Shameless Matt Hancock is the poster boy for a failing, incompetent and conceited Tory Party.
Portraying himself as a Covid-19 hero and blaming tens of thousands of deaths on everyone from care workers to experts and rival ministers, the Tory jungle grub isn’t alone.
TRIUMPHS
Evading responsibility for their mistakes, presenting disasters as triumphs and wanting a battered Britain to hail them as titans is a disease among the Conservatives.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak bills himself as the only politician capable of reviving an economy that collapsed on his watch while Boris Johnson’s Chancellor.
Mediocre Jeremy Hunt in the Treasury poses as a safe pair of hands when he squeezed the life from the NHS in his sweaty palms.
The current Health Secretary, nonentity Stephen Barclay, is all condescending tea and synthetic sympathy when a passionate visionary is required. Grant Shapps, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, Dominic Raab, Nadhim Zahawi – this truly is a Cabinet B-team.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and, in his peculiar freewheelin’ way, Michael Gove as Levelling Down Secretary, are the only pair worth a hearing.
Haughty Hancock embodies the worst of the Conservatives as he publishes a laughably distorted first draft of recent history.
But there is more than a dash of a conceited former Health Secretary – caught, let us never forget, breaking his own Covid rules with a lover – in the remaining Cabinet.
Labour’s 14% poll lead and Sunak’s falling ratings are the writing on the wall for a decaying Conservative regime in a country which they have ground into the dirt.
TORIES' ARMED FARCES
Nurses, ambulance crews, firefighters, Border Force staff... the Conservative armchair generals are abusing the British military by vowing to deploy the Armed Forces as a “Scab’s Army”.
Hopeless Cabinet Minister Nadhim Zahawi did it again yesterday, threatening to mobilise soldiers to do the jobs of striking immigration officials and answer 999 calls by driving the sick and injured to hospital.
Much of this is plastic propaganda when the Tories have shrunk the British Army to its smallest in 200 years and 76,000 remaining troops will shortly be cut down to 72,500.
So replacing hundreds of thousands of workers is impossible and pretending they could shows a flailing UK Conservative government is misusing uniformed personnel as PR props. The tactic is likely to backfire as the public are not stupid.
More than half of voters, 55%, supported nurses going on strike for two days this month in an Opinium poll.
Tory ministers relishing pay clashes face a public coup and rout at the ballot box.
