On my desk I have a battered little book a leftie great uncle bought in 1944 called “Why Not Trust the Tories?“
It was written by Aneurin Bevan, the chief architect of the NHS following the post-war landslide Labour victory of 1945.
Bevan wrote: “Honest politics and Tory politics are contradictions in terms.
“Lying is a necessary part of a Tory’s political equipment.”
Depressingly, 77 years on, his words could slip so easily into this week’s commentary on the pictures of Boris Johnson raising a glass at a Downing Street party during lockdown.
Staggering that so much time has passed, yet – with an unfathomable masochistic bent – some of us keep electing the duplicitous posh boys to screw us over.
Of course Johnson lied when he denied there was a party in Number 10 and we knew it without the photograph of him toasting the room.
There’s his red box in shot along with two bottles of champagne, four bottles of wine, half a bottle of gin and a barrel-full of contempt.
Had he toasted “death to the oldies”, he would still rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the Covid dead.
His lips move and he lies.
Take the lie of £350million a week the NHS would get from Brexit, emblazoned across that infamous big red bus that is about to drive us over an economic cliff.
Bevan said the judgment of the British people “is blurred by nationalist sentiments and a traditional distrust of foreigners”. No progress there.
He also said: “Tories make the promise in order to keep power.
“It is never their intention to get power in order to keep their promise.”
Brexit is a disaster of empty shelves, billions of profit wiped from farming, businesses with no workers and lorry queues in Kent now so long that Disaster Response, a charity specialising in war refugees and earthquakes, has been drafted in to ease the suffering of drivers.
Now almost half of Britain thinks that it was wrong to leave the EU.
It’s a show of buyers’ remorse not seen since I bought a taffeta couture evening dress from China for 40 quid which arrived a musty, polyester hanky so flammable it couldn’t be worn on a sunny day.
The reviews screamed “don’t buy from this site” but nope, I knew better.
Brexit isn’t a dress, we can’t send it back and we will pay the price for this scam with domestic impoverishment. It’s not just the lies but the incompetence which has cost so many so dearly.
Yesterday an inquiry by MPs found the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan last year was a “disaster” and a “betrayal” that will damage the nation’s interests for years.
Its chairman Tom Tugendhat said that there had been a failure to lead “at a time when lives were quite literally being lost”, when Taliban death squads were hunting down and murdering Afghans who had worked for the British Government.
At home there were no consequences for those responsible.
In fact Dominic Raab was fired as foreign secretary only to be promoted to Deputy Prime Minister.
Tugendhat also did not dismiss the Covid parties as old news but instead portrayed them as the continued inadequacies of Johnson and Co – part of a matrix of the turmoil we are now facing at home and abroad.
The UK was diminished as a power broker in the eyes of any potential foe – such as warmonger Putin – by the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Tugendhat saw a crashing of dominoes that led to Putin being emboldened to invade Ukraine, which has compounded the economic crisis, causing so much pain to ordinary people in the UK and globally.
The images of Johnson are part of a fetid culture undermining us time and again.
Tugendhat said: “I think those pictures show what many of us have known for a long time – which is that some aspects of this Government are not serious.
“Seriousness matters, I am afraid.”
It’s up to Tugendhat and his fellow Conservatives to oust Johnson but as Bevan would say, never trust the Tories to do the right thing.
Kids need to be protected from danger dogs
How many more pitiful pictures of children savaged by dogs do we need to see before action is taken?
The UK has a shameful gallery of lacerated faces of children who didn’t stand a chance against the might of “man’s best friend”.
This week it was Harley Chatterton, four, pictured left, who needed 60 stitches to her face after a dog mauled her in a Glasgow communal garden.
A three-year-old boy died after being attacked by a dog in Rochdale 10 days ago.
According to NHS statistics, the number of incidents involving dogs in Scotland increased from 533 in 2008 to 6992 in 2019.
In 2018, there was cross-party consensus for the need for robust action to be taken by Parliament to tackle the problem of dog attacks.
There has been more outrage about West Ham footballer Kurt Zouma kicking his cat than children being killed or scarred for life by dogs.
Most dogs are wonderful companions and they were a lifesaver to many during the pandemic but something must be done to protect children from dogs which are clearly out of control and dangerous.
