It’s a privilege to write funny columns about the news for the Observer, and every Sunday I wake excitedly to see what flows from the slushy pen of our illustrator, David Foldvari. But writing these means I have to read the news every day, a weather eye on the endemic corruption of untouchable ministers, and trawl the filth of social media and the sewer press to see if they vomit forth anything I could spin into satire. Sometimes I feel done in by it, a 6 Music dad Malcolm McDowell with my Clockwork Orange eyes pinned open, flickering images of Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman burning my retina until my heart is broken. Again. It’s the lying I can’t stand.
Can two different things be true at the same time? Or is nothing actually true? What is truth? What are lies? A sandalled seeker searching a lifetime in a desert could encounter more vital incarnations of these questions by observing the current antics of the Tory party’s most malevolent manifestation to date. Schrödinger merely had one lone reality-defying cat. We have an entire reality-defying government. And unlike Schrödinger’s cat, Rishi Sunak doesn’t know how to use a litter tray, preferring to stink out the front benches every time his mouth miaows.
I was in the car with a 12-year-old on Wednesday morning, listening to the Covid inquiry coverage on news radio, the child provoked into laughter by Boris Johnson’s quarter-arsed explanation of how he had lost his WhatsApp messages, and then again by Rishi Sunak’s repeated use of the phrase “I don’t recall”. To paraphrase the comedian George Carlin, “I don’t recall” is just an uptown way of lying. When he is finally flushed, Sunak should reboot Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. In Total Non-Recall, Sunak plays Dick, a man who has all his memories removed, but instead of being replaced with other memories, they are replaced by an endless loop of the phrase “I don’t recall” and a photo of a man touching a woman’s bum from the front of a Jilly Cooper novel. And it ain’t over ’til the fat lady’s head explodes!
Kids, used to trying to weasel their way out of trouble without a shred of conscience, recognise the smell coming out of the mouths of Johnson and Sunak, and find it joyously hilarious to hear actual adults – let alone two British prime ministers – wheeling out the same fake shit as I did in 1972 when I kicked a ball through next door’s greenhouse window. The difference being, that ball didn’t result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the misappropriation of billions in public funds. When I ruined Mr Archer’s tomato plants I didn’t kill everyone’s grannies, or get an ocean-going yacht and an interview under caution about a missing two hundred million quid. And kids are better at lying than this lot.
Funny how I can just write the word “lying” and know there will be no legal comeback. We all know they are lying. And they know we know they are lying. And the apparently powerless interlocutors of the Covid inquiry must know they’re lying too. Sunak, especially, seems to have given up caring. Why should he worry about consequences when he can dismiss an international convention affecting billions, and the findings of his own supreme court, with a waft of parliament? Facts begone!
Right now Sunak, like Johnson, says he can’t find his WhatsApp messages because they were all lost. But in June he sought a judicial review to say he didn’t need to hand the WhatsApp messages over, declaring them “unambiguously irrelevant”. The judicial review, then, was presumably a big waste of everyone’s time and money if the WhatsApps were actually all lost anyway. Which they obviously weren’t. Perhaps Schrödinger’s cat ate them. I am sure all those teenagers who hack free rides every day on Santander short-term hire cycles all over London could find those WhatsApps in seconds. Rishi – they can remember it for you wholesale! Is anyone going to actually do anything about this?
Because Sunak’s lies matter. Pursuing the transporting of 200 people a year to Rwanda, at a cost of £290m so far, is supposed to deter migrants from seeking our shores. Rwanda was presumably a good deterrent because of its poor human rights record, and because its police force kill refugees if they protest about having no food. But we can only deport 200 people a year, and if you’re already someone who thinks crossing the Channel in a Tupperware box is an acceptable risk, the remote possibility of Rwandan resettlement has such low odds it’s irrelevant.
Seven Bins Sunak has supersized his lies, using a self-invented lie-law to undermine the judgment of our own non-foreign supreme court that deemed Rwanda unsafe, which it is, and insisted in a law that it is safe, which it isn’t, so he can send migrants there. But if Rwanda was safe it wouldn’t be a deterrent, would it? Critics have called it Schrödinger’s Rwanda, after the famous paradoxical cat mentioned earlier, which is simultaneously both alive and dead. But I call it Pursglove’s Rwanda, after the new minister for legal migration and delivery Tom Pursglove, who is both a purse and a glove at the same time. Meanwhile, a man took his own life on the Bibby Stockholm.
The government’s convoluted, costly and impractical immigration policy is built on lies and serves no purpose other than to try to preserve the unity of a collapsing Conservative party, and consolidate the loyalty of its most aggrieved, and easily misled, supporters. Life would be simpler, and I would be happier, if I didn’t have to follow the falsehoods of the Tory turds beached by the backwash of Brexit. But I do this for you. And for the money. Both at the same time. Schrödinger’s columnist.
Basic Lee tour dates are here; a six-week London run is now at Leicester Square theatre
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