Sleazy On Me
Why We Couldn't Eat the Tories' Naked Lunch
William Burroughs once attributed the title of his hallucinatory smack-adled novel The Naked Lunch to Jack Kerouac. According to Burroughs, a naked lunch was ‘a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’ Yesterday was the frozen moment when any British voter who wanted to look could see the government at the end of their fork.
It wasn’t necessary to look closely to recognise that what they were being asked to swallow was a rotten piece of meat that no serious democracy could possibly digest, without serious risk of a toxic reaction.
Some may argue that we haven’t been a serious democracy for some time. Nevertheless, even by the Johnson cabal’s abysmal standards, yesterday’s vote on the Leadsom Amendment reached a new level of baseness and brazenness, which today’s spectacular U-turn cannot erase.
This was the moment when the government whipped its MPs to support an MP - a leading Brexiter and member of the ERG sect - who had been caught dead to rights with his hands in the till by the Commons standards committee, earning more than £100,000 for lobbying activities, for which he received the relatively minor slap on the wrist of a 30-day suspension. It was the moment when 22 Tory MPs who had been investigated or censured by the same committee voted in favour of an amendment which effectively called for that committee to overruled.
The ‘Prime Minister’ - Eton’s own Ubu Roi - had also been investigated by the committee. According to his new would-be nemesis Dominic Cummings, Johnson still faces further investigation in connection with the decoration of his psychedlic hell-home, and this was why the vote took place yesterday.
In these circumstances it would make sense to appoint John Whittingdale - Carrie Johnson’s old boss and a politician with what tends to described as a ‘colourful’ past - as head of a new committee to raise standards - or lower them.
All that was jaw-droppingly atrocious in its own right. But even more sickening was the gaslighting, hypocrisy, and sanctimonious defence of fatuous and indefensible arguments and talking points, in which yesterday’s rancid meat was marinated.
You need a strong stomach to swallow appeals to ‘fairness’ and ‘natural justice’ for Paterson, coming from politicians like Iain Duncan-Smith who voted persistently and cruelly for people on benefits to be punitively sanctioned for the slightest infraction of the rules that they imposed. Nevertheless these arguments poured like toxic sewage from a burst pipe, leaking out of the commons and into the media.
It’s a moot point whether the politicians who parroted these arguments actually believed them or merely lacked the spine to challenge them, but either way it was infuriating and embarrassing to witness them describe Paterson as a ‘victim’, while denying that their vote was intended to do anything more than ‘reform’ a system that they had supposedly wanted to reform for years.
To get an idea of the flavour, take a look at some of the chefs, like John Penrose, MP for Weston-super-Mare:
Yes that is the John Penrose, the gambling industry’s best friend, and husband of the Queen of Test and Trace Baroness Harding, who also happens to be the government’s ‘anti-corruption tsar’, just trying to keep it real. Elsewhere, on Channel 4 News, Peter Bone and Andrea Leadsom could be found pontificating on ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ . And on Twitter, the hapless Tory stooge Tim Montgomerie applauded the utterly unacceptable like the good Catholic boy he is:
Hear that? Every fibre, yet not a trace of conscience or good sense. And today, it gets worse. First up was Kwasi Kwarteng - a politician for whom the adjective ‘oleaginous’ might have been invented - has essentially suggested that the commissioner for parliamentary standards Kathryn Stone should be the one to consider her position:
That’s what you get when you do your job properly in Johnson’s dystopia - a call for your resignation. But a lot can change in twenty-four hours - and even in much less time. Yesterday the government’s faithful court scribe Laura Kuensberg tried to minimise the damage, with the following observation:
Notice that ‘if you care’ - and the disingenuous suggestion that yesterday’s vote was merely a ‘Westminister village story’ and that perhaps we shouldn’t care too much. And now, less than a day later and little more than an hour after Kwarteng called on the Standards commissioner to resign - like magic! - it turns out that enough people cared to force the government to completely reverse the vote it whipped yesterday.
The Cabal was clearly surprised by the intensity of revulsion that its decision provoked, and the fact that it didn’t see this coming is partly due to its own arrogance, and also to the timidity of the opposition it faced. But this time even Labour has seemed less inert than usual, and refused - along with most of the other opposition parties - to participate in the Tory’s new committee-to-replace-the committee it didn’t like.
So this is a victory, of sorts, even if the meat at the end of the fork has now been replaced by arguments as dishonest as those that were used yesterday to serve it to us. The opposition was entirely right to refuse to coooperate, because it’s been obvious for some time that the British system of ‘good chaps’ checks and balances has no impact on a government that contains no good chaps, and which simply changes or ignores the rules it doesn’t like, or appoints people to key positions who can neuter any committee or institution it regards as problematic.
All this is straight from the rightwing populist playbook. And what happened yesterday was Hungary-style authoritarianism. It was a Polish Law and Justice Party attempt to coopt state institutions. It was one more despicable act by a government intent perpetuating one-party rule, while allowing its cronies to enrich themselves while the nation collapses. It was the moment when Tory MPs and the government jumped headlong into the swamp, because this is what these ‘populists’ will always do.
They come to you with platefuls of culture wars. They ask you to gobble up bittersweet morsels about migrants, statues, ‘wokeness’ and the European Court of Justice. They promise to give you your ‘country back’ and let you ‘take control’ and then you find that they are the ones who have taken control, and when they feel powerful enough and unassailable enough, they will dismantle democracy in front of your tired eyes.
But this was one piece of meat they couldn’t persuade the opposition to swallow, and as we watch Tory MPs pathetically trying to unsay what they said yesterday, let’s take some consolation from the fact that the head chef from the restaurant-from-hell didn’t get away with it this time.
But let’s not take our eyes away from the fork, because this won’t be the last time they try to make us choke, and perhaps the events of the last twenty-four hours can give us some hope that we might be able to close this restaurant down, get the health inspectors in, and prevent what remains of our democracy being trashed by the worst gang of thieves and liars who ever managed to take over the kitchen.