Word has it that yesterday Downing Street witnessed a 90-minute “shouting match” between the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.
Few, if any, of us could ever manage a full hour and a half of yelling, but it says a lot about the times we inhabit that it is entirely believable that Suella Braverman, who is stone-cold barking, went at it hammer and tongs with Liz Truss, who is known to City boys as ‘Daggers’ because they think she’s two stops *past* barking.
Apparently the row was about immigration. Truss wants more of it, because it’s necessary for economic growth and to appease the Office of Budget Responsibility. Braverman wants none of it, because people voted to take back control of our borders with Brexit. And therein lies the totality of the reason that we are where we are – an impossible idea meeting practical reality, with screaming attached.
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Times columnist Matthew Parris called Truss “a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering on a pinhead of a political brain”. Former Labour spin doctor and self-made mental health expert Alistair Campbell reckons she suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which the people who know least about something overestimate their ability to understand it.
But I’m going to pin the blame on Brexit, and here’s why a vote held six years ago about something this woman campaigned against has delivered us a slow-motion political pile-up which has bounced off numerous walls and is about to come to a juddering, limb-strewn, bloody stop.
That vote was won by emotion triumphing over caution; the wish to punch David Cameron on the nose, coupled with a belligerence about how the country wasn’t working in everyone’s favour. The fact it came after six years of crippling austerity, and THAT contributed to the unhappiness, is something that is only now starting to come into focus, when we’re horrified at being offered more.
Half the nation felt poor; they voted to change it. Get rid of the immigrants, they said, and you’ll be rich. The opposite was true, but those who sold the vote will never admit it. They cannot. They still believe it *is* true, like fairies at the end of the garden and the magic porridge pot. That’s why Braverman was hollering in No10, like a toddler told the bribe of cake involved no actual cake.
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That vote delivered Theresa May, a robotic incompetent with the political skills, and warm, open manner, of a brick. And she was the high point.
Because she noticed the Northern Ireland border the pixie-fiends in her party conspired to throw her out, and replaced her with Boris Johnson, an amoral, shambolic tramp who had about as much personal charm as a walking laundry heap. His grubby tenure left smears all over the nation’s institutions, a serious dent in the finances, and Schrödinger’s Northern Ireland border. It both did and did not exist, depending on who you were speaking to at the time.
With each convulsion, the Conservative Pasty sicked up its basest, most blinkered non-thinkers, and put them in charge. They were appointed to government not for skill, not for party unity, not to recognise this wing or that and pull everyone together, but on the basis of whether they believed in Brexit.
I believe in humans; but that doesn’t make them all capable of untangling string theory. And this lot, dear Reader, couldn’t untangle a duvet.
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So here we are with Liz Truss, a woman who voted Remain because she believed David Cameron and now backs Brexit because she believes he was wrong and she is right even though she’s been so wrong so often that ‘Trussterf***’ is about to enter the dictionary.
And while the world watches, bemused, as she crashes the car, the economy, and the government, puts her party through the mincer, and smashes her head repeatedly on the wreckage while wearing a broad smile and telling us she’s not a quitter, few people have stood back and wondered how this lunatic served in public office for a decade.
She was appointed by three Prime Ministers, all trying to appease the wingnuts but ending up emboldening them. She survived a host of junior ministers who despaired of her, whole armies of civil servants who tried and failed to get detail in or out of her head, and somehow or another no-one trotted along to HR and had a word that Liz maybe needed to be kept away from the forks.
But this is what, and who, you voted for. Brexit brought bats**t into the mainstream, and now the stream is nowt but sewage. They didn’t put that on the bus, did they?
Fleet Street Fox
By giving power to the pro-Brexit loonies, the ordinary voters who just wanted things to improve handed the genetic engineering of a unicorn to people that a doctor would resignedly tell you were beyond his help. What they have created is limping and lurching around the laboratory, and the only upside is that they’ve smashed the Mental Institute of Economic Affairs and proven that Britain really doesn’t want a unicorn any more.
That brief period of support for Brexit evaporated within months. The latest poll shows 59% of people feel poorer as a result, including a third of those who voted Leave. Nearly 60% want a new deal, and 70% want more ties with the EU. The experiment failed, largely because it was in the hands of not-geniuses.
And so it is – or was – with Liz. Winston Churchill said there were corkscrew thinkers, and straight-line thinkers. He was wrong – there are also full-stop thinkers, who think something and then just stop. Truss’ ideas don’t grow, decrease, or flex according to circumstances. They just ARE. There are no beliefs, no maths, no strategies, and when the Tories had worked their way through all the believers in decreasing levels of ability, they ended up with someone who is always capable of less.
It doesn’t matter who replaces her. They’ll fall too, like Frankenstein’s monster after he forgot to fit any knees. There is no advantage to us in continuing with something damaging and pointless, like Liz Truss, the Conservative government, or their idea of Brexit.
It’s a case of unicorn, meet wall. Brexit failed, the Right failed, the idea has failed. And do you know, this is the best thing that could have possibly happened? Had we not voted for Brexit, there’d have been more years of Cameron, Boris would have been a liberal, Lefty PM, and Starmer would be struggling instead of soaring. The Tory Right would be there forever more, agitating for more Brexit, another vote, and telling us immigrants were the problem.
This way, the pixies have all been cleared out of the woodshed. All right, the shed’s on fire, but we can rebuild that. This time, without the wingnuts, please.