It’s Thursday morning. Boris Johnson, who made a former KGB agent’s son a lord and attended sexy parties at his fairytale hacienda, has failed to hand over his mobile phone to the Covid inquiry as some secret spies said there might be all stuff on it. Johnson has also spaffed out another child, this time in wedlock, but the announcement of the birth was delayed by a week, which has inadvertently helped to detract from his ducking and diving and lying, like when he got that jack russell cross that we never see any more. The baby, Frank Alfred Odysseus Red Herring Picaninny Bum Boys Letterbox Johnson, also fulfils the same function as when Johnson started talking about how he liked to make model buses out of crates, in 2019, to game malleable search-engine algorithms away from his Brexit bus lies. As with so many of Johnson’s promises, we are yet to see any evidence of his ability to fashion a single model bus from crates. Perhaps he broke them all throwing them at Dilyn the dog. And trying to father a child every time he abuses the rules isn’t a long-term strategy, even for a man as profligate as the former prime minister.
It’s Thursday morning. Yesterday, at prime minister’s questions, the MP for Newark, Robert Jenrick, doubled down on his decision to paint over welcoming murals of Mickey Mouse in a processing centre for unaccompanied migrant minors on the grounds that many of them were teenagers, so the images weren’t “age appropriate”. Perhaps the teenage refugees would have related better to a mural of Mickey Mouse wanking into a crusty sock? Or deciding that vinyl is actually cool. Or being a massive miserable pain in the arse for six years. In contrast to Jenrick’s hastily concocted excuse, the minister for migration and borders, Lord Murray of Blidworth, told former child refugee, and top Jamaican sound system operator, Lord Dubs that the initial decision to paint the murals was a mistake by some cowboy contractors. Perhaps they were supposed to write “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” in the Conservatives’ blue Franklin Gothic font over a painting of the two-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi dead on a beach near Bodrum in 2015.
It’s Thursday morning. Meanwhile, despite having said she is resigning, the pedal bin-brained Mid Bedfordshire MP Nadine Dorries continues to draw her £84,000 salary, presumably continues to pay her daughters a combined salary of £80,000 a year from the public purse and has found time to write an exoneration of Johnson (The Plot) for which she has already received a £20,500 advance from the craven vultures circling the decomposing corpse of her political career at the disgraceful HarperCollins, the sort of facile company that publishes exclusively the kind of books you buy as an afterthought at a supermarket checkout, along with some senna pods. Conservative connivance, Conservative cruelty and Conservative corruption are everywhere. But look at the front pages! A BBC presenter may or may not have done something appalling, according to accusations in the Sun that appear to be cautiously recalibrated hourly as I hastily rewrite this in the closing minutes before the 10am Thursday deadline.
Rishi Sunak, who has not found time to comment on Johnson’s current bout of rule-bending, said he was “shocked and concerned” by the Sun’s story, but fell short of repeating that his main priority was stopping the boats. Taking moral guidance from a Sun story is like making travel plans based on maps given to you by the Flat Earth Society. Conspiracy theorists theorise conspiratorially that the BBC presenter scandal is a convenient way for rightwing Tory media, or the media as they are better known, to spaff attention away from the Conservatives’ continuing woes. But this would require cooperation at the highest level between government and, for example, Rupert Murdoch, whose recent prosecco and crisps party was attended by Johnson, Sunak, Grant Shapps, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Oliver Dowden, Liz Truss, Brandon Lewis, Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke, and Sky TV’s Kay Burley and all.
Perhaps by the time you read this, the details of the twisty BBC tale will be clear. Earlier last week, even the perpetually hi-vissed Jeremy Vine’s decision to document every waking moment of his life with a camera mounted on his bicycle helmet could not stop Twitter’s stinking finger of suspicion from pointing inaccurately at his indignant Bendy Toy ™ ® face. “11am. I get off my bike and stand at a urinal. As you can see, no motorists are currently telling me to f*** off.” This BBC-cash-for-photos-of-a-17-year-old story may yet have been clarified as you scoff your Sunday muffin. But what is definitely true already is that the Sun ran photos of naked 16-year-old Page 3 girls all the time from 1970 until 2003. (Now the law’s changed, Google can’t even show you the 1983 Samantha Fox shoot that accompanied the headline: “Sam, 16, quits A-levels for ooh-levels!”, though it can show you an image of Mickey Mouse, irrespective of your age or immigration status.)
And what is also certain is that, as multiple globules of Tory turds hit multiple overheating fans in the hottest days ever recorded on Earth, the BBC presenter story absolutely isn’t the main story. But we sit here on our collective sofa, like colostomy bags with clown faces daubed on us in shit, sucking up buckets of queasy filth through straws, bleating our half-understood opinions out on to social media networks that farm us for data like pigs, consuming this calculated crap. We deserve to burn.
Basic Lee’s tour dates are here. A fun-size ™ ® version of the show is at the Stand’s New Town Theatre, Edinburgh, from 11 to 20 August
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