06 February 2023 , 13:32
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Very few people who have wondered what the end times would look like would have guessed that certain doom would be presided over by a zombie, a Thunderbird puppet, and a relentlessly-happy Scrooge and Marley.
And yet - welcome to the last year of Tory rule, starring an undead Liz Truss, a barely-human Matt Hancock, and topped off with a Chancellor and Prime Minister whose eternal souls will still be giggling joyfully as the worst demons Satan can find eat them from the toes up.
There are less than 1,000 days before Rishi Sunak has to call an election which he is as likely to win as he is to eat anything from Greggs, yet no-one seems very happy about it. Is it all Keir Starmer's fault?
"Yes. Yes it is." (JESSICA TAYLOR/UK PARLIAMENT/UNPIXS)Recent polls show that even Tory voters want rid of the Tories. All the other voters certainly do. The extreme likelihood of the entire Tory party being reduced to two backbenchers in Lincolnshire should, therefore, make all voters happy.
The political self-immolation of Liz Truss burned her premiership to the ground and spaffed £50billion up the wall. She should be moving on to a lucrative career in global finance, yet keeps popping up in political life, unaware the nation's concerned stakeholders all want to bury it in wherever her heart ought to be.
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Defective man-puppet Matt Hancock abandoned all pretence of being an MP to enter the jungle, where he barely mentioned any topics beyond "the real me", like a first attempt at Pinocchio who missed out on the magic fairy dust by *this* much. Now he's stuck in a GMB maze, trying to find Richard Madeley while wearing the blankly optimistic expression of a Labrador that's been dropped on its head.
And then to Dominic Raab, a man with two law degrees and no self-awareness; Nadine Dorries, a woman so desperate for love she'll accept a job on Talk TV if it means an excuse to get Boris Johnson on the sofa; and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the result of an Addams Family alternate universe where Lurch went to Eton and turned everyone he met into sausages.
This should all be genuinely hilarious. And from an objective distance - like, Saturn's furthermost moon - no doubt it is so funny there are little green men eating space popcorn and arguing about who should get the BAFTA.
The trouble is that we're up close to it. And it hurts.
Nurses going on strike says it all - not even discussing pay with them says even more (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)It's our NHS that's having the biggest walkout in English history. It's our buses having the funding withdrawn. It's our kids without a hot dinner, our schools letting the rain in, our dentist that's disappeared, and our shopping, heating and power bills that we'd need to be a lottery winner to fully satisfy.
It's our country that's torn itself away from its nearest neighbours, with no benefits produced. It's our national discourse that's been poisoned by the things that get people angry, like immigrants and benefits and Jeremy Corbyn. It's our rapes that go unreported, our police who are corrupted, our jobs that get reassessed.
It was the same at the beginning, in 2010. Nothing's really changed, except the rot has become impossible to ignore. Then, and now, they did not rely on the NHS, take the bus, go to state schools, count the pennies. They were always globally connected, banking in Panama and paying tax in Gibraltar.
They don't get raped. They aren't disabled. They weren't born with the landlord's mould in their mouth.
Awaab Ishak, aged 2, died after prolonged exposure to mould which caused breathing difficultiesBut even considering the unrelenting misery of so many millions of people's existence - from the pandemic to long-term illness and increased disabilities, to industrial action and redundancies, to businesses going bust and roads getting potholed - we should, at least, be happy that there's not much more of it.
Even Tory MPs, who should be getting geared up to make millions with no scrutiny on the highly-remunerated seas of executive directorships, aren't finding new opportunities. They seem to want to stay in charge, unable to find solutions to anything, but for some reason determined to keep displaying their utter unfitness for any sort of office, including the ones in abandoned lorry containers in scrapyards.
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Sajid Javid announced he was stepping down, then started spouting off on NHS reform. Boris Johnson was all but bankrupted by his morally-bankrupt time in office, but he keeps acting like he wants to return. GO AWAY, THE PAIR OF YOU.
Why the gloom? Because there is no dawn. Just relentless, endless nightmare. Keir Starmer is not being positive and upbeat, Labour is not shouting about its big ideas, and no-one has any reason to think that once the Tories are defenestrated we'll have anything but a broken window to look at.
That will change. Labour's policy committees are drafting the manifesto promises and - considering the uncosted nightmare of Trussonomics - it's only right they do the sums a couple of times first. The frontbench are just warming up, getting ready for the sprint to the finish. Rachel Reeves is doing some lunges, David Lammy is following a wall pilates video off TikTok, Angela Rayner is filing her teeth into points.
And somewhere, let us hope, over the course of the next year Keir Starmer will be getting a spray tan, his hair will be de-slicked, and someone's will tart up his ties. Yes, we're all ready for a bit of boring competence, but Tony Blair didn't win a landslide by telling everyone he used to be a lawyer. He got it with style and splash when up against a dead duck, and if Starmer's to do the same he has to start treating Rishi Sunak as though he wants to see him slathered in hoi sin sauce and wrapped in a pancake.
These are gloomy end times, but we'd all be a lot perkier about it if we thought the sun was about to break out. If Starmer doesn't up his game in the next year, this is how the Tories will end - not with a bang, but a simper.