‘As PM Boris Johnson vanishes, our sad failing nation heads into the abyss’

It’s a shame the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee isn’t being celebrated this weekend as we’d be able to hold another patriotic get-together.

This time we could hold a mass seance outside Downing Street and ask if there’s anybody there? Because we haven’t even got a zombie government right now. It’s a Cabinet of Carcasses. We’re hurtling towards the abyss on corpse control.

As 45 million people face fuel poverty while energy companies laugh in their faces, inflation hits a 40-year high and economic growth flatlines, there’s drought, sewage on our beaches, 12-hour queues in NHS A&Es, strikes and labour shortages in key industries – and the British people stare at a vacuum where leadership should be.

As if spending six years paralysing us with their Brexit civil war wasn’t good enough for these Tories, they’ve decided to cripple us for an entire summer by letting a pair of prancing pygmies seduce their own members (who make up 0.2% of the population) with their hackneyed Thatcher tribute acts.

Then they tell the 99.8% of us outside their bubble, who are screaming for solutions to a looming financial apocalypse, that us moaning minnies need to believe more in the UK and its people. That’s despite the runaway favourite to be the country’s new leader being quoted as saying we’re a shower of idlers who need to “graft harder” to put more cash in the corporate coffers.

And where is the Prime Minister during this national crisis? Why, in the middle of his second foreign holiday in a fortnight, sulking because he’s no longer the king. It’s like Churchill going on a Caribbean cruise during the height of the Blitz.

Just as Johnson cowered in a fridge to avoid a TV grilling on his last election campaign so he hides now from the consequences of his own reckless actions.

We hear he wants to spend the rest of his Premiership ensconced at Chequers, no doubt entertaining donors or prospective employers, drawing up a list of people to send into the Lords who can be of future benefit to him.

This is exactly what Johnson does – to his partners, kids and colleagues. When the going gets tough he gets going. Mind you, David Cameron did the same when he lost his Brexit referendum. And this time last year, then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stayed on his Crete sunlounger with the phone turned off as the Taliban captured Kabul.

Have the Tories invented a superdrug that makes them instantly disengage from other people’s suffering and think only of Number One?

Twelve years they have had to get Britain in working order, yet all that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak can do is scrap in the rubble of their own party’s truth-bombs, attempting to out-flank each other on undeliverable promises, bullsh*t slogans and impossible tax cut pledges.

As they pose for photo-ops with fake smiles, whipping-up their tribe with hatred against immigrants and benefit claimants, and spewing out lies about unbuilt hospitals and unsigned trade deals, it seems we’re watching a tragic farce called Malice in Blunderland.

But reality, truth, action? Like answers to this failing nation’s problems, they are nowhere to be seen.

Is anybody in Downing Street still there? Anyone who cares about anything but their own future? No.