All across the land the emergency alarm went off. Oliver Dowden had been appointed deputy prime minister. The harsh metallic tone of the mobile phone sounded suspiciously like the rattle of a barrel being scraped bare. Metal on metal. There’s not an ounce of talent left in the Tory party. If it was a circus elephant you’d put a bullet in its head and have done with it. A kindness.
Dominic Skeletor Raab is gone, currently preparing to spend more time with the sentient throbbing vein in his head that tells him who can live and who must die. The Conservative response to Raab’s transgressions is not to make sure ministers stop bullying civil service staff, but instead to recruit only party loyalists who will be grateful for the honour of being shouted at by a top Tory, rather than kicking up a fuss. Those wet wipes! Those silly bitches!
Similarly, in 2021, rather than ending dodgy party donations, the Conservatives instead proposed to limit the Electoral Commission’s ability to scrutinise them. The November 2021 elections bill planned to give Michael Gove the power to decide what got investigated and when. Snort if you like, but Gove famously has a nose for sniffing things out, and snuffling up any lines of inquiry that might be laid out before him on the glass-topped coffee table of British political corruption.
As far back as 2012, instead of dealing with London’s air pollution problem, the then mayor Boris Let the Bodies Pile High Johnson simply used suppressants to glue pollution particles to roads near official air quality monitors, bringing down readings, to suggest better air quality. If only there had been some warning, when Turds was allowed to become prime minister on the back of his busload of Brexit lies in 2019, that he was not to be trusted. Tories gonna Tory!
But the problem is, guys, that Rishi Sunak needs to pick another Conservative politician to be deputy prime minister. The problem is, guys, if you are a Conservative politician at the moment, you have clung on by making unjustifiable intellectual and moral accommodations for Brexit, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss’s Tufton St apocalypse, the flooding of the nation’s rivers and water table with human excrement, proposed state-sanctioned breaches of international human rights understandings, and a prime minister who calls everyone “guys”, like a sixth-form prefect trying to convince some cool kids to sell him weed that is actually dried out strands of goldfish excrement in a Tic Tac mints box.
In short, guys, if you are currently in government, you are either evil or a moron. In short, guys, if you are currently in government you are, by definition, not fit to be in government. And yet, guys, it is into this shallow smallpox well of Tory talent, as clogged with filth as our waterways, that a bare-forearmed can-do Sunak must lower his leaky slop bucket. Guys.
I sit, sickened, next to the conveyor belt in the sushi restaurant of broken Brexit Britain, and watch Conservative politicians going round and round the track. They are tiny piles of human excrement splatted on to clean white plates, each topped with a flag of their face to remind me who these blandly evil beings are during their brief moment in the spotlight, before greed, cruelty and incompetence send them hence. Again. They disappear round the corner of the serving unit, trailing unholy halos of flies, only to re-emerge, with clockwork Camberwick Green inevitability. But I thought we had seen the last of Oliver Dowden, the Harold Bishop of the anti-woke Avengers ™ ®.
In February last year the then minister without portfolio and party co-chairman Dowden flew to America to address the Heritage Foundation. Sixty-six of the thinktank’s employees and alumni got roles in the Trump administration; it published lies about election fraud on its website; has an affiliate that spent $75,000 on adverts, including falsely suggesting that Democrats wanted to register illegal aliens to vote; pushed to ban critical race theory teaching; supports legislation against transgender rights; opposed military aid for Ukraine; has received ExxonMobil funding; and criticises the Kyoto agreement. Dowden spoke to them about how cancel culture is a “painful woke psychodrama”, and woke ideology is a “dangerous form of decadence”.
Ironically, Dowden, the anti-woke wokefinder general ™ ® , stepped down as minister without portfolio and party co-chairman last year, after the Tory defeat at the Wakefield byelection, a wakey-wakey Wakefield wake-up call for the weakened anti-wokeys. When a minister quits as minister without portfolio it is not clear if the minister is then handed a portfolio to prove they no longer have the job. Either way, it seemed we had seen the last of Dowden, with or without portfolio.
But the sushi belt trundles on, and the pile of shat with Dowden’s face on the flag rounded the corner again last October, this time as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, replacing the financially inconsistent horse-warmer Nadhim Zahawi. And now the hand of fate reaches down and places a new flag on Dowden’s poo pile, declaring him deputy prime minister. In lieu of any answers to the country’s real problems, expect Dowden to bodyboard a brown tide of bullshit, about woke teachers and rewritten history, into the sunset.
Meanwhile, Southwest Water is fined a paltry £2.1m for fish-fatal river pollution; Lee Anderson rampages through a select committee, a dangerous golem given life by a Conservative establishment that know not what they do; Robert Jenrick raises the false flag of incompatible values to court far-right votes, clinging to power like a perma-smiled dingleberry on the filthy anus of Suella Braverman’s home office; Brexit means food and drink prices are rising at the fastest rate since the 70s, making builders’ Bovril a luxury drink; and Rishi Sunak smiles like a spanked schoolboy as CBI leaders tell him everything is fucked. But the real problem is wokeness. Guys.
• Basic Lee tour dates are here, including six performances at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in June and July
