I will always remember where I was when I heard Boris Johnson had resigned. It was 9.05am on Thursday 7 July, I was driving through Stamford Hill. This column had a final deadline of 10am and now I had 55 minutes to rewrite it. The bendy BBC Tory-trumpet Chris Mason broke the news via the government-amplifier of Nick Robinson’s mouth and, winding down my window, I was desperate to share my joy with someone. But the only human beings in the area were a group of Orthodox Jewish schoolboys by the library, who seemed bewildered by an old fat goy shouting something about a bastard having gone at them out of a passing Ford Fiesta.
But, even as a Metropolitan Liberal Elitist Remoaner, I am grateful to Johnson on many levels. When the country voted for Brexit, and then for Johnson, I knew years of chaos and a far right lurch lay ahead. I also realised Brexit and Johnson would be exactly the kind of wedge issues to guarantee me a lucrative stand-up career playing to grateful audiences of crying Remainers for the foreseeable future. Like the hedge fund manager Crispin Odey and the international businessman Arron Banks, I too benefited financially from Johnson’s Brexit.
My last tour, Piglet’s Inferno, which ended an interrupted three-year run with a sold-out week at the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday, contained nothing but me swearing, red-faced, about Johnson for two-and-a-half hours and culminated in a beef effigy of the prime minister being shredded into slices and dropped from the rigging into the mouth of a giant puppet shark. And I achieved my dream of abandoning the traditional demands of so-called “comedy”, finally writing an entirely laugh-free show, each attack on the prime minister greeted simply by approving applause and angry jeers from the grim-faced Remoaners who exclusively comprise my audience. But for the tour’s closing weeks I worried daily that Johnson was about to be forced to resign and the show would fall apart before I had finished. I will be eternally grateful to Johnson for hanging on for four days after the show’s final date.
Johnson’s premiership, a mindless rotting meat zombie held together with the Sellotape™® of lies and the sticky excretions of his own spaff-faucet, began a sudden and dramatic slide into the ocean on Wednesday, like an arctic ice shelf made entirely of frozen shit. The Tories gasped for air in the filthy brine. Michael Fabricant got all brown stuff in his stupid hair and Carrie Johnson went down. Again. Hemingway’s line about a disaster happening “gradually, then suddenly” grew flesh. Gardy-loo! Gardy-loo! Gardy-loo!
I started to write this at 8.30am on Wednesday in a Pret A Manger, the day before Johnson finally folded. Two MPs resigned in less time than it took me to eat a Bacon & Egg Breakfast Mini Baguette™®. Whatever I filed on Thursday morning would surely be irrelevant by the time it was published on Sunday. I considered emailing the illustrator David Foldvari, suggesting he drew a blank space in a frame, inviting readers to scribble in their own etching of whatever has happened in the previous five minutes. Who would be in charge by the weekend? Mike “Concrete” Graham? A jar of Bovril with some mould in it? Morbius the Living Vampire? Or would Johnson cling on, like a mad king in an ancient British folk tale, roaming the mushroomed woods with his langer a-dangle, knighting stoats and beatifying otters.
Nadhim Zahawi, whose horses were never knowingly under-warmed, with £5,822.27 of public money heating their stables, became chancellor, surely a safe pair of hands for public finances. Michelle Donelan was education secretary for 36 hours before resigning and still managed to be rubbish at it. Even Ashfield MP Lee 30p Anderson quit, a man of such integrity he used supportive stooges on filmed walkabouts, and who until recently believed the PM was a victim of “a witch hunt by the BBC”, a news outlet so enfeebled it would run scared if someone showed it a child’s drawing of a Frankingstein. All these sudden discoveries of standards speak only of self-preservation.
I tried to follow the resignations on my laptop in Pret. A woman sitting at the next table, who has been throwing boiled eggs into her mouth and shouting about how magnetism is gay, got up and left. Perhaps she was the new parliamentary private secretary in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I turned off my phone, worried that if I could be contacted I might be offered a cabinet position.
By the time I turned in on Wednesday night, 42 MPs had resigned from the government and Johnson had sacked Michael Gove. Portents of doom abounded; a lioness hath whelped in the street; Sky News had a drone camera flying over parliament, beaming back the kind of shots you’d see in a disaster movie where London is attacked by dragons from space; graves yawned, and yielded up their Kremlin connections. You couldn’t write this. How could I write about it? And then the morning news brought a sort of conclusion, but the corruption that allowed Johnson is still with us.
Because despite the drama, we are still where we always have been. Rightwing media and the Conservative party enabled the promotion of a man they knew was a dangerous lying corrupt cheat, in order to further their own interests. And so far they have wasted six years of our country’s life now, briefly wavering only when the figurehead’s corruption could no longer be concealed and threatened to blow the political reactor core sky high, a Chernobyl explosion of backhanders, bullying, Brexit bullshit and ridiculously expensive wallpaper. You fucking idiots. Your self-serving resignations ring hollow. Your backpedalling editorials stink. You should all be in prison.
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