Partygate

Johnson.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

We can’t just leave it to James O’B, so…

Johnson. The heave-inducing haystack; part lard, part Scarf(e)ian nightmare . The Liar. The Cheat. The Truly Grossly-Entitled One. The son of his father. ‘King of the World’. Did all of this stuff really happen?

Of course it did. And however much we absolve ourselves – even those of us who knew (who knew!) what sort of a malign prick he was – every single one of us has some serious thinking to do.

Without setting aside the Johnson-specific howlers, the international embarrassment, the murderous strategic failures, the government-by-racism, we have to be smart enough and generous enough to think beyond our justified contempt of the man. It’s fair enough to hate him, he’s a low-life in a surreal, truth-less realm he really does think he owns; a particularly foul individual. But this can’t happen again; this can’t all just be about him. Let’s deny him that.

We have to seek progress, do we not? So need to be as clear as we can about the enablers. (We won’t, sadly, be able to do much about the systems of privilege and prejudice in these islands but we must call them out).

Murdoch, Dacre and waaaay too much of the media has either created the environment for Johnson’s grotesque rampage or facilitated it via omission – by failing to call lies lies. Look with any intelligence or fairness at what the Mail/Express/Telegraph/Times have been pumping out and there’s a truly sinister level of delusion, bigotry, disinformation. The whole concept of news has been subsumed under a kind of contemporary signalling: imagery and relentlessly crass soundbitery hussling readers towards a mean, othering worldview. It’s strategic – meaning choreographed towards a specific purpose. Big Money, in short, is being protected.

I’ve just watched James Rob utterly eviscerate the Daily Mail and nodded along with the (yes, gedditt, plainly flawed) Alistair Campbell’s twitter onslaught against the worst PM of my lifetime. How many other significant public figures have been actually calling out Johnson’s filth and amorality, directly? Should it be down to Johnathon Pie to steer the public consciousness towards what’s really going on? Is that not the very purpose of The Media? How have they been so absent when The Story – that we’ve had a plainly debauched Tory leader with a high-viz capacity for lies, corruption and cronyism – is so obvious and undeniable? To repeat… is it not the media’s very function to report and therefore make judgement possible?

Of course it’s not, when they themselves are driving the urge towards cheap, dumb, race-based patterns of behaviour.

The Mail (surely a candidate for Most Vile Newspaper on the Planet?) enabled Johnson every step of the way – championed him. Dacre and co. made possible the rise of xenophobia and evil that powered Farage and Brexit, and the conflation/reduction of every political discourse to a dreamy return to a Proper Ingerland: white; noisy; exceptional. The Daily Mail coaches zillions of old, dim reactionaries towards a more exceptional bigotry every day. It is really not alone in this but everything from the relentless lying to the disappeared corruption around Covid contracts, Track and Trace, Arcuri, cash-for-honours, Russian influence, lobbying and second jobs, as well as the editing-out of the central horrors that are the Covid deaths, Partygate and the astonishing extravagances and outright law-breaking of the desperado couple, Cummings and Johnson is a function of the Murdoch/Media Baron Environment. We have to break that somehow.

Zooming out, the deliberate damage to political life and discourse is scary. The fact that Keir Starmer has been steered away from ‘controversy and ‘divisiveness’ for so long is indicative of a deadly failure within the system. The Opposition dare not oppose, for fear of a) Tory rags whipping up yet more dumb rage against them and b) this rage winning out, electorally. Only now, that Johnson is going (pleeeeeeze god), are we seeing any legit moral outrage from the Labour leadership. Previously, he daren’t call out lies for fear of scoring own goals.

On many levels this is offensive and inadequate – it serves us badly. But plainly Starmer has been advised not to appeal to people’s intelligence and decency, because three inch headlines about immigrants or scroungers will hold sway over that. That is, there is no (or there is insufficient) conscience out there – no sense that historic boundaries or norms around individual or collective behaviour remain valid. So nothing matters. When the PM’s getting blowjobs in parliament and/or been trying to get his mistresses jobs or jollies, or finishing his book/sorting his divorce instead of attending to international emergencies and this stuff somehow leaks away from view, things political are being steered ver-ry dangerously.

We’re still being run – being played – by a few families. Folks with colossal power, unthinkable wedges and an iron grip on all of us. It’s only occasionally that the truth of this cuts through. Cummings loved to paint himself as some anti-Establishment guru but he was (is) neck-deep in money and privilege. Johnson’s father is the very epitome of Olde English Entitlement: he will enjoy those privileges alongside those now afforded by his residency within the EU. (By the way, could there be a better symbol of Tory Hypocrisy than Our Stanley? True, there are a glut of contenders but everything about Johnson senior reeks of the very smuggest form of exemption – of the rules simply not applying).

