne), when some unknown person (rhymes with Hominic Jummings, perhaps) handed ITV News a set of photographs which clearly showed Johnson surrounded by empty bottles of plonk and plates piled with party food, glass of wine in hand, holding court before blurred out partygoers at a leaving do for his outgoing (he was another one who’d run afoul of Wife Mark#3) Director of Communications Lee Cain, a leaving do that was held, by a remarkable coincidence, on the afternoon of November 13th.

Yes, that’s the same day as the Abba-themed Party in the residence, and yes, these are the same photographs that The Met had access to from Grey’s report when they concluded they didn’t have sufficient evidence to prove Flobalob had attended any more illegal gatherings.

Mr Fan, meet Mr Shit. I hear you know each other from work…

There’s no longer even the gauziest whisp of a figleaf for the Bullingdon Boozer to hide behind now, even though his minions will continue mouthing the words as long as there’s a camera nearby. Our own Sloane Ranger’s MP, Sir Peter Bone, was first out of the blocks insisting that photographs of Johnson attending a boozy party didn’t actually show Johnson attending a boozy party, and anyway, since The Met had already seen them and concluded there was no party, what’s the problem? But really, as the News Media should (but inevitably don’t) make clear to their viewers, it doesn’t really matter what the anal groomers pretend to think about what does or does not constitute ‘a party’. There’s nothing in the Covid rules about ‘parties’, they refer to illegal gatherings, and that’s what these were.

So, when Flobalob was asked point blank in the House of Commons “Will the Prime Minister tell the house whether there was a party in Downing Street on the 13th of November?” and he replied “No, but I’m sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed.”   He misled the House on two points, namely that yes, he could tell them if a party had taken place, because he’d been getting shitfaced at two of them, and no, the guidance and rules weren’t followed, because he set the tone and the tone was “Fuck the rules, let’s drink to our victory in the class war!”. Then, when he was asked in April “Did you deliberately mislead the House at the dispatch box?” and he responded “No.”, he did it again. There’s clear photographic evidence to show that he lied. Resignation-level offence. Case closed.

The catch here, of course, is that the UK has no constitutional mechanism to remove a Prime Minister who has lied so frequently to Parliament other than an expectation of honourable behaviour [Haaaaaaa! As fucking if! – Ed] or an internal Party vote where enough of their MPs signal their preference for the offender to fuck the fuck off or face losing an actual vote of no confidence in Parliament. It means we’re left waiting for that most spineless of invertebrate breeds, the Conservative Member of Parliament, to come to the conclusion that their own personal and professional futures would benefit from a Flobalob-free environment. They’ve already had the evidence of 500 seats lost in the recent local elections to chew over, and now the honking red alert of Australia’s own Murdoch-addled electorate rejecting the lies to unseat an unpopular, faux-populist, far-Right regime. Do they want to cling onto Johnson’s hollowed out reputation for appealing to the lowest of the low at the ballot box, or do they want to drive him out now, before he pushes the nuclear button of an early General Election and while they still have time for a successor Administration to dump all of the Party’s many failures onto Johnson’s bowed shoulders (“He wasn’t even a real Conservative!”) and benefit from the accustomed News Media honeymoon where new Tory leaders are concerned?

I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do. I know what they should do, that’s obvious, and morality or ethics don’t even have to enter into it. There are undoubtedly more pictures out there, they will come drip-dripping out whenever the screw needs turning. We’re basically back in the whack-a-mole nonsense of last year when each bare-faced denial of Downing Street parties was met by a well-placed leak that blew the denial away, except this time the evidence is pictorial and even more damning. The Cabinet is useless, split between desperate loyalty to the one man classless enough to give fuck ups like them Ministerial posts and deluded ambition driving fuck ups like them to imagine they might be Prime Ministerial material. It’s down to individual Tory MPs and whether they have the proverbial cojones to send 54 letters in to the 1922 Committee to trigger a leadership contest.

Will they do it? Fucknoze. I don’t even know if it’s still 54 letters. So many Tory MPs have had to stand down after being exposed as sex offenders recently that it could be half that many by now.

As for The Met, they’re already being bombarded with demands to publicly justify how they could look at the evidence contained in those photographs and come to the conclusions they did. That’s not going to stop or go away. If the Grey Report is anywhere close to being as harsh as rumoured, then the idiots who rifled through its evidence and quietly discarded anything too damning are going to look even worse. I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to imagine no one else was ever going to see the photographs? It’s 2022, FFS, most people are basically just mobile flesh-carriages for their ever-clicking camera phones these days. When you get right down to it, the entire Met is a cancerous tumour at the heart of British policing that needs tearing down and replacing ASAP, but since that won’t (be allowed to) happen, the high-up headslappers who orchestrated this Operation Hillman shitstorm need to be investigated and, eventually, hounded from their posts, but first, yeah, make them explain how they reached their verdict on Flobalob. That should be some rollicking fun.

Of course, by the time this rant sees the light of day the Grey Report will have been published, but its conclusions will have been drowned out by the Government announcing a screeching U-turn on imposing a windfall tax on energy companies, some kind of horrifically racist policy preferences coming out of Gauleiter Patel’s (Fuck Off and Go) Home Office, the latest twists and turns in whatever celebrity disaster ‘real people’ care about, or we’ll be at war with Ireland and under strict Martial Law. Anything to get Bully Bunter safely through another day.

Or the Queen will die. That should buy him a week or two. Anyone seen Nadine Dorries and that ceremonial blowpipe gifted to Britain by the Chief of the Ugoawaynow Tribe in 1973?

To be continuated……….