If you feel physically breathless at the current state of British politics, that’s just Boris Johnson immediately sucking all of the oxygen out of the room again. Is the dignity vampire coming back? Unclear. But I know we’re all big fans of lettuces now, so be advised there could be a monstrous 16-stone slug waiting to crawl out of this one and burrow straight into your brain stem.
With a poll this morning putting them just the 39 points behind Labour, a genuinely tragic number of Conservative betas seem to think that only Johnson can fix this/save their jobs. They desperately, desperately need you to think of the UK government as a state-of-the-art technology that only functions when unlocked with Boris Johnson’s unique biometric pass. And yet, does it? Does it operate only when Johnson’s eyes meet its retinal scan? Does it crave to recognise his handprint (like so many spirited but troubled young women before it)? On the vanishingly outside chance that this is the case, can we not simply do as the movies have taught us: forcibly borrow or cut off the relevant Johnson body part, and just get things working that way?
The UK is in a political crisis layered on top of an economic crisis, which itself has needlessly exacerbated an already dire cost-of-living crisis. The idea that the answer to a single part of this horror show is to bring back a morally degenerate financial incontinent who broke his own laws is something that tells you everything about the terminal sad-sacks who are so much as thinking of it. The formal parliamentary investigation into Johnson’s last truth-aborting period in office is about to begin; if it ends up censuring him for misleading parliament over the No 10 lockdown parties, as is perfectly likely, then we’d be in a constitutional crisis too. Maybe crises are cheaper when you buy in bulk.
The fact his name is even being mentioned suggests the Conservative party has failed to learn the lessons of the first wave of Boris Johnson, and to plan for the second. Any rays of light in the worst-case scenario? The return to power of Roman dictator Cincinnatus – famously mentioned by Johnson in his recent leaving speech – lasted just three weeks (by choice). Though if Johnson clocks up even that many days back in power, it’ll feel very much longer.
As indeed did Liz Truss’s tenure as prime minister, despite being shorter than the seven-week leadership contest that put her there. At the current rate of executive disintegration, I’d give it three months before someone’s unfurling an ironic TRUSS IN banner behind Rishi Sunak/Penny Mordaunt/Johnson at PMQs. As things stand, Truss leaves with up to £115,000 a year office expenses, for life, on the back of just 44 days in post, with the Tories effectively now acting like the Football Association did for so many years – paying all their expensively terrible choices millions of pounds to go away.
If you wanted to make a moodboard of the past 48 hours you’d need Thérèse Coffey to bung you some illegal sedatives and a wall the size of the Hoover Dam to mount it all on. But given that we’re all condemned to play psychodrama Pinterest, here are a few key images: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’d be a first-round KO for Monty Burns, being accused of “manhandling” people in the voting lobbies. Johnson, during a parliamentary session, cocktailing his arse off for his Uxbridge constituents on a sun lounger in the Dominican Republic. Penny Mordaunt acting like the unity candidate. Suella Braverman acting like the Unity Mitford candidate. Brandon Lewis taking “soundings” to see if he was going to be the Fortinbras in all this. You, unable to meet your own gaze in the bathroom mirror as you whisper, “Maybe … oh God … maybe Sunak, I suppose?” The mirror cracking.
Elsewhere, Graham Brady and Jake Berry, looking shifty as they explained the vote could well end up in the hands of the party membership again. Sorry, but if this does come to pass, it can’t be online. Voting should instead take place in Westminster Hall, with Conservative members required to queue and present themselves for the BBC livestream. That way if rogue actors such as Putin – or rogue presenters such as Phil and Holly – wish to upset the delicate balance of this ancient rite, everyone can see them doing it.
At the time of typing, many think that surely Johnson won’t get the numbers to run. Then again we passed “surely” three WTFs ago. Even his own backers couldn’t quite seem to believe it last night, with one anonymous acolyte telling the Telegraph: “It is too early. In autumn next year the party will be on its knees. He is walking into a shitshow he can’t control. They need to be on their knees.” On their knees! Unbidden, this reminds me of that moment in the documentary about the Fyre festival – another story of disastrous allegiance to a charismatic boss – where an otherwise sane-seeming man looks into the camera and says of a customs official refusing to release them some Evian water: “I got to his office, fully prepared to suck his dick.”
For now, we must bed in for days of Conservative MPs openly hissing about the damage other Conservative MPs are doing to “the party”, as though the crisis-convulsed country were some distant afterthought. That’s not just a hideously revealing way of talking but a profoundly warped way of thinking. It’s precisely this level of Conservative solipsism that got us here, and we all know the old lines. They simply can’t lose their reputation for competence. If they’re not careful people might just stop looking to them for stability. Only they can fix the mess they inherited from themselves. We’ve heard all this stuff so many times before that there are uncontacted Amazon tribes who know it backwards. Yet the next week will be taken up with yet another binfire of the vanities.
Out there in the real world, though, is where the serious fires are raging. Stories of child hunger pour in from teachers every day. This week an elderly patient died after hours in the back of an ambulance outside a Manchester hospital because there were no beds. There are vast black holes in the public finances, and the markets have demonstrably put the UK on suicide watch. Half the country doesn’t work properly any more, and all of the country knows it.
Of the MPs who can surely see all this yet are still going ahead and backing Johnson today, what can honestly be said? Other than: their struggle is finished. They have won the victory over themselves. They love Big Boris.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
• What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
