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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Stewart Lee

Like all supervillains, the Tories will meet their match

Illustration by David Foldvari of Darth Vader.
Illustration by David Foldvari. Illustration: David Foldvari/The Observer

On Wednesday, the former environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, on whose watch the deregulated post-Brexit waterways of Britain turned into rivers of human excrement, with only Feargal Sharkey to speak for them, tried to score a sarcastic point off Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary. Cooper “can’t even get the name of the country right, talking about the Kigali government”, Coffey told the house, a hot wombat wrapped in tea towels. “We’re talking about Rwanda, a respected country that has recently been president of the Commonwealth.” Kigali is the capital of Rwanda. The Tories have sent three home secretaries there. It wasn’t the burn Coffey thought it was.

A party of dreg folk is taking us into a war in the Red Sea, under the command of a defence secretary, Grant Shapps, who pretended to be lots of nonexistent people online to promote a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme and once declared a lower insurance on ride-on lawnmowers a Brexit benefit. Perhaps Shapps’s Corinne Stockheath persona is an expert on marine warfare as well as online marketing. The war may be right. It may be wrong. But allowing Shapps to pursue it is like giving a ride-on lawnmower to a monkey, a monkey with improbably named imaginary friends. But it isn’t just that this final crumbling crop of Conservatives are idiots. Many of them are also evil.

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