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – c’mon, let’s hoist him by that petard (no doubt) imposed by pater – is going. He hopes and expects to choose the time of his going – of course he does – and apparently expects us to host and underwrite his extravagant wedding during this period. After that he will (of course) slot into the easy life that is gifted consultancies and the After-Dinner Circuit, where he will command huge fees. (Can it just be me who’s thought all along that the whole degenerate Prime Minister Project has for Bojo been just another way of collecting anecdotes with which to entertain Lady Amplebosom, of Hartley Wintney? The shameless bastard will probably have his own talk show, never mind as many £100k speaking engagements as he wants. And he knew this would happen for him.)

Masses more of ‘Boris’ then, in the offing. Because the truth is paths will open, scandals will fade or disappear. Power persists. Johnson, despicable man that he is, will probably never be held accountable. And if he was, he wouldn’t care – wouldn’t need to. We may never know if his flirtations with Russian Intelligence were genuinely a threat to our national security, nor where the missing Track and Trace billions have landed. When it comes to Elite Family members, even the ‘quirky’ ones get protected.

Strawberry blonde.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

How is it, exactly, that we’re not on the streets? With the foulest, most rancidly prejudiced and corrupt government of my lifetime traducing the work of parliament, hour by hour? How? When the pitifully transparent Big Dog himself is cocking his leg over everything that feels right? How can this liar, this wilfully amoral clown be getting away with it?

The answers are several; some obvious, some not. Firstly of course the British Media is largely either brazenly prostituting itself beneath the Evil Barons – let’s specify; the filthy Mail/Express/Sun and their joined-up-writing equivalents The Telegraph and Times – or *mysteriously* failing to pursue stories that might lead somewhere tetchy for Johnson/Sunak/Rees-Mogg/Patel, etc. In short our ‘free press’ is either bent to the will of near-fascists, or so cosied-up to the private school/’elite’ families/personal benefit system that genuinely investigative journalism is smothered in an anaesthetic fog.

We expect the BBC and The Met to be more or less pliant to the will of the Establishment: we’ve got that. The Beeb is stacked full of decent people – lefties, even – but the Direction of Travel is being carefully steered by Daily Mail stooges. So Kuenssberg* hasn’t been a-tweeting about Partygate: extraordinarily, she didn’t have any information on any of those events, despite having unprecedented access to the drinking, dancing scumbags. And similarly, the obviously corrupt ‘tendering process’ for covid-related contracts has remained impenetrably obscure, to protect Tory families and funders.

(*Not just her, naturally. Plenty newspaper journo’s have strangely gone quiet on this one – often because their seniors were at the Downing St parties. One of the great failures to report).

I’m not sure who first used the phrase ‘the very worst of us’ to describe the execrable scheisters at the helm. But how else might we capture that sense of real, deep contempt for Johnson and Cummings and Patel and Mogg? They are surely simply not of us and yet we’ve let them besmirch us. Johnson for his utter separation from decency, truth, morality of any perceptible kind; Cummings for his evil narcissism and calculated debasement; Patel for her brazen prejudice and that faux-bullish small-person’s arrogance (or worse). Mogg is just an unspeakable caricature of tory privilege and estrangement from the real world: monied; less clever than he thinks; as stupidly unaware as the other freaks. They are The Very Worst Of Us.

As I write it seems our friends at The Met have exonerated Johnson for Partygate. Because he wasn’t in any sense responsible. And neither was poor old Carrie. They were merely hosts and Star Attractions in said events. They were, unlike their fawning underlings – lately found guilty – ‘innocently’ wee-weeing on the graves of thousands of plebs.

Out There, (here), in the meanwhile, in the Inconsequential Wastes, daft buggers like you and me were blowing masked farewell kisses down phones before bawling into our hands, because that seemed a sacrifice we all had to make. In these uniquely aching moments, in Downing Street and within the sphere of influence of the Secret Tory Machine, it was ‘Dancing Queen’ time.

Even the most cursory look at our bouffant, bumbling, unconscionable Prime fucking Minister will confirm that Johnson has never made a sacrifice in his life. Never needed to. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – like his appalling father before him – has never needed to reflect, only to drive inexorably forward, towards His Manifest Destiny. Like Rees-Mogg, assumptions towards brilliance and a kind of inevitable ‘greatness’ cossetted his ether – his aura. Boris was chosen, by his class, his schools, his clubs, his exceptional milieu, to plough on, towards oven-ready genius and fame. The irresistible power of a zillion years of feudal domination (and peasant capitulation?) was his. No wonder we chose him.

It remains – incredibly – possible that Johnston may survive the murderous incompetence, the missed COBRA meetings, the outrage that was the Covid contract-fest and now the relentless, mind-bending Partygate lies. The volumes of stupidity and naivety in the general population have carried him on, rubber-stamping Cummings’s filthy xenophobic Brexit, dumbly dancing with that poisonous conflation of Brussels with immigrants. Where we are is a triumph of sorts for Daily Mail-levels of bigotry and for the Great Families who continue to piss on our strawberries.

Never has the UK been so low, so barren, so shameful.